When the xix century opened there was no general society in Cambridge. It was more out of the way of polite England than Oxford, and many dons whose homes were at a distance spent the whole year in their colleges, emphasising the faults and therefore detracting from the virtues of small learned societies. The dons in the xvi century, say at S. John’s College, had been a brilliant company who bestowed as much on the Elizabethan age as they took from it: but the xviii century closed upon a period of dulness and reaction, in which the rudeness of material civilisation met a social uncouthness little calculated to recall the university of Spenser, of Burleigh, of Bacon. The intimacy between the fellows and their head was a thing of the past; the familiarity between scholar and don had been replaced by “donnishness” which kept the undergraduate at arm’s length; the blight of the artificial and stilted, the sterile and pompous aristocratism of just a century ago had settled down upon the university. Isolated in this eastern corner of England, just before the enormous impulse to travelling brought by railways, just after the cosmopolitan spirit which took even the Englishman abroad--the sense of a debt to Italy, of a continental comradeship--had finally ceased to exist, Cambridge dons at the dawn of the xix century had perhaps fathomed the lowest social depths. But before this century passed a social change more wonderful than the material changes around them metamorphosed university society. The unmannerly don married; and the sex which makes society, the sex which suffers no social deterioration when left to its own devices--the aristocratic sex--was introduced as the don’s helpmeet. More still--worse still--she was introduced in the same quarter of a century as what the weak-kneed among us cry out upon--his rival. It is the same donnish bachelor, separated by a gulph from the social amenities, wedded to ingrained habits and some eradicable prejudices, who suffered women to come to Cambridge and take what they could of the intellectual advantages he himself enjoyed. The historian of the great movements of the age we live in will record with interest this proof of the traditional open-mindedness which has never deserted the Cantabrigian, which has never failed to respond to the sacred dual claims of the age and the intellect. [Illustration: PARKER’S PIECE This large open space in the centre of Cambridge is one of the Town’s playgrounds. In the distance is the Roman Catholic Church, and the boundary wall of the Perse Grammar School, just behind the trees on the left.] [Sidenote: Classes of students.]