wooden houses, and connected them with corridors and passages
until all together formed a sort of labyrinth; the only clue
being in the names of the corridors, all being chosen from
Shakspere, and each being enriched with Shaksperian quotations
appropriate and pithy. At his table during our stay we met
various interesting guests, one of whom suggested the idea
regarding the secret of Carlyle's cynicism and pessimism to which
reference is made in my "Warfare of Science." Next came visits to
various country houses, all delightful, and then a stay at
Oxford, to which I was reinitiated by James Bryce; and for two
weeks it was a round of interesting visits, breakfasts,
luncheons, and dinners with the men best worth knowing at the
various colleges. Interesting was a visit to All Souls College,
which, having been founded as a place where sundry "clerks"
should pray for the souls of those killed at the battle of Crecy,
had, as Sir William Anson, its present head, showed me, begun at
last doing good work after four hundred years of uselessness. In
the chapel was shown me the restored reredos, which was of great
size, extending from floor to ceiling, taking the place of the
chancel window usual in churches, and made up of niches filled
with statues of saints. As the heads of all the earlier statues
had been knocked off during the fanatical period, there had been
substituted, during the recent restoration, new statues of saints
bearing the heads of noted scholars and others connected with the
college, among which Max Muller once pointed out to me his own,
and a very good likeness it was. Interesting to me were Bryce's
rooms at Oriel, for they were those in which John Henry Newman
had lived: at that hearth was warmed into life the Oxford
Movement. At one of the Oriel dinners, Bryce spoke of the changes
at Oxford within his memory as enormous, saying that perhaps the