I have been able to clip only the fringe of a great theme. Athletes require an essay to themselves. In later age they seem to me more melancholy than their Cambridge peers and less successful. These splendid creatures are really works of art, and form our only substitute for sculpture in the absence of any native plastic talent. From the collector's point of view they belong to the best period, while the graceful convention of isocephaly, which has raised the standard of height, renders them inapt for the 'battles' of life, however well equipped for those of their College where the cuisine is at all tolerable. I am not enough of an antiquary to conjecture if there was ever a temple to Isis during the Roman occupation of Britain on the site of the now illustrious University. But I like to imagine that there existed a cultus of the venerable goddess in the green fields where the purple fritillaries, so reminiscent of the lotus, blossom in the early spring. In the curious formal pattern of their petals I see a symbol of the Oxford manner--something archaic, rigid, severe. The Oxford Don may well be a reversion to some earlier type, learned, mystic, and romantic as those priests of whom Herodotus has given us so vivid a picture. The worship of Apis, as Mr. Frazer or Mr. Lang would tell us, becomes then merely the hieroglyph for a social standard, a manner of life. This, I think, will explain the name Oxford on the Isis--the Ford of Apis, the ox- god at this one place able to pass over the benign deity. You remember, too, the horrid blasphemy of Cambyses (his very name suggests Cambridge), and the vengeance of the gods. So be it to any sacrilegious reformer who would transmute either the Oxford Don or the Oxford undergraduate--the most august of human counsellors, the most delightful of friends. (1902.) HOW WE LOST THE BOOK OF JASHER.