It is rather perfect than academic; a garden of which the most would say that, after their own, it is the best. Its shape and size are accidents, for it embraces the sites of an old hall, a graveyard, and an orchard of Elizabeth’s time; and the expert mole might here and there discover traces of a dozen successive fashions since it was clipped and carved by a dialist and peppered with tulips. But a thoughtful conservatism and a partnership between many generations have given it an indubitable style. The place has, as it were, a nationality, and the inevitable boundaries are apparently the finishing-strokes of the picture and not its aboriginal frame. Yet it is no natural garden into which any one may stroll and scatter the ends of cigarettes. A strong customary law is expressed by the very aspect of the place. Hence, part of it is still sacred to the statelier leisure of the dons. Hence, where any one can go, whether by right, or from a lack of beadles, it is the good fortune of every one to find himself alone when he reaches the spot. Even so, the trees have never quite their just tribute of dignity and ceremonial. They would be pleased to welcome back the days when Shenstone could only visit Jago secretly, because he wore a servitor’s gown; when even Gibbon remembered with satisfaction “the velvet cap and silk gown which distinguish a gentleman commoner from a plebeian student”; and when, within living memory, the “correct thing for the quiet, gentlemanly undergraduate was a black frock-coat and tall hat, with the neatest of gloves and boots,” on his country walk. The garden, when its borders were in scrolls, knots, and volutes, was certainly not among The less ambitious Pleasures found Beneath the _Liceat_ of an humble Bob, but was chiefly honoured by those who had graduated into a grizzled wig “with feathery pride,”--Mr. Rakewell of Queen’s or Beau Trifle of Christ Church, or the ornate gentleman who are depicted in Ackerman,--and by dons who had never lost their self-respect by the scandal of keeping the company of undergraduates. When Latin was the language of conversation at dinner and supper, the trees looked their best. The change came, perhaps, in the days of the President who went about the world muttering _Mors omnibus communis_, or when our grandfathers made the gravel shriek with their armchair races across the quadrangles; for in those days, according to an authority on roses, undergraduates either read, or hunted, or drove, or rowed, or walked (_i.e._ up and down the High). The pile of the lawn continued to deepen, and the trees to write new legends upon the sky.