nent of living English historians
returned to Oxford in the character which was his due.

The new Professor gave up his house in London, and settled at
Cherwell Edge, near the famous bathing-place called Parson' s
Pleasure.* He found the University a totally different place from
what it was when he first knew it. Dr. Arnold, who died in 1842, the
year after his appointment, was the earliest Professor whose
lectures were famous, or were attended, and Dr. Arnold did exactly
as he pleased. There was no Board of Studies to supervise him, and
it was thought rather good of a Professor to lecture at all. Now the
Board of Studies was omnipotent, and a Professor's time was not his
own. He was bound in fact to give forty-two lectures in a year, and
to lecture twice a week for seven weeks in two terms out of the
three. The prospect appalled him. "I never," he wrote to Max
Muller,+ "I never gave a lecture on an historical subject without a
fortnight or three weeks of preparation, and to undertake to deliver
forty-two such lectures in six months would be to undertake an
impossibility. If the University is to get any good out of me, I
must work in my own way." He did not, however, work in his own way,
and the University got a great deal of good out of him all the same.

--
* The house is now, oddly enough, a Catholic convent.
+ April 18th, 1892.
--

Lord Salisbury, in making Froude the offer, spoke apologetically of
the stipend as small, but added that the work would be light. The
accomplished Chancellor was imperfectly informed. The stipend was
small enough: the work was extremely hard for a man of seventy-four.
Froude's conscientiousness in preparation was almost excessive.
Every lecture was written out twice from notes for improvement of
style and matter. His audiences were naturally large, for not since
the days Mr. Goldwin Smith, who resigned in 1866, had anything like
Froude's lectures been heard at Oxford. When I was an undergraduate,
in the seventies, we all of course knew that Professor Stubbs had a
European reputation for learning. But, except to those reading for
the History School, Stubbs was a name, and nothing more. Nobody ever
dreamt of going to hear him. Crowds flocked to hear Froude, as in my
time they flocked to hear Ruskin.

One sex was as well represented as the other. Froude had left the
dons celibate and clerical. He found them, for the most part,
married and lay. There was every variety of opinion in t