CHARMED WITH OXFORD. 171 



then lie used finer chisels than his predecessors, and 

 sought to enrich his architecture by fresh emblems and 

 fresh treatment. With an artistic feeling for colour, 

 an aesthetic taste, and a thorough love of work amount- 

 ing almost to a sacred devotion, he not only did more 

 single-handed than any man of his time in museum- 

 formation, but in displaying the sine qua non of each 

 preparation in hand gave an illustrative speciality to 

 his work, as distinct as the colouring of Titian or the 

 minute traits in the tavern-scenes of Teniers. 



On his return from Germany, in 1857, he paid a 

 visit to his friend Dr. Acland of Oxford, and enjoyed 

 it exceedingly. He had an appreciating host in the 

 Oxford Professor, with whom he could make a daily 

 inspection of the new museum, then approaching com- 

 pletion, and fulfilling all the requirements of an Ana- 

 tomical and Natural History collection. Goodsir liked 

 to talk of the glorious past of that ancient university, 

 its mediaBval struggles, its historic characters and their 

 defence of what appeared best in religion, politics, and 

 letters. Oxford, with its classic fame, its scholastic 

 influence, and its educational modes and purport, were 

 a delight to Goodsir, who would gladly have tried to 

 implant the Oxonian system upon the hard and dry 

 northern scheme of education. For, with all his nation- 

 ality and large inheritance of the Scottish covenanting 

 spirit, lie was too broad in his beliefs, and too zealous 

 for freedom of thought, not to see the need of some 

 qualifications to the doctrinal, dry, ami dogmatic stand- 

 ards ruling the religious denominations, if not the 



