The Oxford manner is, alas, indefinable; I was going to say indefensible.  Perhaps it is an attitude—­a mental attitude that finds physical expression in the voice, the gesture, the behaviour.  Oxford, not conduct, is three-fourths of life to those who acquire the distemper.  Without becoming personal it is not easy to discuss purely social aspects, and we must seek chiefly in literature for manifestations of the phenomenon:  in the prose of Matthew Arnold for instance—­in the poems of Mr. Laurence Binyon, typical examples where every thought seems a mental reservation.  Enemies rail at the voice, and the voice counts for something.  Any one having the privilege of hearing Mr. Andrew Lang speak in public will know at once what I mean—­a pleasure, let me hasten to say, only equalled by the enjoyment of his inimitable writing, so pre-eminently Oxonian when the subject is not St. Andrews, Folk Lore, or cricket.  Though Oxford men have their Cambridge moments, and beneath their haughty exterior there sometimes beats a Cambridge heart.  Behind such reserve you would never suspect any passions at all save one of pride.  Even frankly irreligious Oxford men acquire an ecclesiastical pre-Reformation aloofness which must have piqued Thackeray quite as much as the refusal of the city to send him to Westminster.  He complains somewhere that the undergraduates wear kid gloves and drink less wine than their jolly brethren of the Cam.  He was thoroughly Cambridge in his attitude towards life, as you may see when he writes of his favourite eighteenth century in his own fascinating style.  How angry he becomes with the vices and corruption of a dead past!  Now no Oxford essayist would dream of being angry with the past.  How annoyed the sentimental author of The Four Georges would be with Mr. Street’s genial treatment of the same epoch!  It would, however, be the annoyance of a father for his eldest son, whom he sent to Oxford perhaps to show that an old slight was forgiven and forgotten.

There have been, of course, plenty of men unravaged by the blithe contagion.  Mr. Gladstone intellectually always seemed to me a Cambridge man in his energy, his enthusiasm, his political outlook.  Only in his High Church proclivities is he suspect.  The poet Shelley was an obvious Cantab.  He was, we are told, a man of high moral character.  Well, principles and human weakness are common to all Universities, and others besides Shelley have deserted their wives:  but to desert your wife on principle seems to me callous, calculating, and Cambridge-like.

A painful but interesting case came under my personal observation, and it illustrates the other side of the question.  A clever young graduate of my acquaintance, after four years of distinguished scholarship at Oxford, came up to the metropolis and entered the dangerous lists of literature.  It is not indiscreet if I say that he belonged to what was quite a brilliant little period—­the days of Mr. Eric Parker,