As it was, the History statute was passed with its notable limitation against the events of the last sixty years. The Oxford scholar may now sail down the stream of modern story as long as the water is smooth, or the storm seen only in the distance; but as he nears the explosive point of 1789, of which the vast and terrible wrecks are still tumbling around us, a huge board warns him of ‘danger,’ and his frail little cock-boat of history is driven forcibly all the way back again. Such is the point of advance to which the present year of our Lord has brought the University of Oxford. Such is the provision made at the wealthiest place of education in the world, in the middle of the nineteenth century, for that true and subtle understanding of modern life and institutions on which the peaceful development of the twentieth century will mainly depend! But Oxford was founded by a Church, which, amid all ludicrous surrounding evidences of her failures and her follies, still claims to be infallible; and the worst peculiarities of the founder cleave to the foundation. The next fifty years will have to show, however, whether an institution shall be allowed to continue in the annual disposal of some half million or more of money for a purpose she so manifestly mistakes, that even the learning she prefers to every other is less taught to her scholars for the wisdom to be found in it, than for mere constructive skill in the language by which that wisdom is conveyed. Sydney Smith has remarked it as one of the great advantages of the classical education in which we are trained in this country, that it sets before us so many examples of sublimity in action, and of sublimity in thought. ‘It is impossible for us,’ he exclaims, in one of those noble lectures on moral philosophy of which the fragments have recently been published, ‘in the first and most ardent years of life, to read the great actions of the two greatest nations in the world, so beautifully related, without catching, _ourselves_, some taste for greatness, and a love for that glory which is gained by doing greater and better things than other men. And though the state of order and discipline into which the world is brought, does not enable a man frequently to do such things, as every day produced in the fierce and eventful democraties of Greece and Rome, yet, to love that which is great, is the best security for hating that which is little; the best cure for envy; the safest antidote for revenge; the surest pledge for the abhorrence of malice; the noblest incitement to love truth and manly independence and honourable labour, to glory in spotless innocence, and build up the system of life upon the rock of integrity.’