that does not conduce to enthusiasm; and nobody in recent years has been electrified in an Oxford lecture room. “I have discovered,” writes an outsider, “with much difficulty that there are two classes in Oxford, the learned and the unlearned: my difficulty arose from the fact that the latter were without coarseness and the former without enthusiasm.” And certainly in a city that loves to light bonfires, and is never more herself than when she is welcoming a guest, enthusiasm is astonishingly well concealed. It may be detected occasionally among gentlemen who are conducting East-Enders from quadrangle to quadrangle, or among those who like the ground-ivy beer at Lincoln College on Ascension Day, or among those who salute financiers and others in the act of becoming Doctors of Civil Law at the Encænia. It was said that some one unsuccessfully spread his gown as a carpet for the late Mr. Rhodes’s feet: it is certain that some played upon him with little jets of truth very heartily, and asked Socratic questions, on that august occasion. At luncheon there is, however, some enthusiasm; not for the meal, which is commonly a stupid one, but for the long afternoon, to be spent in the parks, or on the river, or in the country, east to Wheatley, west to Fyfield. These matters, or the prospect of a long bookish afternoon indoors or (in the summer) under a willow on the Cherwell or Evenlode, encroach too absolutely upon luncheon to allow it to be anything more than an affair of knives and forks. As for the country, a man used frequently to walk so as to know all the fields for twenty miles on every side. But the walker is vanishing. Games take away their thousands; bicycles their hundreds; the motor car destroys twos and threes. On Sundays walking is almost fashionable; on week-days it is in danger of becoming notorious as the hall-mark of a “reading man.” An uninteresting youth was once asked, as a freshman, what exercise he favoured, and replied, “I belong to the reading set and go walks.” The remark was generally considered to lower him to the rank of the _Intellectuels_, or as the “Guide Conversationelle” translates the word, the Prigs. That guide, which appeared in the _J.C.R._ in June 1899, is so characteristic in its humour that I cannot apologise for quoting from it:-- GUIDE CONVERSATIONELLE DE L’ÉTRANGER À OXFORD