But there is an architect who has taken up the tale where Thomas Holt dropped it, and who has carried it farther, with results almost as important for the appearance of Oxford. A like moment in the history of the place seemed to have come round again. The new ways of the University needed new schools--for examination this time instead of disputation--and a great extension of college building coincided. Never, perhaps, since Wren had the churches of London to rebuild has one architect had such a fling in so important a place as Mr. T. G. Jackson in the Oxford of our time. And there can be no question that, whatever the faults of restlessness and overcrowding that sometimes mar his designs, Mr. Jackson has been worthy of his opportunity. The last great addition to Oxford is its undergraduates. It is not very long since the colleges, in respect of undergraduates, were normally as All Souls' is now, with its four Bible Clerks; but they were not as All Souls' is in respect of its Fellows. The long deserts of theological and political war had left them for the most part mere club-houses, whose members existed to drink port together of an evening, and abuse one another in little pamphlets during the day. The Common Room was the great invention of the late seventeenth century, and the eighteenth was spent in bringing it to perfection. Then came the Fellows of Oriel, the Examination Statutes, the genius of the Masters of Balliol, the Commission, the new Statutes, the Unattached. It is an exciting show for the visitor, this incongruous surface of new and old, this great bustle and pulse of the machine among the frail and crumbling walls. Each morning dilatory tides of men in cap and gown set about the streets under the jangling bells; each afternoon, in punctual haste, a steady stream of the same men, in flannel, makes for the river, and flows back for the monastic evensong and refectory dinner. There was a time when the dinner-hour was ten o'clock in the morning, and it was thought that so late an hour was a sign of the decay of learning. [Illustration: A "BUMP" AT THE BARGES.] Meanwhile the streets grow emptier, and the visitor, in the abstraction of the growing darkness, will gather hints of the antiquity about him. He will see the society grimace of the buildings relax. Their features will relapse into startling meanings, and the presence of other centuries will strike in upon his senses. If he is an American, like Mr. James's _Passionate Pilgrim_, he will feel about it all the pang of a forfeited possession. It is part of himself that was lost and is found, a history forgotten long before he was born. Now he remembers it.