Now, what has been the answer from Oxford when reproaches of this kind have been addressed to it? What was its answer when ridiculed, forty years ago, for teaching what rational men had been laughing at for more than a century? It amounted to this—that so intimately had the original statutes of the University interwoven the Aristotelian methods with the whole course of its studies and exercises, and so sacredly were its officers bound to see to the enforcement of those statutes, that the last stronghold from which any such learning could be dislodged was the University, to which its mere forms and practices unhappily continued to be essential, even long after every vestige of reality had vanished out of them. In other words it was confessed that Oxford had been so constructed as a place of study, that the rules and statutes which should have been framed for the reception of truth, in whatever quarter it might appear, had turned out to be only available for the retention and perpetuation of error; and that Education, whose express province everywhere else was to absorb and make profit of every new acquisition, was miserably bound, on this spot only, to reject them all. Precisely the same arguments have very lately been repeated. When the great ‘whip’ of the country parsons brought up a majority against the Modern History statute twelve months ago, this was the plea on which bigotry rallied her forces; and when more recently the statute was again proposed, the same plea would have secured it the same reception, if the old flock of reverend Thwack-’ums had not meanwhile tired of the expense and trouble of being dragged in a drove from their parsonages to the Senate House, to bleat forth ignorant _non placets_.