if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times. How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a figure which to us would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social, and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our forefathers that they could not conceive of such a _terminus ad quern_ as serves us as a _terminus a quo._ In other words, we _begin_ at a point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in all essentials is for ever repeating herself--impossible though it may be to put the clock back for ourselves.