I saw much of Froude again during the last years of his life, when he returned to Oxford as Regius Professor of History, having been appointed by Lord Salisbury. “It is the first public recognition I have received,” he used to say. He rejoiced in it, and he certainly did credit to Lord Salisbury’s courageous choice. His lectures were brilliant, and the room was crowded to the end. His private lectures also were largely attended, and he was on the most friendly and intimate terms with some of his pupils. There is no place so trying for a professor as Oxford. Froude’s immediate predecessors, Goldwin Smith, Stubbs, and Freeman, were some of the best men that Oxford has produced. Their lectures were excellent in every respect. Yet every one of them had to complain of the miserable scantiness of their audiences at Oxford. The present Bishop of Oxford, Dr. Stubbs, in his “Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediæval and Modern History” (1886), states what may sound almost incredible, that he had sometimes to deliver his lectures “to two or three listless men.” The same may be said of some of the best lectures delivered in the University. The young men are encouraged in each college to attend the lectures delivered by the tutors, and are given to understand that professorial lectures “do not pay” in the examinations. These examinations are chiefly in the hands of college tutors. Professor Stubbs was not given to complain about anything that might seem to concern himself, yet he confesses that “sometimes he felt hurt that in the combined lecture list he found the junior assistant tutor advertising a course on the same subject, or at the same hours, as his own.” Nay, he goes so far in his modesty as to say: “It may be better that there should be a dozen or fifteen college lecturers working away with large classes, when I have only a few stray men,” but the real friends of the University would hardly think so. As things are at present, it has been said, and, I believe, truly said, that nearly all professorial lectures might be abolished, and the studies of the undergraduates would go on just the same. Oxford suffers in this respect from a real _embarras de richesse_. The University is rich enough, though by no means so rich as it was formerly, to keep up a double staff of teachers, professorial and tutorial. It supports sixty-five professors, readers, and lecturers, and probably four or five times as many tutors. Many of the tutors are quite equal to the professors, nay, it may be, even superior to them, but the most popular tutor, whose lectures, when in college, were crowded, has to be satisfied with two or three listless men as soon as he has been raised to the professoriate. Froude’s lectures formed an exception, but even this was quoted against him.