It is always pleasant, too, to be wiser than one’s erstwhile pastors and masters. The pupil goes out into the great world; the teacher remains behind, and continues apparently to go on in his old and crusted errors. Outwardly the Universities do not change much, and it is easy to assume that the habits and ideas of their denizens do not change either. Thus it is that the young men of the ’National Observer,’ coming back from a Saturday-to-Monday visit to a university which they never respected and are now entitled to despise, are moved to declare to the world the complete inutility of what they call the Futile Don. ’He is dead,’ they say, ’quite dead;’ and if he is, might not the poor relic of mortality be allowed in mere charity to lie peacefully entombed in his collegiate cloisters? Yet, after all, it is only among the great Anglo-Saxon race that the profession of teaching is without honour; and even among us it may be allowed that it is a mode of earning a pittance as decent and comparatively innocuous as another. We cannot, all of us, taste the fierce joys of writing for the daily or weekly press, and the barrister’s ’crowded hours of glorious life’ in the law courts would be more overcrowded than ever were not a few _fainéants_ suffered to moulder in the retirement of a university. Seriously, it was all very well for the young lions of the Press to denounce the torpor of Dons in the bad old days when colleges were close corporations--when Fellows inherited their bloated revenues without competition, and simply because they happened to be born in a particular corner of some rural district. But now that nearly every First-class man has the chance of election and would be a Fellow if he could, one is tempted to recall the ancient fable of the sour grapes. Or at least the _esprits forts_ whom the University has reluctantly driven out into the great world might be grateful to her for saving them in spite of themselves from an existence of futile incapacity. Probably as long as colleges exist in something like their present form--until the People takes a short way with them, abolishes common rooms and the Long Vacation, and pays college tutors by a system of ’results fees’--these things will continue to be said. Deans and Senior Tutors will never escape the stigma of torpor or incapacity. That quite respectable rhymester, Mr. Robert Montgomery (who, had he not been unlucky enough to cross the path of Lord Macaulay, might have lived and died and been forgotten as the author of metrical works not worse than many that have escaped the lash), has left to the world a long poem--of which the sentiments are always, and the rhymes usually, correct--entitled ’Oxford.’ He has taken all Oxford life for his subject, Dons included; and this is how he describes the fate of College Tutors:--