To return, however, into the track from which I have digressed. The reader will understand that any student is at liberty to have private servants of his own, as many and of what denomination he pleases. This point, as many others of a merely personal bearing, when they happen to stand in no relation to public discipline, neither the University nor the particular college of the student feels summoned or even authorized to deal with. Neither, in fact, does any other University in Europe; and why, then, notice the case? Simply thus: if the Oxford discipline, in this particular chapter, has nothing special or peculiar about it, yet the case to which it applies _has_, and is almost exclusively found in our Universities. On the Continent it happens most rarely that a student has any funds disposable for luxuries so eminently such as grooms or footmen; but at Oxford and Cambridge the case occurs often enough to attract notice from the least vigilant eye. And thus we find set down to the credit account of other Universities the non-existence of luxury in this or other modes, whilst, meantime, it is well known to the fair inquirer that each or all are indulgences not at all or so much as in idea proscribed by the sumptuary edicts of those Universities, but, simply, by the lower scale of their general revenues. And this lower scale, it will be said--how do you account for that? I answer, not so much by the general inferiority of Continental Europe to Great Britain in _diffusive_ wealth (though that argument goes for something, it being notorious that, whilst immoderate wealth, concentrated in a small number of hands, exists in various continental states upon a larger scale than with us, moderately large estates, on the other hand, are, with them, as one to two hundred, or even two hundred and fifty, in comparison with ours), but chiefly upon this fact, which is too much overlooked, that the foreign Universities are not peopled from the wealthiest classes, which are the classes either already noble, or wishing to become such. And why is that? Purely from the vicious constitution of society on the Continent, where all the fountains of honour lie in the military profession or in the diplomatic. We English, haters and revilers of ourselves beyond all precedent, disparagers of our own eminent advantages beyond all sufferance of honour or good sense, and daily playing into the hands of foreign enemies, who hate us out of mere envy or shame, have amongst us some hundreds of writers who will die or suffer martyrdom upon this proposition--that aristocracy, and the spirit and prejudices of aristocracy, are more operative (more effectually and more extensively operative) amongst ourselves than in any other known society of men. Now, I, who believe all errors to arise in some narrow, partial, or angular view of truth, am seldom disposed to meet any sincere affirmation by a blank, unmodified denial. Knowing,