France, placed in both those countries at the entrance to university
studies"; and it is by this that he justifies Signer Matteucci's
absurd description of Oxford and Cambridge as _hauts lyceés_ Now, in
the first place, there is not one single word in this sentence, or in
the context, or, so far as I remember, in the whole book, about the
Honours system, which for very many years before 1868 had exalted the
standard infinitely higher in the case of a very large proportion of
men. And in the second place, there is not a word about the
Scholarship system, which in the same way had for very many years
provided an entrance standard actually higher--far higher in some
ways--than the _concluding_ examinations of the French _baccalauréat_.
My own days at Oxford were from 1863 to 1868, the year of Mr Arnold's
book. During that time there were always in the university some 400
men who had actually obtained scholarships on this standard; and a
very considerable number who had competed on it, and done fairly.
Whether Mr Arnold shared Mark Pattison's craze about the abolition of
the pass-man altogether, I do not know. But he ought to have known,
and I should think he must have known, that at the time of his writing
the mere and sheer pass-man--the man whose knowledge was represented
by the minimum of Smalls, Mods, and Greats--was, if not actually in a
minority,--in some colleges at least he was that--at any rate in a
pretty bare majority. With his love of interference and control, he
might have retorted that this did not matter, that the university
_permitted_ every one to stick to the minimum. But as a matter of fact
he suggests that it provided no alternative, no _maximum_ or _majus_
at all.

By the time that we have now reached, that of his giving up the
professorship, Mr Arnold's position was, for good and for evil, mostly
fixed. When he took up the duties of his chair he was, though by no