counts its admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of
translation into French; but Tom Brown, though robust enough, never seemed
to get over his transplantation from Rugby--possibly because his author's
heart remained at Rugby. 'Loss and Gain' is not a book for the many; and
the many never did justice to Mr. Hermann Merivale's 'Faucit of Balliol'
or Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's 'Hugh Heron of Christ Church.' Neither of
these two novels obtained the hearing it deserved--and 'Faucit of Balliol'
was a really remarkable book: but neither of them aimed at giving a full
picture of Oxford life. And the interest of Miss Broughton's 'Belinda'
and Mr. Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' lies outside the proctor's rounds.
Yes (and humiliating as the confession may be), with all its crudities and
absurdities, _Verdant Green_ does mark the nearest approach yet made to a
representative Oxford novel.

How comes this? Well, to begin with, _Verdant Green_, with all his
faults, did contrive to be exceedingly youthful and high-spirited. And in
the second place, with all its faults, it did convey some sense of what I
may call the 'glamour' of Oxford. Now the University, on its part, being
fed with a constant supply of young men between the ages of eighteen and
twenty, does contrive, with all its faults, to keep up a fair show of
youth and high spirits; and even their worst enemies will admit that
Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of their sons at any rate, a
certain glamour. You may argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which
will wear off in time; an illusion, at all events, and to be treated as
such by the wise author intent on getting at truth. To this I answer
that, while it lasts, this glamour is just as much a fact as _The Times_
newspaper, or St. Paul's Cathedral, just as real a feature of Oxford as
Balliol College, or the river, or the Vice-Chancellor's poker: and until
you recognise it for a fact and a feature of the place, and allow for it,
you have not the faintest prospect of realising Oxford. Each succeeding
generation finds that glamour, or brings it; and each generation, as it
passes, deems that its successor has either found or brought less of it.
But the glamour is there all the while. In turning over a book the other
day, written in 1870 by the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, I come on this
passage:--

"When I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty years and upwards
agone, I feel, notwithstanding m