the lectures of University Professors. Fellows of Colleges were not unwilling to add to their Commons and Livery the Tutor's stipend. Thus the importance of the College waxed while that of the University waned, and the College Statutes became more and more collectively the law of the University. These Statutes were mediæval and obsolete, but they were unalterable, the Heads and Fellows being sworn to their observance, and there being no power of amendment, since the Visitor could only interpret and enforce. Thus the mediæval type of life and study was stereotyped and progress was barred. The Fellowships having been originally not teacherships or prizes, but aids to poor students, the Founders deemed themselves at liberty in regulating the elections to give free play to their local and family partialities, and the consequence was a mass of preferences to favoured counties or to kin. With all these limitations, the teaching body of the University was now practically saddled. Even the restrictions to particular schools--as to Winchester in the case of New College, to Westminster, which had been substituted for Wolsey's Ipswich, in the case of Christ Church, and to Merchant Tailors' School in the case of St. John's--were noxious, though in a less degree, albeit their bad influence might be redeemed by some pleasant associations. Worst of all, however, in their effect were the restrictions to the clerical Order. This meant little in the Middle Ages, when all intellectual callings were clerical, when at Oxford gownsman and clerk, townsman and laic, were convertible terms. Wykeham, Foxe, and Wolsey themselves were thorough laymen in their pursuits and character, though they had received the tonsure, were qualified, if they pleased, to celebrate mass, and derived their incomes from bishoprics and abbeys. But the Reformation drew a sharp line between the clerical and the other professions. The clergyman was henceforth a pastor. The resident body of graduates and the teaching staff of Oxford belonging almost exclusively to the clerical profession, the studies and interests of that profession now reigned alone. Whatever life remained to the University was chiefly absorbed in theological study and controversy. This was the more deplorable as theology, in the mediæval sense, was a science almost as extinct as astrology or alchemy. Oxford was turned into the cock-pit of theological party. At the same time she was bound hand and foot to a political faction, because her clergymen belonged to the Episcopal and State Church, the patrons and upholders of which, from political motives, were the Kings and the Cavaliers, or, as they were afterwards called, the Tories. Cambridge suffered like Oxford, though with some abatement, because there, owing to the vicinity of a great Puritan district, high Anglicanism did not prevail, and, for reasons difficult to define, the clergy altogether were less clerical.