us. Five minutes more, and she was fairly clear. Then suddenly, above the awful shrieking of the hurricane, came a duller, deeper roar. Great

heavens! it was the voice of the breakers!

"At that moment the moon began to shine forth again-this time behind the path of the squall. Out far across the torn bosom of the ocean shot the ragged arrows of her light, and there, half a mile ahead of us, was a white line of foam; then a little space of open-mouthed blackness, and then another line of white. It was the breakers, and these grew clearer and yet more clear as we sped down upon them like a swallow. There they were boiling up in snowy snouts of spray, smiting and gnashing together like the gleaming teeth of hell!"

We will venture to add that in real adventure Mr Rider Haggard will find his best field. Truth is stranger than fiction even there, and it is hard to fit such a personage as 'She' to the uses either of poetry or grammar. 'She' is a sham, and not a pleasant one.

1

We have given enough, perhaps too much, room to the lighter literature. Here is something which is, in contrast with all this froth, perhaps a little heavy, serious instruction, and worth preserving. Mr Maxwell Lyte deceives us a little to begin with, though we do not suppose he had any such intention. His book, which is in reality only the first volume of a history, is put forth more or less as a companion book to the History of Eton,' which he published several years ago; but the Eton book had many and very good illustrations, and the present volume has none, which is a disappointment to begin with. It is, however, very well worth the attention of those to whom Oxford is the Alma Mater of intellectual life, as well as to the many more who are interested

in the great University, and eager to know all about it without being able to claim that relationship. I would give my right arm,

we

The

once heard an enthusiastic American poet say, flinging forth that member as he spoke, "to have been educated at Eton and Oxford!" Alas! there are many who have possessed these privileges who make but small use of them. history of the University, Mr Lyte tells us, has never before been written. (Another shorter work of the same kind, by the Warden of Oriel, has, we believe, just come from the press, but has not yet reached us.) Oxford has furnished plenty of antiquarian "bits," and plenty of florid descriptions. The vagaries of its youthful inmates have called forth many a volume, and traditions of all sorts have been vaguely afloat, and done service as history in popular publications. But none of her many literary sons have till now gathered documents and legends into the sieve of genuine and continuous historical research. Mr Lyte has no doubt destroyed a good many pleasant beliefs, and cut down cherished delusions into the bare outline of fact; but he has thrown a great deal of real daylight upon the beginnings of those stately and venerable corporations which give individuality to English universities. Even in this respect we are perhaps a little disappointed by the result of his investigations; for it had been a sort of accepted conclusion that the distinctive feature of English university life, the existence of its many separate Colleges, each with a band of scholars, united by close ties of fellowship and propinquity, was characteristic and fundamental-in short, that Oxford was born so, as a child is

By Maxwell Lyte. London: Mac

born with its legs and arms complete, and fingers and toes developed. The Scotch imagination (being slow, as everybody knows) at first refuses to believe that the time ever existed when there was no Master in Balliol, although Snell scholarships, we allow, had an ascertainable beginning; but when we are called upon to ascend into remote antiquity, and concede that there was once no Balliol at all, the blood almost refuses to flow in our startled veins.

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Yet such it appears was reaily the case. "For those who are acquainted with the Oxford of the present century alone," says Mr Lyte, it may be difficult to realise that the University was a large and flourishing body long before it contained a single college of secular students. The collegiate system did not take its rise until the second half of the thirteenth century, and at least three inore centuries elapsed before it became predominant," so that, in fact, the univer sity in England was at its beginning not much more dignified than in other places, but consisted of the same busy crowd of young men, the same untitled groups of lecturers and teachers, as in France or Ger: many, or even Scotland. Even the first founders did not do much more than establish chests" (in fact, as well as in title) containing certain moneys, to be given or lent to poor scholars to help them through their studies. The Sea Chest, or Kist, by the by, an institution of last century in seaboard parishes, to help poor mariners to their salt-water equipment, hands on this simple title.

The first thing that looks at all like the foundation of a College was, what we should call in Scotland the "mortification" of certain funds made by John Balliol, which does not, however, seem to have had the grace of a voluntary

act.

It was in or before the year 1260 that he incurred the censure of Walter Kirkham, Bishop of Durham, by some serious offence against ecclesiastical order, and he was not pardoned until he had submitted himself to be publicly scourged by the bishop at the door of the cathedral church, and had vowed to set apart a certain sum of money for the perpetual maintenance of poor students at the University. In fulfilment of this vow, an Balliol' was ere long opened at Oxford for the reception of poor scholars, the patron granting to each of them a weekly allowance of eightpence for 'commons,'-that is to say, for a share of the food at common table."

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establishment known as the house of

From such small beginnings do the greatest results spring! Devorgilla, the revered patroness to whom that learned corporation now looks back as upon an open-handed princess, "continued to pay the weekly allowances" after her husband's death, and a considerable time afterwards the community was constituted under the external supervision of two proctors, members of the university, and a Principal elected by the students. The Master, that name of awe, was a later institution. The College began its career in a hired house near the Church of St Mary Magdalen, about which spot it acquired various dwellings, never moving from the vicinity of that corner, now so fully filled up by the long extending line of building which forms the present very modern college.

Mr Lyte disposes almost contemptuously of the fond fiction of University College-that its corporation was founded by Alfred. And his account of how, one after another, these little centres of life and learning were formed, or formed themselves, with their chest or coffer full of odd moneys for the help of poor scholars, is very interesting.

On more than one occasion, how

ever, the very being of Oxford was in danger. After a great outburst of the immemorial town-and-gown quarrel, the University in a body abandoned that scene of tumult, migrating in one case to Northampton, in another to Stamford, to the great alarm and horror of everybody concerned. So great was the impress produced by the later secession, that an oath to the following effect,-"You shall swear that you will not give or attend lectures at Stamford as in a university seat of learning or general college," to be taken by all candidates for a degree, was not abolished until 1827. A still more tremendous riot, which took place in 1354, and in which the inns and halls of the newly formed communities were sacked, and the scholars cut to pieces, brought an interdict upon the townsmen. After one of these tumults, in which the Pope's legate interfered, improvements were introduced which will go to the heart of every parent. "He decreed that for the next ten years to come they should pay only one-half of the rent agreed on by them and their respective landlords before the secession, and that for ten years more they should pay according to their own valuation." Admirable legate! he must have been an Irishman. We may add, in order to supply that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin, that affairs in the University town in those days betray some familiar features known to all of us. "The wine sold to the scholars by the Oxford vintners was denounced as being at times unfit for human consumption, and exorbitantly dear. The townsmen were frequently accused of rapacity and illegal conduct, in charging higher prices for certain articles of food than were sanctioned by Act of Parliament." Even in our own days, unprotected as we are by any

Acts of Parliament, such things have been known.

No one of all the Colleges, however, had so large and magnificent a beginning as that intended by Wolsey, the great and splendid Cardinal College, which he had planned and partially built on the site of the present Christ Church. Everybody who has ever visited Oxford knows the staircase, with its airy and high-springing pillar and delicately carved roof, which leads to the great hall, both of them built by the Cardinal. It is curious to hear that it was the great Churchman who began the seductive practice of suppressing monasteries, afterwards so powerfully followed up by his king whom he had served better than his God, and who abandoned him so remorselessly. The Cardinal, however, was able to carry out this spoliation with every legitimate sanction. He procured from Pope Clement VIII. " a bull authorising him, with the royal consent, to suppress the Priory of S. Frideswyde, and to transfer the canons to other houses of the Augustinian order, so that their dwelling and their revenues might be assigned to the proposed college." The same Pope, some time after, explaining "that divine service could not be properly maintained in monasteries containing less than seven professed members," gave permission to his legate in England to suppress an unspecified number of such small religious houses, provided that the inmates should be transferred to other monasteries, and that their revenues to be taken for the new college should not in all exceed the yearly value of three thousand gold ducats." This was indeed the thin end of the wedge-a suggestion supplied to a most ready scholar. The Pope-for Wolsey did not live to share that sorrow— must have deeply regretted the

initiative which showed Henry such an easy way of money-getting, and one so much to his royal

mind.

In all probability, however, it was Wolsey's fall which saved to us the venerable Church of S. Frideswyde, which now serves at once as the Cathedral of Oxford and the chapel of Christ Church. The magnificent Cardinal, could he have carried out his intention, would no doubt have replaced that noble old sanctuary with a fine church in highly decorated perpendicular architecture, than which, however, there are worse things. The reader will find not only a great deal of information, but also most interesting reading, in Mr. Lyte's book.

Few people who take a serious interest in Scottish history can open quite calmly a volume that is entitled The Scotland of Mary Stuart.' The present work, however, brings with it a certain disappointment in the discovery that Mr Skelton has only given us an instalment, a first volume, which, dealing as it does with many things of importance, yet leaves the chief objects of interest for the next volume. It is rather hard on readers, this custom of issuing books of such interest bit by bit, breaking off like a penny serial at the most interesting part, with a promise to be continued in our next." No period of Scottish history has been more voluminously, and often more unfairly, discussed than this of Queen Mary; the mere name of Mary Stuart seems even now to arouse as much party feeling as that of Mr Gladstone, if we may hope to be forgiven for mentioning the two names in the same sentence. But the history of this period has been hitherto

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undertaken by men who belonged to one or other of two classes, neither fully capable of dealing with it in the most efficient way. They have been either determined partisans like Mr Froude, or scholars like Dr Hill Burton,-for whose valuable work we can have no word but of praise, but whose views were rather those of the student than the man. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that we welcome even an instalment of the history of these times from Mr Skelton, a writer who-though in a question like this every one must take a side-is neither an enthusiastic partisan nor blindly dependent upon chronicles.

An author who, as he himself says, writes his book "in the evenings of busy days," has advantages which may almost counterbalance the patent disadvantage of restricted leisure-a man of the world having means of understanding and divining the motives and modes of working of other public men, even at a distance of centuries, such as are seldom possessed by the mere student. For, with all due allowances for circumstances and customs, which differ from age to age, human nature three hundred years ago was not very much unlike the human nature of the present time. The difference of circumstances, however, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries must be allowed to be very great. In a confused and tumultuous kingdom, in which there was no solid and efficient balance of a middle class, but which was torn asunder by the great houses, which an unscrupulous statesman could always pit against one another, and disturbed by the tremendous outburst of religious feeling, which nowhere took such an impassioned