II.] UNIVERSITIES : ACTUAL AND IDEAL. 27 



real or supposed wants of mankind. And it is 

 remarkable that these searching inquiries are not so 

 much forced on institutions from without, as developed 

 from within. Consummate scholars question the 

 value of learning ; priests contemn dogma ; and 

 women turn their backs upon man's ideal of perfect 

 womanhood, and seek satisfaction in apocalyptic 

 visions of some, as yet unrealised, epicene reality. 



If there be a type of stability in this world, one 

 would be inclined to look for it in the old Universities 

 of England. But it has been my business of late to 

 hear a good deal about what is going on in these 

 famous corporations ; and I have been filled with 

 astonishment by the evidences of internal fermentation 

 which they exhibit. If Gibbon could revisit the 

 ancient seat of learning of which he has written so 

 cavalierly, assuredly he would no longer speak of " the 

 monks of Oxford sunk in prejudice and port." There, 

 as elsewhere, port has gone out of fashion, and so has 

 prejudice at least that particular fine, old, crusted 

 sort of prejudice to which the great historian alludes. 



Indeed, things are moving so fast in Oxford and 

 Cambridge, that, for my part, I rejoiced when the 

 Koyal Commission, of which I am a member, had 

 finished and presented the Eeport which related to 

 these Universities ; for we should have looked like 

 mere plagiarists, if, in consequence of a little longer 

 delay in issuing it, all the measures of reform we pro- 

 posed had been anticipated by the spontaneous action 

 of the Universities themselves. 



A month ago I should have gone on to say that 



