There at any rate is the fact: _the_ novel of University life has not been written yet, and perhaps never will be. I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ do not mark the nearest approach to it-- save the mark! And I am not at all sure that _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green_ can be called a novel at all, while I am quite certain it cannot be called a novel of first-class merit. _Tom Brown at Oxford_ still counts its admirers, and has, I hear, attained the dignity of translation into French; but Tom Brown, though robust enough, never seemed to get over his transplantation from Rugby--possibly because his author's heart remained at Rugby. 'Loss and Gain' is not a book for the many; and the many never did justice to Mr. Hermann Merivale's 'Faucit of Balliol' or Mr. St. John Tyrwhitt's 'Hugh Heron of Christ Church.' Neither of these two novels obtained the hearing it deserved--and 'Faucit of Balliol' was a really remarkable book: but neither of them aimed at giving a full picture of Oxford life. And the interest of Miss Broughton's 'Belinda' and Mr. Hardy's 'Jude the Obscure' lies outside the proctor's rounds. Yes (and humiliating as the confession may be), with all its crudities and absurdities, _Verdant Green_ does mark the nearest approach yet made to a representative Oxford novel. How comes this? Well, to begin with, _Verdant Green_, with all his faults, did contrive to be exceedingly youthful and high-spirited. And in the second place, with all its faults, it did convey some sense of what I may call the 'glamour' of Oxford. Now the University, on its part, being fed with a constant supply of young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty, does contrive, with all its faults, to keep up a fair show of youth and high spirits; and even their worst enemies will admit that Oxford and Cambridge wear, in the eyes of their sons at any rate, a certain glamour. You may argue that glamour is glamour, an illusion which will wear off in time; an illusion, at all events, and to be treated as such by the wise author intent on getting at truth. To this I answer that, while it lasts, this glamour is just as much a fact as _The Times_ newspaper, or St. Paul's Cathedral, just as real a feature of Oxford as Balliol College, or the river, or the Vice-Chancellor's poker: and until you recognise it for a fact and a feature of the place, and allow for it, you have not the faintest prospect of realising Oxford. Each succeeding generation finds that glamour, or brings it; and each generation, as it passes, deems that its successor has either found or brought less of it. But the glamour is there all the while. In turning over a book the other day, written in 1870 by the Rev. Robert Stephen Hawker, I come on this passage:--