Man at ten, with a desire to learn. Stays till near eleven discussing his chances in the schools at great length. Presently comes to his prospects in life. Would send me to sleep if he wouldn’t ask me questions. Eleven: no more men, thank goodness. Tobacco and my lecture for to-morrow.... Never could understand why a gentleman being neither intoxicated nor in the society of his friends, cannot cross the quadrangle without a view-halloo... There he is again: must go out and see what is going on. Quadrangle very cold, raining. Group of men playing football in the corner: friends look on and encourage them from windows above. As I come on the scene all disappear, with shouts: none identified: saves future trouble, at all events. More tobacco and period of comparative peace. Bedtime. Wish my scout wouldn’t hide hard things under the mattress. Noise in quadrangle renewed: ’Daddy wouldn’t buy me a Bow-wow,’ with variations.... Some one’s oak apparently battered with a poker. _Ought_ to get up and go out to stop it.... VIII--THE UNIVERSITY AS A PLACE OF LEARNED LEISURE. ’I had been used for thirty years to no interruption save the tinkling of the dinner-bell and the chapel-bell.’ _Essays of Vicesimus Knox._ Standing with one foot in the Middle Ages and the other in a luxuriously furnished ’Common Room’--such is Oxford life as summarised by a German visitor, who appears to have been a good deal perplexed, like the outer world in general, by the academic mixture of things ancient and modern, and a host who wore a cap and gown over his evening dress. Certainly the University is a strange medley of contraries. It never seems to be quite clear whether we are going too fast or too slow. We are always reforming something, yet are continually reproached with irrational conservatism. Change and permanence are side by side--permanence that looks as if it could defy time: ’The form remains, the function never dies,’