Added to the personal comforts are the artistic and scholastic comforts—if one may speak of them as such—with which the student is surrounded. The natural beauties of Oxford’s environment are a fit setting for the classic treasures of architecture which have risen in irregular grouping throughout the mediaeval town. As the student comes and goes, as he sits at his lecture, he is, consciously or unconsciously, living in an atmosphere of artistic realities. And then again, one cannot but remember now and then that he is sitting on the same benches or writing at the same table where once sat or wrote many of the men whose lives or whose works he is set to study, and whose portraits now stare down upon him from the walls opposite or whose coats of arms are blazoned on the oak panelling around him. Then as for books and libraries and reading-rooms—whether one wishes to dig among ancient texts or manuscripts, to consult reference libraries, or to fill one’s own shelves with books old and new, where can Oxford be surpassed? [Sidenote: Cosmopolitanism.] As a cosmopolitan intellectual centre Oxford is a Mecca to which pilgrims flock from all parts of the world; pilgrims with brains, pilgrims without brains; those who want to learn and those who do _not_ want to learn; bookworms, athletes, soldiers, ‘sports,’ workers and idlers; sons of noblemen, sons of commoners; not Englishmen alone, but Indians, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Egyptians, Germans, and Frenchmen. All this variety of student units go about looking very much alike in the conventional ‘lounge’ garb of Oxford; so that only an intimate acquaintance reveals the true cosmopolitanism of its personnel and of its intellectual life. [Sidenote: The ‘College’.] Although the University encircles, and, in constitutional and jurisdictional matters, exercises authority over the Colleges, it is really only the sum of the Colleges, each of which is in turn only the sum of its members. While the University is thus only a union of the Colleges for attaining such ends and such status as can better be attained by united than by isolated existence, the College is a real and concrete thing, the foundation stone of the ‘Oxford System’. Each College is within itself independent; each has its own traditions and some characteristics of organization, life, and system which are peculiar to itself. With the affairs of the College individually the University is not concerned. The Colleges as they exist to-day suggest some features of the monastery, some of the ancient hostelry, some of the fashionable hotel, some of the College dormitory, and some of the bachelor’s club—they combine church, lecture-rooms, dining-halls, professors’ houses, College clubs and students’ apartments, all within the radius of College walls, all accessible only through College gates, all capable of being shut off from the outside world, at once castle and prison.