ts which he marshalled so well, require even now, in these
post-Darwinian days I should venture to say, renewed consideration.
Like all great men, he was wonderfully humble, and allowed me to
contradict him, who ought to have been proud to listen and to learn
from him.

But though I cannot say that the result of these meetings and
wranglings was very great or valuable, I spent a few most delightful
days at Oxford, and I could not imagine a more perfect state of
existence than to be an undergraduate, a fellow, or a professor there.
A kind of silent love sprang up in my heart, though I hardly confessed
it to myself, much less to the object of my affections. I knew I had
to go back to be a University tutor or even a master in a public
school in Germany, and that was a hard life compared with the freedom
of Oxford. To be independent and free to work as I liked, that was
everything to me, but how I ever succeeded in realizing my ideal, I
hardly know. At that time I saw nothing but a life of drudgery and
severe struggle before me, but I did not allow myself to dwell on it;
I simply worked on, without looking either right or left, behind or
before.

While at Oxford on this my first flying visit, I had a room in
University College, the very college in which my son was hereafter to
be an undergraduate. My host was Dr. Plumptre, the Master of the
College, a tall, stiff, and to my mind, very imposing person. He was
then Vice-Chancellor, and I believe I never saw him except in his cap
and gown and with two bedels walking before him, the one with a gold,
the other with a silver poker in his hands. We have no Esquire bedels
any longer! All the professors, too, and even the undergraduates,
dressed in their mediaeval academic costume, looked to me very grand,
and so different from the German students at Leipzig or still more at
Jena, walking about the streets in pink cotton trousers and
dressing-gowns. It seemed to me quite a different world, and I made
new discoveries every day. Being with Bunsen I was invited to all the
official dinners during the meeting of the British Association, and
here, too, the Vice-Chancellor acted his part with becoming dignity.
He never unbent; he never indulged in a joke or joined in the laughter
of his neighbours. When I remarked on his immovable features, I was
told that he slept in starched sheets--and I believed it. At one of
these dinners, Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte caused a titter during a
spee