that a visitor to the town might spend a week of sight-seeing in the
place without being aware of these shortcomings. This fortunate
circumstance is due to the truly excellent planning of Cambridge. It
is not for a moment suggested that the modern growth of the place is
ideal, but what is new and unsightly is so placed that it does not
interfere with the old and beautiful. The real Cambridge is so
effectively girdled with greens and commons, and college grounds
shaded with stately limes, elms, and chestnuts, that there are never
any jarring backgrounds to destroy the sense of aloofness from the
ugly and untidy elements of nineteenth-century individualism which are
so often conspicuous at Oxford.

Cambridge has also made better use of her river than has her sister
university; she has taken it into her confidence, bridged it in a
dozen places, and built her colleges so that the waters mirror some of
her most beautiful buildings. Further than this, in the glorious
chapel Henry VI. built for King's College, Cambridge possesses one of
the three finest Perpendicular chapels in the country--a feature
Oxford cannot match, and in the church of the Holy Sepulchre Cambridge
boasts the earliest of the four round churches of the Order of the
Knights Templars which survive at this day.

But comparisons tend to become odious, and sufficient has been said to
vindicate the exquisite charm that Cambridge so lavishly displays.



CHAPTER II