Germain, and criticises them accordingly. Their rich toilets and coquettish gestures, their self-consciousness and affectation, are commented on in the manner I have described as peculiarly English; and she discerns a reason for every rapid movement, tracing it back to the desire of showing off hat or feather, flounce or trimming or tasselled boot. Surely so much insight is unnatural, and must indicate not a healthy activity, but one that is morbid and diseased. I ask myself with amazement, is it possible to recognize and discriminate motives so as to account for every action of a child, and are we always successful when we try to find out a reason and a first cause for everything?

Certainly I should have plenty to say if I discussed the pictures these girls were looking at, the stories they were reading, and their conversation, or rather the conversation which your writer reports. I have no words for them except those of blame. But I earnestly entreat the writer and your readers not to suppose for one moment that she was listening to the conversation of girls who were either carefully brought up or members of good society.

Fine feathers do not make fine birds. The elaborate dress of these girls proves conclusively that the parents did not occupy a high social position. Mothers even of the higher classes often take pleasure in adorning their little children; but in France, as a rule, all mothers have the good taste to dress growing girls with simplicity, and you will find almost invariably that the higher the social position of the parents the simpler is the dress of their young daughters.

Moreover, girls in the higher classes do not play together in the Tuileries at twelve years old; indeed, I can assure your readers, not only that these girls were not "fashionable," but that you must descend tolerably low in the social scale before you meet with such manners and conversation as those which the writer of the article describes.

The description is followed by an account of the cours, which are spoken of with great contempt. They have defects, they are in some respects superficial, and they take young girls away from home for several hours. I have been told that the former defect is almost universal, and that even in England the education of girls is not good and thorough. But in spite of shortcomings the cours offer appreciable advantages. They are accessible to persons of very moderate means; the instruction they give is, to say the least, quite equal to that which five out of six girls receive from a governess, and by their means the number of girls sent to schools and convents, and thus separated from their parents for many years, has been considerably diminished.

Before long these elder girls also begin to sing. begin to sing. Was so much singing ever heard in the Tuileries? And then follows a translation of the ronde. This time not only is the translation bad, but the whole meaning of the song is perverted and twisted into a form which is almost unrecognizable, or would be so if the ballad were not so striking and so well known that there can be no doubt as to the original from which it has been taken :

"A Paris, dans une ronde

Composée de jeunes gens,
Il se trouva une vieille,
Qui avait quatre-vingt ans.

Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !
"Elle choisit le plus jeune,
Qui était le plus galant.
Va-t-en, va-t-en, bonne vieille,
Tu n'as pas assez d'argent.'

Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !
"Si vous saviez ce qu'a la vieille,
Vous n'en diriez pas autant!'
'Dis-nous donc ce qu'a la vieille!'
'Elle a cent tonneaux d'argent !'

Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !
"Reviens, reviens, bonne vieille,
Reviens ici, promptement !
On alla chez le notaire-
'Mariez-nous cette enfant.'

Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !

"Cette enfant !' dit le notaire,
'Elle a bien quatre-vingt ans ;
Aujourd'hui le mariage,

Et demain l'enterrement.'

Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !
"On fit tant sauter la vieille,
Qu'elle est morte en sautillant;
On regarda dans sa bouche,
Elle n'avait plus que trois dents;
Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui croyait avoir quinze ans !
“Une qui branle, une qui hoche,
Une qui s'envole au vent.
On regarda dans sa poche,
Elle n'avait que trois liards d'argent!
Oh la vieille, la vieille, la vieille,
Qui avait trompé le galant!"

This ballad is probably as old as the nurse's lullaby, and your readers will not fail to see that mercenary marriages are spoken of with bitter irony and contempt, and that the author takes great delight in the discomfiture of the galant.

I have very often sung the song, and I must confess that there is in it a want of respect for the poor old lady, who wished to pass for a girl when she was eighty years old. At the same time, I cannot see why it called forth the horror and disgust which your contributor felt when she listened to it. A young man marries an old woman for her money, and finds after her death that he has been deceived. Such marriages are "cruel and immoral," and not the songs which hold them up to ridicule and contempt. Surely, now that English readers can compare the original with the translation, they will no longer be deceived as to the nature and tendency of the ronde.

In her severe reflections upon these young girls, who, as I have told you, were neither of "rank" nor of "elegant and refined education," and from whose youthful lips the poison which English

readers find in these ballads did not emanate, the author of the translation says: "In a very few years they will be given in marriage; they will be wives and mothers as soon as a man rich enough can be found to suit their parents." Once again I must call attention to an exaggeration so great that it almost makes the statement untrue. All French husbands are not rich any more than they are all old. English people are apt to forget that in France. we have very few "old maids ;" it is the universal custom for women to marry; and in France, as elsewhere, there are some young men who are not rich, and some young couples who begin life with very slender means. French parents are not always in search of rich husbands for their daughters, and the daughter sometimes feels just a little shade of preference for the man whom she is about to marry. It is true that parents take a more active part in the marriage of their children than they do in England, but the daughters do not object to it, and willingly confide the care of providing for their future happiness to those on whose tender solicitude they have such good reason to rely.

There is more domestic happiness in France, and there are more good parents and carefully educated children, than the author of "A Morning in the Tuileries" has any idea of Moreover I believe that, by the grace of God, our late misfortunes will lead us into paths of simplicity, steadfast courage, and patient perseverance; so that in time there will be nothing for us to envy, even in that England which I love so dearly, and which grieves me so much, when, after a superficial glance, it judges my country so severely and with such harsh injustice.

M. DE WITT.

I AM an abuse, and I know it, and I am not afraid to own it, because I am a vested interest, and that is enough to make even a licensed victualler respectable. For several years I have been paid for belonging to a very pleasant club in a beautiful provincial city, and I expect to be paid for belonging to it as long as I please. It would border

upon a breach of confidence to say how much I am paid, though probably the amount will soon be published on authority; but to prevent any virtuous exaggeration I may mention that it has seldom been over two hundred in a year, after deducting what is spent at the club. Naturally I feel it pleasant to be an abuse, and it would be pleasanter still if people would not call me one. It is hard that they should have begun so soon; if they had waited for my greatgrand-nephew he might have been expected to stand it; even his uncle ought not perhaps to have grumbled much: but considering that a dozen, even half a dozen, years ago it was a great Liberal triumph to have made me and the like of me possible, it really is hard to be called an abuse so soon, especially as nothing has happened which might not have been expected any time the last twenty years, when people were still wondering if the great Liberal triumph could ever be attained. Still, if it were only for myself, I should not mind so much; everybody gets to care less for his club as he grows older, so if mine is spoilt in five or six years, as most likely it will be, it will not matter so long as they pay me to keep my name on the books.

Unluckily my club is a national institution, so the newspapers will have it, and of course it is not for us to repudiate the honour, especially as we are a very creditable institution, as English institutions go; and as much

may be said of the other clubs in the town, and there are some twenty of them. But if we are national institutions, it is rather a discouraging reflection that Parliament should be at the mercy of advisers who are capable of founding and abolishing an abuse in a single generation.

To speak seriously, we want a great many things at Oxford, but we want stability and organization more than all. We want to be dealt with as a whole by people who can foresee the effect of their own measures, not to be kept in a perpetual fever of agitation by a succession of isolated reforms, half of which are required to remedy the mischiefs introduced by the rest. At present there is every danger that the mistakes of the old University Commission, and of the legislation which followed, will be repeated over again, and there is also reason to fear that mistakes made now will be found harder to remedy than mistakes made then. The conditions which led reformers wrong before are present now. Those conditions may be summed up in two words-great endowments and baffled energies. A number of clever men are engaged in working a system supported by large revenues, and they hardly feel that they are doing a great work. They judge themselves reasonably and modestly they believe that they could do honour to a good system, they do not pretend to themselves or to others that their abilities are sufficient to supply the place of a good system. They require to have such a system organized for them and it may certainly be conceded that in the existing revenues and in their abilities there ought to be sufficient materials for any organization. Unfortunately, the public is even more impatient than University reformers, and, we need not say, more incapable of

organizing an University. The result is that the bulk of University reformers are compelled to fall back upon the assumption that the existing organization is perfect-if only its palpable defects were removed-and cannot stop to reflect that institutions, like individuals, sometimes have "the faults of their qualities." Twenty years ago the grievance of the reformers was that the revenues of Oxford went to fatten dunces, and, what made the matter worse, dunces who had a strong taste and a very pretty talent for obstruction. Of course obstructive dunces had no business at an University, and the reformers persuaded themselves and the public that they were to be got rid of at any cost.

Competitive examination presented a satisfactory security that no one should get a scholarship who was not either clever or well taught, and that no one should get a fellowship who was not clever and well taught. After years of agitation and discussion the University reformers had persuaded Parliament to carry out their ideas, and this is the reform they made. True, there were theorists who wished to enlarge the curriculum, and extremists who doubted if every college could produce three walking encyclopædias to act as tutors; and for their gratification it was determined to found schools without prizes, and professorships without classes. Perhaps there may have been some who expected such experiments to succeed-there are hardly any whom their failure has surprised or pained. They lay too much outside the practical work of those who advocated them for the failure to be really felt. The case was different with the failure of competition, though that also might have been foreseen. Under the old system those who lived by Oxford lived for Oxford; and a bookish docile lad of fifteen, who made up his mind to live for Oxford, had more certainty of being able to live by Oxford than he has now.

When he had once got his scholarship, and he must have been unusually friendless or spiritless to fail, he had simply to conduct himself well.

He was sure to succeed to his fellowship, which brought the obligation of residence and the hope of college office, which he attained at an age when a clerical tutor of the present day is on the eve of taking a college living, and a lay tutor is already regretting that he has no college living to take: he spent the best and ripest years of his life within the walls of his college, he gained such a reputation and authority in his college and his university as seemed due to his character and abilities, and he retired satisfied with his share of the world, to spend the evening of his days in a pleasant country parsonage. Of course under this régime there were useless dons, as there have always been useless squires, and it is believed there are useless aldermen, who will never convince mankind of the necessity that civic corporations should possess estates sufficient to enable them to give grand dinners. But in those days it had not been discovered that because a corporation was useful to the nation, its property was the property of the nation: and consequently the public were in no danger of being tormented by that peculiarly British optical illusion which makes a sum of public money seem larger than it is, and the same sum of private money seem smaller than it is.

The reformers perhaps underrated the merits of this system; certainly they overrated the advantages of competition: they expected that by bringing a number of clever men together they could not fail to evolve something higher than cleverness; but the great mistake of all was to suppose that they might cut away as much of the old system as they pleased, and the rest would stay of itself. They thought that they could sweep away stupid dons by examinations, and useless dons by sending off all fellows who were not wanted for college work to be barristers and schoolmasters, and then that the best Oxford men would stay in Oxford and be as contented as before. But the don of the old school was contented because he had stupid and useless neighbours; because in taking orders he had pledged himself

already to a life of arbitrary restrictions and of limited horizons; because a long series of competitions had not inflamed his appetite for sensible success. The success which was in his reach came to him after he had passed the years in which men expect too much from themselves and the world, and that expectation had not been raised to an unnatural pitch by an exhausting course of exercises in the art which people are expected to have mastered by three-and-twentythe art of being ready to write upon anything in the manner of a man who is familiar with everything. To him the greater part of knowledge was still distant, unfamiliar, attractive; it might be the reward of his life to reach two or three such views as a fashionable "coach" assimilates by the dozen out of fashionable books, spending a week. at the outside upon each, while his pupil, if intelligent, can use any view in any examination after an hour's lecture.

The result was, that the reformers produced something quite different from what they intended, and they are but half satisfied with their work, and they want Parliament to help them to reform their reformation. Parliament will do well to ascertain, before doing anything in the matter, that they have made much greater progress than they have made yet in understanding the system they have undertaken to reform. At present, hardly any Oxford reformer (with the illustrious exception of the Rector of Lincoln, whom the reformers that I am criticising agree to shelve as "unpractical") has got beyond the rudimentary conception of the redress of grievances. Most of the fellows cost the college a great deal of money, and do very little for it, so sinecure fellowships are to be terminable: it is felt that any term which could be proposed will hardly shorten the average tenure, so the value of sinecure fellowships is to be cut down. It is hard not to be allowed to marry till forty or fifty, so celibacy is to be abolished; of course a married man must provide for his family, and the value of tutorships is to

be raised in proportion. And people still imagine that after this is done everything really will be for the best in the best of all possible universities, and that anything further that can be wished for will come of itself, thanks to the spontaneous energy of the married residents.

One

Now the people who speculate after this fashion certainly hold that the Oxford of to-day, with all her faults and shortcomings, is still a great and noble institution, and such as she is she is what celibacy and competition make her; and it is really a startling thing that those who think there is much in Oxford worth keeping, should propose to abolish celibacy, and virtually to starve competition, without a thought of what is to take their place. could understand a proposal to sweep away Oxford altogether, to make room for something better; one could understand a project of producing by other and more effectual means the very considerable good which Oxford does now, as well as the immense and indefinite good which it might be expected to do, on the obvious ground that it is as rich as any ten German universities together, and therefore ought to be ten times as distinguished as any of them.

Oxford, as it is, is a singularly perfect and delicate machine for the formation and regulation of opinion, and for the maintenance and diffusion of historical, literary, and philosophical knowledge. For these purposes it is as well fitted as any human institution can be expected to be. For the extension of knowledge it does not answer as well; it is rather doubtful whether it will ever be possible to persuade hundreds of men to make the extension of knowledge the business of their lives, in a time and in a place where there are so many pleasanter things for the natural man to do; and there are reasons, as we shall presently see, why the typical Oxford resident is very unpromising material to be moulded into a maker of discoveries. If a man has a genius for discovery, Oxford will not warp or stifle it; but the industrious multitude of extraor