[Frontispiece: THE GREAT COURT, TRINITY COLLEGE] CAMBRIDGE Described by NOEL BARWELL Pictured by E. W. HASLEHUST BLACKIE & SON LIMITED LONDON AND GLASGOW BLACKIE & SON LIMITED 50 Old Bailey, London 17 Stanhope Street, Glasgow BLACKIE & SON (INDIA) LIMITED Warwick House, Fort Street, Bombay BLACKIE & SON (CANADA) LIMITED Toronto BEAUTIFUL ENGLAND The Heart of London. Dartmoor. Canterbury. Oxford. Bath and Wells. In London's By-ways. The Peak District. Winchester. The Thames. The Cornish Riviera. Shakespeare-land. Cambridge. York. The English Lakes. BEAUTIFUL SCOTLAND Loch Lomond and the Trossachs. Edinburgh. The Scott Country. The Shores of Fife. _Printed in Great Britain by Blackie & Son, Ltd., Glasgow_ LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Great Court, Trinity College ... Frontispiece Byron's Pool The Kitchen Wall, Peterhouse The Old Hall, Corpus Christi College Erasmus' Tower, Queens' College Gateway, St. John's College Wren's Bridge, St. John's College Fisher Lane and Great Bridge The Market Place Library Staircase, St. John's College Fellows' Garden and Pond, Christ's College Clare College from the Backs [Illustration: BYRON'S POOL] [Illustration: CAMBRIDGE] CAMBRIDGE To the sympathetic beholder one of the most potent charms of England lies in the singular diversity of its landscape. To him each district makes its special, its peculiar appeal. He is sensible everywhere of a real, if intangible, _genius loci_; and he is prone to seek the effect of some such spirit as well in the history of communities and bodies politic as in the lives of individuals. For him, then, there must needs be something of truth in the idea that much of the destinies of Oxford and Cambridge lay written upon the land at their gates. From the hills above Oxford a man may see the whole city at his feet. Generations of men have so seen it, and have so regarded it, subjectively--as a whole. At sundown, when the varied shape of tower and dome merge in a common outline, this impression of unity becomes unforgetably intensified; and but few, probably, of those who have found there the place of their education, will have left it without a sense of having shared in some common purpose. It has ever seemed the aim of Oxford to foster uniformity; of Cambridge, however unconsciously, to encourage the opposite in thought and manners. The sympathies which unite men of a Cambridge education are not therefore less strong, but they are subtler and less capable of expression in a phrase.