"Still?" said he, smiling. "Well, it has reverted to some of its
best traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its
nineteenth-century position. It is real learning, knowledge
cultivated for its own sake--the Art of Knowledge, in short--which is
followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past. Though
perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its
less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial. They
(and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class
of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were
indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day
generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in
order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise. The rich
middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes)
treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a
mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they
were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact,
THE bores of society. They were laughed at, despised--and paid.
Which last was what they aimed at."

Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary
judgments. Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that. But I
must admit that they were mostly prigs, and that they WERE
commercial. I said aloud, though more to myself than to Hammond,
"Well, how could they be better than the age that made them?"

"True," he said, "but their pretensions were higher."

"Were they?" said I, smiling.