We saw at the beginning of this chapter that the aspect of the university had changed with the marriage of fellows, tutors, and officials; and in time this factor must greatly modify the conditions of life at our universities. Both of these are now overrun with children’s schools, and there can be little doubt that all the boys (and many of the girls) will go to college. The natural profession for many of these, owing to the father’s influence with his college and the son’s inherited inclinations, will be academic. It would certainly not be to the advantage of our seats of learning if they became in this sense close corporations. It is obvious that this would mean less movement of ideas and less opportunity for the outside world to affect the university; and if a large number not only of the teachers but of the scholars belonged to such a caste as this, if the profession of teaching were handed down from father to son, the situation would not be unlike that which threatened Europe when Gregory VII. interposed and made the Christian world his executor in enforcing clerical celibacy. A new tuitional field would be open to the young graduate in the numerous schools of Cambridge and Oxford, but this would only accentuate the vicious circle of an education which might come to suggest the ecclesiastical seminary rather than the English university. Perhaps, too, a young man loses more than half the social and worldly advantages of a college life if when [Illustration: DITTON CORNER, ON THE CAM From this spot the boat races are viewed. Behind the elms is the village of Ditton, and the building we see is Ditton Church.] he “goes up to the university” he does not change his habitat. The married fellow cannot begin life again elsewhere after the 5 or 10 years’ teaching at his college which used to precede his departure for a benefice: the old bachelor, if he stayed on, no longer taught, and new men took his place in the lecture room. But now a fellow cannot renounce the lecture room, for he and his family cannot live on the fellowship. Lecturers are therefore often men past the prime of life, and moreover men who no longer live in daily contact with the undergraduate. New blood comes in seldom, and percolates slowly. On the other hand valuable men stay who would under the old system have left. The influx of the “monstrous regiment” will not however, one hopes, diminish an advantage at present possessed by the seniors at our centres of learning--a general equality of fortune which frees university society from the laborious vulgarity that travails the soul elsewhere, from the general “ponderousness,” as someone has called it, of English life. At least Gray’s advice to Wharton not to bring his wife to Cambridge would now be quite out of place; the “few” women are no longer “squeezy and formal, little skilled in amusing themselves or other people,” and the men are no longer “not over agreeable neither.” CHAPTER V