“Whate’er is best administered is best.”  These are some of the impressions made at Oxford by the studies of the schools, the more or less inevitable “curricoolum,” as the Scotch gentleman pronounced the word.  But at Oxford, for most men, the regular work of the schools is only a small part of the literary education.  People read, in different degrees, according to their private tastes.  There are always a few men, at least, who love literary studies for their own sake, regardless of lectures and of “classes.”  In my own time I really believe you could know nothing which might not “pay” in the schools and prove serviceable in examinations.  But a good deal depended on being able to use your knowledge by way of literary illustration.  Perhaps the cleverest of my own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use his own special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing answers to questions in examinations.  Hence his academic success was much below his deserts.  For my own part, I remember my tutor saying, “Don’t write as if you were writing for a penny paper.”  Alas, it was “a prediction, cruel, smart.”  But, “as yet no sin was dreamed.”

At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English and Latin.  This might have been good literary training, but I fear the essays were not taken very seriously.  The chief object was to make the late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes.  But nobody ever succeeded.  He was experienced in trash.  As for what may be called unacademic literature, there were not many essays in that art.  There have been very literary generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis “lived in Oxford as if it had been a great country house;” so Corydon confessed.  Probably many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr. Swinburne’s early works were undergraduate poems.  A later generation produced “Love in Idleness,” a very pleasing volume.  But the gods had not made us poetical.  In those days I remember picking up, in the Union Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, “Atalanta in Calydon,” by A. C. Swinburne.  Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne’s name before, signing a brief tale in Once a Week.  “Atalanta” was a revelation; there was a new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too.  In my own mind “Atalanta” remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr. Swinburne’s many poems.  He instantly became the easily parodied model of undergraduate versifiers.

Swinburnian prize poems, even, were attempted, without success.  As yet we had not seen Mr. Matthew Arnold’s verses.  I fell in love with them, one long vacation, and never fell out of love.  He is not, and cannot be, the poet of the wide world, but his charm is all the more powerful over those whom he attracts and subdues.  He is the one Oxford poet of Oxford, and his “Scholar Gypsy” is our “Lycidas.”  At this time he was Professor of Poetry; but, alas, he lectured just