of the reforms recommended by the second Royal Commission, whose activities resulted in the Universities Act of 1882. This Commission had not such obstinate enemies to fight as its predecessors of 1852, possibly because the abuses which had been so obvious in the early Victorian colleges had already been in the main abolished. The second Commission made an end of life-fellowships, which the first had unwisely allowed to continue. There are many still alive who can remember the last resident survivors of the old régime, lingering on obscurely in colleges where they had never done any work, or perhaps returning in senility to quadrangles where they were forgotten, after a life spent in other quarters of the globe. The non-tutorial life-fellow was seldom a scholar or a writer of books, though he occasionally excused his existence by ostensible researches for a magnum opus which never appeared. He was sometimes a man of affairs, who by continued celibacy had retained 2007. to 3001. a year of academic money to add to the income which he was earning at the bar, or in a public office, or in Fleet Street. It certainly was no profit to the University, or to learning at large, that a Q.C. or a Permanent Under-Secretary should be drawing a few hundreds of college endowment money for twenty, thirty, or forty years. This was merely an abuse of academic funds. The case was not quite so scandalous with the molluscs who never had left Oxford, and, lured from more active life by the attractions of an exiguous celibate endowment, stuck to their rooms and crept about the college, often in unhonoured old age. For it must be acknowledged that some of them were eccentric, up to (or over) the bounds of insanity, while others were bibulous, a source of unholy joy to observant undergraduates, as they passed from common-room to their beds. The second Commission wisely brought down the prize fellowship from a life tenure to a seven-years' term, removing the ban on marriage. The tutorial fellowship, with all bans equally removed, was made into a renewable office, tenable so long as its duties were discharged, and furnished with a pension at its end. The weak point of the tutorial fellowship as a career was that it had no certainties of promotion: a competent tutor might be earning as much at the age of thirty as

2

at the age of sixty. And if his particular line of learning was provided with a professor who lived for ever, and his college was presided over by a Provost or Warden who emulated the years of Dr Routh, promotion in Oxford was blocked for the term of his natural life. The only chance was to seek it elsewhere-breaking the habits that had been formed by twenty years of residence. In earlier days the superannuated tutor had been in orders, and took a college living. But for laymen there is no such possibility.

The abolition of the compulsory clerical fellowship, and of the life-long idle' fellowship was undoubtedly a boon to the University, and set free much money for better uses-always in an increasing degree. For the colleges, giving as their reason or in some cases rather as their excuse, the long-drawn agricultural depression which brought down their rents, took to giving fewer prize fellowships every year. There are hardly any in existence now, save at All Souls, whose conditions are exceptional. But relief to the college revenue obtained in this way only involved the corporation in larger contributions to the Common University Fund,' that institution so much hated by the advocates of college autonomy and 'federalism.' New professorships were founded by the 1877 Act, on even a larger scale than those of the 1854 Act, a great proportion of them on the Science side. Indeed, Science, with its all-devouring and ever-multiplying group of museums and laboratories, has been the great spending department of the University of the last fifty years. Outside the sphere of the scientific schools, in which college tutors were few and University professors were often the real teachers, the newly created holders of professorial chairs often found themselves in the same position as their elders of 1854. 'The University expected them to lecture in the grand style, but forgot to provide them with audiences' (p. 343).

Of the last Post-War University Commission it is, fortunately, not needful to write at any great length. To the distress of many foes of Oxford, it found that there were no scandals to be removed, and its touch fell with comparative lightness on the academic Constitution. But, as Sir Charles Mallet observes (p. 493), the time has not yet come to judge of the permanent

results of its activities. The most obvious of them are the liberal grants in aid of University funds by the Exchequer of the realm. Whether this will in the end make Oxford the vassal of the Education Office we cannot say-but venture to hope that pessimists are as misled as the prophets of evil who, in 1854, declared that the work of the first Commission was 6 an illiberal revolution which struck at the roots of freedom,' and in 1877 cried out 'that every penny diverted from the colleges to the University would be diverted from the encouragement of learning to the benefit of laziness.' This last was the dictum of Robert Lowe, Lord Sherbrooke!

Of Sir Charles Mallet's chapters on college, as opposed to University, history we have little space to speak. In the 18th century their interest is great-in the 19th decency began to be the rule rather than the exception, when the fellows differed from each other—or from their head. The former period is naturally the more amusing to the reader. The strangest incidents may be foundof fellows who at an election dragged a half-witted or a moribund colleague to vote in chapel-of Rectors who withstood a visitor vi et armis when he tried to enterof the chaos caused when two bodies of fellows, each declaring itself to be the legitimate governing body, elected colleagues into their corporation, no one knowing which was the valid and which the invalid mandate. All this greatly resembles Papal Elections of the 14th or 15th century. The 19th century can produce few such pictures-the wars of Mark Pattison with the fellows of Lincoln were at least conducted with decency, if not without acerbity. Perhaps the only 19th-century Oxford incident which still strikes us as astounding was the bankruptcy of old Hertford College, the only college which has ever disappeared, though halls vanished by the dozen in the 16th century. Insufficiently endowed by that admirable enthusiast Dr Newton, old Hertford fell into financial ruin when undergraduates ceased to enter its gates. Of its exiguous staff of four fellows, several died unreplaced. The last survivor is said to have elected himself as head of the moribund institution, and t have maintained a small income by letting out the empty rooms to strange non-academic lodgers—a teacher of modern Greek, a fencing master, and various un

desirable foreigners. The fall of an unrepaired roof slew one or more of these aliens, and the University Calendar of the following year has as its head-piece 'A view of All Souls College from the ruins of Hertford College.' The University at last interfered, and procured an Act of Parliament to declare the college defunct. Its partly ruinous buildings were sold to Magdalen Hall, a society whose home had recently been destroyed by fire, and which sought a new abode. With the fund thus obtained the famous Hertford Scholarship was established in 1834. How many of its proud winners are aware of the curious origin of its name-the sole memorial of the excellent endeavour of Dr Newton ?

We cannot speak too highly of the excellent index with which Sir Charles Mallet has furnished his volume. Tested again and again, it has always been found lucid, complete, and well arranged-as indeed is the whole of his book.

C. W. C. OMAN.

Art. 12.-QUEEN VICTORIA.

The Letters of Queen Victoria. (Second Series.) [Third Volume.] A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence and Journal between the Years 1862 and 1885. Published by authority of His Majesty the King. Edited by George Earle Buckle. In Three Volumes. Murray, 1928.

THE new volume of Queen Victoria's letters carries the story from 1879 to 1885. We begin with the last months of the Beaconsfield Ministry and end with the first months of the long rule of Lord Salisbury. The bulk of the book is occupied with the Gladstone Ministry of 1880-1885, with which the Queen is shown to have been in almost continual conflict on one subject or another. Though describing herself in one of these letters as 'yielding to no one in true Liberalism' she had in fact become a strong Conservative, and even something of a Jingo. The defeat of her beloved Disraeli in 1880 was a great grief to her, and still more the necessity of accepting Gladstone as his successor. Almost everything the Gladstone Ministry did aroused her alarm or indignation, and she welcomed their defeat in 1885. The last letters here printed show her, after the General Election of 1885, successfully urging Salisbury not to resign, and endeavouring, through Goschen and others, to create a coalition of 'moderate' men who will save her from the dreaded and detested alternative of resigning herself once more into the hands of Gladstone. As we know, she did not, in fact, escape that alternative. Readers of this volume will have no difficulty in guessing the indignation with which she must-certainly not at all in silence-have watched the fall of the Salisbury Government and the first attempt at Home Rule. Indeed, if I am rightly informed, there was more than indignation. There was active resistance. I believe that she passionately urged Lord Salisbury to carry on and defy the vote of the House of Commons; and that, even after the impossibility of that course had been made plain to her, she accepted Gladstone only on condition of his substituting Lord Rosebery for Lord Granville at the