* * * * * In my discredited trade of a novelist--that is to say, the trade of people who create out of their own brains new things--we have a technique of phrase. Unimportant to the pedant, as are the methods by which we are sometimes able to secure a great, and even grateful public, we still have our little catchwords and there is a certain freemasonry of craft. One finishes up, it is generally understood, with “a canter down the straight.” Bursting away from the restrictions of the Essay, glad to have finished with an academic convention which says one must write this way and so, let me attempt to crystallize just what this paper means, from my own, and doubtless limited, point of view. It means this. Upon the sturdy oak, generations old, in which the University may be typified in allegory, a dusty parasite of ivy has been clinging. This parasite, which has clogged the newer shoots from the old tree, is a parasite of the classical and especially of the history don and pedant. Law, Science and Mathematics have entered Oxford as a bright light comes into the dark. Here, all is well. And in regard to the older arts, I think, and many other people who are in the centre of the ferment of change think with me, all is about to be reconstituted in a freer air. It remains as a wonder that past and present undergraduates, the guests of the hotel, remain so individually and cumulatively distinct from the obstructionist section of its managers and landlords. In the darkest days it is astonishing to see how many men reading history have been able to educate themselves brilliantly in spite of all opposition. And if Oxford can send out into the world such men as she is giving to the community now, in spite of the influences which have checked and hampered them, what may she not do in the days which are at hand, when the parasite shall be cut down from the old tree and growth shall be unhampered by the incompetent? Those days, I am convinced, are at hand, and, curiously enough, it is the influence of James Anthony Froude which is precipitating the revolution. What the great historian could not do in his life, the immortality of his writings is accomplishing. Under Froude’s banner a devoted and influential band is enlisted. The work of change is proceeding with wonderful vigour and rapidity. Let us gird up our loins to push and elbow out the discredited and effete, and if necessary pay hirelings, and employ executioners to end the unfortunate history of the immediate past, to destroy the Obstructionists, the Historicides, and those whom only annihilation will convince of error. In conclusion I submit that I have neither been conjecturing what I cannot find, nor insinuating what I dare not assert; and if a sincere conviction and a prolonged scrutiny give one title to a part in the growing condemnation of the Historicides I shall be proud to think that I have taken a very humble place in the coming renaissance.