University education, and in this little essay I endeavour to hold up the
mirror to their ill-nature--the fault to which I am unduly attached.
Writers besides Richardson have referred to it. I might quote many
eloquent tributes from Dryden to Wordsworth and Byron, all Cambridge men,
who have felt the charm and acknowledged a weakness for the step-sister
University. Cambridge has never been fortunate in having the compliment
reciprocated. Neither Oxford men nor her own sons have been
over-generous in her praises: you remember Ruskin on King's Chapel. And
I, the obscurest of her children, who cast this laurel on the Isis, will
content myself with admitting that I sincerely believe you can obtain a
cheaper and better education at Cambridge, though it has always been my
ambition to be mistaken for an Oxford man.

I often wonder whether Mr. Cecil Rhodes, while he had the English
Government in one pocket, the English Press in the other, and South
Africa in the hollow of his hand, felt a certain impotency before Oxford.
He had to acknowledge its influence over himself--an influence stronger
than Dr. Jameson or the Afrikander Bond. He was never quite sure whether
he admired more the loneliness of the Matoppos or the rather over-crowded
diamond mines of Kimberley. On the grey veld he used to read _Marius the
Epicurean_, and sought in Mr. Pater the key to the mystery he was unable
to solve. He turned to the Thirty-nine Articles (more tampered with at
Oxford than in any other cathedral city) with the same want of success.
That always seems to me a real touch of Oxford in what some one well
said, was an 'ugly life.' What a wonderful subject for the brush of a
Royal Academician! no ordinary artist could ever do it justice: the great
South African statesman on the lonely rocks where he had chosen his tomb;
a book has fallen from his hand (Mr. Pater's no doubt); his eyes are
gazing from canvas into the future he has peopled with his dreams. By
some clever device of art or nature the clouds in the sky have shaped