But what immediately concerns us here is the intention of Mr. Rhodes.  Was it entirely benevolence, or some wish to test the strength of Oxford—­to bring undergraduates into contact with something coarser, some terrific impermeable force that would be manner-proof against Oxford?  Would he conquer from the grave?  Several Americans have been known to go through the University retaining the Massachusetts patina.  What if a number of these savages were grafted on Oxford?  How would they alter the tone?  We shall see.  It will be an interesting struggle.  Shall we hear of six-shooters in the High?—­of hominy and flannel cake for breakfast?—­will undergrads look ’spry?’—­will they ‘voice’ public opinion? . . .  I forbear:  my American vocabulary is limited. Outre mer, outres moeurs, as Mr. Walkley might say in some guarded allusion to Paul Bourget. . . .  I shall be sorry to see poker take the place of roulette, and the Christ Church meadows turned into a ranch for priggish cowboys, or Addison’s Walk re-named the Cake Walk.  But no, I believe Mr. Rhodes, if there was just a touch of malice in his testament, realised that Oxford manners were stronger than the American want of them.  Oxford may be wounded, but I have complete confidence in the issue.  These Boeotian invaders must succumb, as nobler stock before them.  They will form an interesting subject for some exquisite study by Mr. Henry James, who will deal with their gradual civilisation.  Preserved in the amber of his art they will become immortal.

I have been able to clip only the fringe of a great theme.  Athletes require an essay to themselves.  In later age they seem to me more melancholy than their Cambridge peers and less successful.  These splendid creatures are really works of art, and form our only substitute for sculpture in the absence of any native plastic talent.  From the collector’s point of view they belong to the best period, while the graceful convention of isocephaly, which has raised the standard of height, renders them inapt for the ‘battles’ of life, however well equipped for those of their College where the cuisine is at all tolerable.

I am not enough of an antiquary to conjecture if there was ever a temple to Isis during the Roman occupation of Britain on the site of the now illustrious University.  But I like to imagine that there existed a cultus of the venerable goddess in the green fields where the purple fritillaries, so reminiscent of the lotus, blossom in the early spring.  In the curious formal pattern of their petals I see a symbol of the Oxford manner—­something archaic, rigid, severe.  The Oxford Don may well be a reversion to some earlier type, learned, mystic, and romantic as those priests of whom Herodotus has given us so vivid a picture.  The worship of Apis, as Mr. Frazer or Mr. Lang would tell us, becomes then merely the hieroglyph for a social standard, a manner of life.  This, I think,