LITERATURE AND SCIENCE. 739 



to the sister university. I will venture to say that to an honor of this 

 kind from the University of Cambridge no one on earth can be so 

 sensible as a member of the University of Oxford. The two univer- 

 sities are unlike anything else in the world, and they are very like one 

 another. Neither of them is inclined to go hastily into raptures over 

 her own living offspring or over her sister's ; each of them is pecul- 

 iarly sensitive to the good opinion of the other. Nevertheless they 

 have their points of dissimilarity. One such point, in particular, can 

 not fail to arrest notice. Both universities have told powerfully upon 

 the mind and life of the nation. But the University of Oxford, of 

 which I am a member, and to which I am deeply and affectionally 

 attached, has produced great men, indeed, but has, above all, been 

 the source or the center of great movements. "We will not now go 

 back to the middle ages ; we will keep within the range of what is 

 called modern history. Within this range, we have the great move- 

 ments of Royalism, Wesley anism, Tractarianism, Ritualism, all of 

 them having their source or their center in Oxford. You have noth- 

 ing of the kind. The movement taking its name from Charles Simeon 

 is far, far less considerable than the movement taking its name from 

 John Wesley. The movement attempted by the Latitude men in the 

 seventeenth century is next to nothing as a movement ; the men are 

 everything. And this is, in truth, your great, your surpassing dis- 

 tinction ; not your movements, but your men. From Bacon to Byron, 

 what a splendid roll of great names you can point to ! We, at Ox- 

 ford, can show nothing equal to it. Yours -is the university not of 

 great movements, but of great men. Our experience at Oxford dis- 

 poses us, perhaps, to treat movements, whether our own, or extraneous 

 movements such as the present movement for revolutionizing edu- 

 cation, with too much respect. That disposition finds a corrective 

 here. Masses make movements, individualities explode them. On 

 mankind in the mass, a movement, once started, is apt to impose itself 

 by routine ; it is through the insight, the independence, the self-con- 

 fidence of powerful single minds that its yoke is shaken off. In this 

 university of great names, whoever wishes not to be demoralized 

 by a movement comes into the right air for being stimulated to 

 pluck up his courage and to examine what stuff movements are really 

 made of. ' 



Inspirited, then, by this tonic air in which I find myself speaking, 

 I am boldly going to ask whether the present movement for ousting 

 letters from their old predominance in education, and for transferring 

 the predominance in education to the natural sciences, whether this 

 brisk and flourishing movement ought to prevail, and whether it is 

 likely that in the end it really will prevail. My own studies have been 

 almost wholly in letters, and my visits to the field of the natural sci- 

 ences have been v^ery slight and inadequate, although those sciences 

 strongly move my curiosity. A man of letters, it will perhaps be 



