In those happy days a fellowship of All Souls possessed the same quality which Lord Melbourne admired so much in the Order of the Garter, “There was no damned nonsense of merit about it.” Now, alas! all is changed. The fellows of colleges, even of All Souls, are married and meritorious. The Don’s wife is the ruling power and his daughters are the nymphs of Isis, floating luxuriously in punts under the willows of the backwaters—punts that the ruthless proctors of my day, suspiciously tolerant of sisters, would have employed mine-sweepers to disperse. Oxford has suffered a sea-change. All the tongues of the diaspora of Babel raise a cacophony in the groves of the Academeia. The Mohammedan in pious prayer turns his face to the Kibleh and curses the infidel. The Buddhist reverently seeks Nirvana in the contemplation of his own navel. The mild Hindoo profitably studies anarchy. The Negro becomes a Christian and takes holy orders that he may go back to his own country, receive a revelation, and organize a massacre of whites by Divine command. Such are the uses to which the grand old universities of England and America are now put, and this is what is called reform. The Oxford of Gaisford, the Cambridge of Whewell are phantoms of the past; what were once the strong places of Christianity are now held by the heathen, and England is no longer for the English—no—not even the House of Commons. Dean Gaisford was a great potentate: not only was his scholarship superb, but he was also a ruler of men. When he nodded, Olympus trembled. When he stood up at the altar in Christ Church and thundered out the first Commandment, with a long pause after the “I” and a strong insistence on the “Me,” he would look round the cathedral sternly, as much as to say, “I should like to see the undergraduate, or the graduate either, for that matter, who will dare to dispute that proposition.” His famous utterance in a sermon, “St. Paul says, and I partly agree with him,” has become a classic. But he was like the Nasmyth Hammer: he could crush a rock or flatten out a rose-leaf. Jelf had a good story of the way in which he once petrified a very young Don who at one of his dinners ate an apple in a way which he did not consider to be quite orthodox.