LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. liii 



which no other purer rewards or pursuits can have. I see from 

 my window Monaco with its Prince, its Jesuits and their schools, 

 its nunneries, and its mediaeval castle lately underpinned and 

 plastered up; and under it the modern Monte Carlo with its 

 modern appliances of all kinds and its gambling Casino, and 

 I feel that this latter place represents the Examination system 

 with its excitement, its gambling, its power to dull aspiration of 

 every better kind, and its all but entire monopoly of the activity 

 of the place, albeit the blind Prince does walk about with one 

 priest in front and another behind him, and has everybody 

 pushed out of the way as he passes.' 



Though Dr. Eolleston had ceased to practise as a physician, his 

 experience in past days of the life and sufferings of the poor was 

 deeply imprinted in his mind. The sanitary work and improve- 

 ment of labourers' dwellings which has come to the front as a 

 duty of these modern days, was one chief business of his Oxford 

 life. Showy philanthropy he had no liking for, and he would 

 speak his mind about it plainly enough. Talking of some 

 modern hospitals where much power for healing had been 

 sacrificed for external decoration, he would say — 'In such a 

 place the Physician will fondly lead about My Lord Bishop of 

 This and My Lord of That, and show them with much pride an 

 interesting eruption on the hand of a delicate girl, surrounded 

 with every conceivable comfort. / would take them to a house 

 in the slums and show them a boy blown up with dropsy after 

 scarlet fever — no nurse — children sprawling on the floor, and 

 mother up to the elbows in soap-suds washing for her family, 

 who are sickening of the disease and soon to be fresh centres of 

 it — the father out of work or perhaps in gaol. These are the 

 people one wants to help before spending money on Gothic 

 buildings.' • It was with these practical ends in view that he 

 sat for years on the Oxford Local Board, working at drainage, 

 water-supply, and sanitary regulation. The difficulty of in- 

 ducing the classes who suffered most from unhealthy homes and 

 exposure to contagion of course met him at every step. He 

 lsed often to recall one of his experiences at the time of the 



