’Her image comes into the gloom
   With her pale features moulded fair,
   Her breathing beauty, morning bloom,
   My heart’s delight, my tongue’s despair.’  BINYON.

   ’An Oxford scholar of family and fortune; but quaint and opinionated,
   despising every one who has not had the benefit of an University
   education.’  RICHARDSON.

   [Greek text].  HERODOTUS.

I once had the good fortune to take down to dinner a young American lady of some personal attractions.  Her vivacity and shrewdness were racial; her charm peculiar to herself.  Her conversation consisted in a rather fierce denunciation of Englishmen, young Oxford Englishmen in particular.  Their thoughts, their dress, their speech, their airs of superiority offended one brought up with that Batavian type of humanity, the American youth, to whom we have nothing exactly corresponding in this country except among drawing-room conjurors.  But I was startled at her keen observation when I inquired with a smile how she knew I was not an Oxford man myself.

’Had you been one, you would never have listened to what I have been saying,’ she retorted.  Rather nettled, I challenged her to pick out from the other guests those on whom she detected the brand of Isis.  A pair of gloves was the prize for each successful guess.  She won seven; in fact all the stakes during the course of the evening.  Over one only she hesitated, and when he mentioned that he had neither the curiosity nor the energy to cross the Atlantic, she knew he came from Oxford.

Yes, there is something in that manner after all.  It irritates others besides Americans.  Novelists try to describe it.  We all know the hero who talks English with a Balliol accent—­that great creature who is sometimes bow and sometimes cox of his boat on alternate evenings; who puts the weight at the University Sports and conducts the lady home from a College wine without a stain on her character; is rusticated for a year or so; returns to win the Newdigate and leaves without taking a degree.  Or that other delightful abstraction—­he has a Balliol accent too—­with literary tastes and artistic rooms, where gambling takes place.  He is invariably a coward, but dreadfully fascinating all the same; though he scorns women he has an hypnotic influence over them; something in his polished Oxford manner is irresistible.  Throughout a career of crime his wonderful execution on the piano, his knowledge of Italian painting, and his Oxford manner never seem to desert him.  We feel, not for the first time, how dangerous it must be to allow our simple perky unspoiled Colonials to associate with such deleterious exotic beings, who, though in fiction horsewhipped or (if heroes) shot in the last chapter, in real life are so apt to become prosperous city men or respected college officials.