resolution, and one I am sure I should never have formed if I had possessed a friend who could have laid the whole case before me. If I had been asked such questions as these :Can you see the face of a witness?' 'Can you watch the countenances of a jury so as to judge whether what you say finds acceptance with them or no?' Can you in a crowded Court take full and accurate notes of evidence and cases?' 'Can you read through a long affidavit in a fog or by candlelight?' 'Can you find your place readily in a long brief or report?'-all these and many more such questions I must have answered in the negative. However, it was on this impossibility that I had set my heart, and, the matter being resolved upon, I had next to consider the way to get called to the Bar. For this two things were necessary; one to get a lay Fellowship, the other to support myself and bear the expenses incident to the study and the entrance into the legal profession.

I happened to know that a lay Fellowship at Magdalen confined to Nottinghamshire would be vacant in two years, which solved the first difficulty, and for the second I had to rely on finding a sufficient number of pupils. And now I began a labour compared with which everything else which I have had to do in my life has been mere play and recreation. The business of a private tutor at Oxford may be described to be to give an hour a day to each pupil. Had I meant to make teaching my profession I should have gone to work with more moderation, but I thought, and justly, according to the plan I had laid down for myself, that I was bound to work as hard as I could in order to carry out my ideal. For seven years I took as many pupils as I could do justice to. My number very often amounted to ten, and in addition to this, for five years out of the seven I took pupils during the long vacation. I do not think I could have gone on with it much longer. It has at any rate had this good effect, that all other work has seemed to me trifling after it. To dismiss this sub

ject at once I may say that I was very popular as a tutor and retained my number up to the last, and finished in November with four pupils of mine in a first class of six. I have lost the list of my pupils, but I am proud to mention amongst them Lord Justice Mellish, Mr. Gathorne-Hardy, Mr. Charles Reade the novelist, Mr. Clough the poet, Mr. Congreve, and the late Father Dalgairns. I had not the honour to be known either to Mr. Newman or to Dr. Arnold, but so many pupils came to me from those two distinguished men that I flattered myself, perhaps too readily, that it was not wholly fortuitous.

In 1834 I spent the long vacation with some pupils in Wales. The latter part of the time we spent at Festiniog, where I had a most extraordinary escape. About half a mile from the village there is a fine mountain stream which has worn itself an exceedingly deep channel, and makes a series of cataracts. There is also in the stream a very remarkable rock called Hugh Lloyd's Pulpit.' I walked down to the brook after my work was over to look at one of these cascades which was called The Black Pools.' The rock projected over it so that the fall seemed directly under my feet. I laid hold of the branch of a tree to steady myself while I looked over, my foot slipped on the mossy bank, the branch that I held broke, I fell on my side, rolled over and over three or four times, and then shot clear over the precipice. People are described in such situations as having their whole life pass before them, as losing their breath, as dead before they reach the ground. None of these things happened to me. I seemed a long time to be rolling over and over in the air. I remember hoping that I should be killed outright, and then the relief of finding myself in water. I rose to the surface like a duck and on looking round found myself in a deep basin with the waterfall facing me, high rocks all round, and one very close to the place where I had fallen in. After a futile attempt to get out by the way that I came in, which showed that I had not quite recovered my senses, I swam down the stream and crawled

out at the first point where the bank began to slope. I sprained my ankle and my hand, was only able to crawl on all fours most of the way home, and ended by fainting with the pain. They said the height of the fall was 120 feet. On this I can give no opinion, for my experience has proved to me that the worst possible way of measuring a height is to fall down it. My kind old friend, Martha Owen the landlady, whose name, if there is gratitude in man, ought to be green in the valleys of Wales, and who bore no inconsiderable resemblance to Scott's Meg Dodds, took excellent care of me, and I felt no permanent bad effects from my accident.

The next year was a memorable one. The Fellowship at Magdalen fell vacant and I was elected without a competitor. I took a party of pupils to read at Beaumaris, and three months after I had obtained the Fellowship which had formed so prominent a part of my scheme for being called to the Bar, I effectually cancelled that part of my programme by engaging myself to the lady whom I had met at Barmouth. It was a matter that might have waited a little while, but I had a motive which induced us to rather precipitate matters. If I vacated my Fellowship during that year, my younger brother would be sure to get it. I had taught him at Oxford, he had obtained a second class, and as he intended to take orders would thus be provided for for life. So we arranged matters accordingly, and were married in March 1836. As I never was a full Fellow, all that I received from the munificence of William of Wainfleet was 10l.

The summer of this auspicious year we spent in a tour in Switzerland; we left England in the beginning of June and did not return till the middle of October. We walked, I may literally say all over Switzerland, for not only did we visit the Oberland and Chamouni, but Appenzell, St. Gallen, and the Grisons. My wife was an excellent walker, and thus our slender resources, being relieved of the charges of transport, held out till the end of our long campaign. We walked 700

miles in two months; my wife, who drew extremely well, carrying her sketch-book and drawing materials, and I our wardrobe and the money, which, being silver, was the heaviest of all. We returned to Oxford, bought a small house between Christchurch and Folly Bridge, and set to work at the business of life in good earnest. This lasted for four years, during which I underwent an enormous amount of drudgery.

The Oxford of to-day, owing to changes in which I have been so fortunate as to bear a part, is very different from the Oxford of forty years ago. At that time we were governed academically and socially by what I can only describe as a clerical gerontocracy. Almost all power was vested in the heads of colleges, an office to which men seldom succeed when young, and in which there is no superannuation. Bacon says that a university should be like a beehive, 'quo neque sit ventis aditus,' and certainly the institution was well qualified to secure that its government should not be of a too revolutionary or innovating character. It might perhaps have occurred to some people that I, who was able to obtain in the open field of competition more pupils than I required, might have been a useful auxiliary to the not very powerful tutorial staff of the college to which I belonged. I do not believe such an idea was ever rejected, because I do not believe that it ever occurred to anyone.

Magdalen was less of a reading college than University, and, as the Duke of Wellington once told the authorities, had been notorious for idleness ever since the time of Gibbon. Our president was a scholar and a gentleman, but his reign began in the reign of Louis the Sixteenth. If such a plan as that of utilising me had ever been broached, I am sure it would have been overruled. I was popular with the Fellows but I was a decided Liberal, and worse than all was known to entertain very strong opinions in favour of the repeal of the Corn Laws, a most distasteful heresy in academical eyes, as having a tendency to diminish the value of Fellowships. The heads

of houses had the usual quality of a narrow and factitious aristocracy-they were socially exclusive. Not that this would have been any great loss in itself, but the evil was that Oxford was too small to support two societies, and so those who had not university or collegiate rank enough to place them in what was somewhat irreverently called the cod's head and shoulders' set, ran some risk of having no society at all.

As for us, we found an ample indemnity for general society in youth, health, constant employment, and in the kindness of many of my old college friends. In 1837 I was appointed a Master of the Schools, or in other better understood words a little-go' examiner. This I owed, if I remember right, to my connection with Magdalen College. One of our Fellows was Proctor and he gave me the appointment. Among my colleagues were Dr. Dyne and Dr. Kynaston, who have since. been remarkably successful as schoolmasters; Dyne at Highgate, and Kynaston at St. Paul's. I held the office for two years. Our duties were laid down for us by statute and there was no difficulty in performing them, except that to do so was extremely unpopular and quite contrary to the spirit of the place. Our duty was to see that the students of so many terms' standing were not wholly wasting their time and might with propriety be allowed to continue their studies at Oxford. One would have supposed that the wish of all parties would be that this duty should be strictly and creditably performed; sometimes, indeed, I have been thanked by a tutor for cutting short the career of an idle and dissipated young man whose bad example was doing injury to the college, but much more frequently the matter was received with a growl and visible annoyance. We were, in fact, to compare small things with great, judges residing among a small society greatly interested in the manner in which we administered justice-all whose sympathies were, so to say, with the criminals.

As people talk very much and understand very little about what they call University teaching, I will try to explain the