The fact that no porter or other college servant has recently received a D.C.L. is no proof of his insignificance. “The President and your humble servant manage very well between us,” said one porter, with perfect truth. College servants are the corbels and gargoyles that complete the picturesqueness and usefulness of Oxford. The oldest are not so much serviceable as quaint, often grotesque, reminders of an age that has gone; their faces are apt to express grim judgments upon the changes which they have helplessly watched; and they are among the stoutest retainers of the past. The younger are either very much like any other good men-servants, silent, receptive, curious but uninquiring, expensive, and better able to instruct than to learn; or they are average men, with Oxford variations. In spite of their profound knowledge of the richer classes, they remain, as a body, good conservatives, with the half-sarcastic, half-reverent servility of their order. They do not often change; the men whom they serve are replaced every year by others; and looking on at generation after generation, they are not only skilled and practical psychologists, and almost the only persons in Oxford who wear silk hats on Sunday, but perhaps the most enduring human element in the University. “Well,” says an eighteenth-century “scout” to another to-day, in an undergraduate “dialogue of the dead”--“Well, I suppose gentlemen are no worse and servants no better than in my time?” “Such a thing is impossible” was the reply. Yet one may surmise that they are more plutocratic, at least, than they were, if it be true that every summer at a Scottish hotel one may find “Mr. and Mrs. Brown of---- College, Oxford” on the pages of the visitors’ book, in a handwriting known to the buttery. In the game which they play with the undergraduates, they know all their opponents’ cards. Yet, until a member of the University is admitted to the cellar and pantry parliament, they will always be praised as reticent and discreet. A little inexperience will soon reveal, as the freshman knows, the other qualities of the college servant. I