“Some writers, in casting up the goods most desirable in life, have given them this rank--health, beauty, and riches. Of the first, I find no dispute; but to the two others much may be said; for beauty is a good that makes others happy rather than one’s self; and how riches should claim so high a rank I cannot tell, when so great, so wise, and so good a part of mankind have, in all ages, preferred poverty before them--the Therapeutae and Ebionites among the Jews, the primitive monks and modern friars among Christians, so many dervises among the Mahometans, the Brachmans among the Indians, and all the ancient philosophers; who, whatever else they differed in, agreed in this, of despising riches, and at best esteeming them an unnecessary trouble or encumbrance of life: so that whether they are to be reckoned among goods or evils, is yet left in doubt. “When I was young, and in some idle company, it was proposed that every one should tell what their three wishes should be, if they were sure to be granted: some were very pleasant, and some very extravagant; mine were health, and peace, and fair weather; which, though out of the way among young men, yet perhaps might pass well enough among old: they are all of a strain; for health in the body is like peace in the state, and serenity in the air; the sun, in our climate at least, has something so reviving, that a fair day is a kind of sensual pleasure, and of all others the most innocent.” The last words he would often repeat, with this comment: that people to-day were so much busied with sunsets and landscapes and colours that they had no such hearty feeling for Nature as the old seventeenth-century statesman, philosopher, and gardener had. “Read Cowley and Pope,” was his only criticism in English literature. “Any one can be a Keats, though few can write as well,” he argued, “but it is not so easy to be like Pope.” Meeting Browning one day, and telling him that he enjoyed some of his poetry, the poet asked him whether he understood it. “No,” said the Don, “do you?” For twenty years, when men spoke of---- College, they thought of him. “The University of Oxford,” said an old pupil who lived to send his son to that college, “the University of Oxford, at least as a place of education, consists of old----, the river, and the college pump.” That college is now like Roman [Illustration: THE RADCLIFFE LIBRARY, OR CAMERA BODLEIANA, FROM BRASENOSE COLLEGE QUADRANGLE The gateway to the left of the centre of the picture is the entrance to the College from the Square in which stands the Radcliffe Library. The great dome of the Library rises above the gateway tower, dominating the Square, the College, and indeed all Oxford.