returning to the supper in Hogg’s rooms, to the curious desultory meals, the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring fire, the small head lying perilously near the flames. One would not linger here over the absurd injustice of his expulsion from the University. It is pleasant to know, on Mr. Hogg’s testimony, that ‘residence at Oxford was exceedingly delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most beneficial.’ At Oxford, at least, he seems to have been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness, and who, if he made another suffer, himself suffered so much for others. The memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford. Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we not say, with the shepherd in Theocritus, of the divine singer: αἰθ’ ἐπ’ ἐγμῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες εἶμεν, ὥς τοι ἐγὼν ἐνόμευον ἀν ὤρεα τὰς καλὰς αἶγας φωνᾶς εἰσαίων, τὺ δ’ ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἦ ὑπὸ πεύκαις ἁδὺ μελισδόμενος κατεκέκλισο, θεῖε Κομᾶτα. ‘Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pine-trees lying, didst sweetly sing, divine Comatas!’ CHAPTER IX A GENERAL VIEW WE have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now, perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a bird’s-eye view of its present condition. We may ask St. Bernard’s question, _Whither hast thou come_? a question to which there are so many answers readily given, from within and without the University. It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that which has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual, throughout England.