The leading idea of the Commissioners’ scheme was, as every one knows, the Professoriate. The multiplication of professors was to be the remedy for all shortcomings in the way of education; a government by professors was to close all mouths which were complaining of the powers that be, and demanding representation; college revenues, applied to the liberal support of professors, could no longer excite the envy, or awake the rapacity of reformers, but must be held to have been at last applied to their rightful uses; examiners, appointed by professors, were at last to achieve the difficult task of satisfying every candidate; to be a professor was to be all that man ought to be—a guarantee amply sufficient for religion, learning, and energy—an office which could teach independently of vulgar details of actual instruction, diffusing scholarship through the University by its mere presence— “_Dives_, et sutor bonus, et solus formosus, et est rex.” Where this new race of more than mortal teachers was to spring from, was a point for which, it will be remembered, the Commissioners made no provision; but as to their mode of appointment there was no difficulty whatever. All newly-created chairs (pretty comfortable berths too) were to be filled with nominees of the Crown—in plainer words, of a future minister of public education,—for we should have soon found that office even more necessary than a secretary at war,—and these, with such as were already subject to the same appointment, would have had an absolute majority in the remodelled House of Congregation. But this is by no means the only mode in which, if the Commissioners should have had their will, Oxford would have been gradually converted into a national gymnasium under Government superintendence, and at the same time a gigantic field of patronage. They did not, indeed, go so far as to recommend, because in their delicate consideration for the feelings of others they thought it might be “distasteful” to the societies themselves, but they evidently entertained with favour Mr Senior’s cool proposition,[1] that “the power of selection of Heads of Houses should be given to the Crown, under the advice of the prime-minister.” And in Recommendation 44 we have the first step made towards it—that the election to these offices should, _if possible_, be left to the Fellows of Colleges; but that in case abuses in these elections should continue, provision to abate them should be made by an alteration in the mode of election. To what this subtle proviso might have led, and was intended to lead, it requires no peculiar spirit of divination to foresee. Again, the staff of professors and the “Crown,” indirectly through these its nominees, was, by the Commissioners’ scheme, to have the control of the studies, and the sole appointment of the public examiners, although on this latter head not a tittle of evidence went to show that the present mode of nomination (by the vice-chancellor, as representing the