meadows turned into a ranch for priggish cowboys, or Addison's
Walk re-named the Cake Walk. But no, I believe Mr. Rhodes, if there was
just a touch of malice in his testament, realised that Oxford manners
were stronger than the American want of them. Oxford may be wounded, but
I have complete confidence in the issue. These Boeotian invaders must
succumb, as nobler stock before them. They will form an interesting
subject for some exquisite study by Mr. Henry James, who will deal with
their gradual civilisation. Preserved in the amber of his art they will
become immortal.

I have been able to clip only the fringe of a great theme. Athletes
require an essay to themselves. In later age they seem to me more
melancholy than their Cambridge peers and less successful. These
splendid creatures are really works of art, and form our only substitute
for sculpture in the absence of any native plastic talent. From the
collector's point of view they belong to the best period, while the
graceful convention of isocephaly, which has raised the standard of
height, renders them inapt for the 'battles' of life, however well
equipped for those of their College where the cuisine is at all
tolerable.

I am not enough of an antiquary to conjecture if there was ever a temple
to Isis during the Roman occupation of Britain on the site of the now
illustrious University. But I like to imagine that there existed a
cultus of the venerable goddess in the green fields where the purple
fritillaries, so reminiscent of the lotus, blossom in the early spring.
In the curious formal pattern of their petals I see a symbol of the
Oxford manner--something archaic, rigid, severe. The Oxford Don may well
be a reversion to some earlier type, learned, mystic, and romantic as
those priests of whom Herodotus has given us so vivid a picture. The
worship of Apis, as Mr. Frazer or Mr. Lang would tell us, becomes then
merely the hieroglyph for a social standard, a manner of life. This, I
think, will explain the name Oxford on the Isis--the Ford of Apis, the ox-
god at this one place able to pass over the benign deity. You remember,
too, the horrid blasphemy of Cambyses (his very name suggests Cambridge),
and the vengeance of the gods. So be it to any sacrilegious reformer who
would transmute either the Oxford Don or the Oxford undergraduate--the
most august of human counsellors, the most delightful of friends.

(1902.)

HOW WE LOST THE BOOK OF JAS