greatest of these was the preference given to laymen over
clergymen as heads of colleges. An example of this was the
president of Magdalen. I had met him not many years before in
Switzerland, as a young man, and now he had become the head of
this great college, one of the foremost in the university. This
impressed me all the more because my memory suggested a
comparison between him and the president at my first visit,
thirty years before: Warren, the present president, being an
active-minded layman hardly over thirty, and his predecessor,
Routh, a doctor of divinity, who was then in his hundredth year.
It was curious to see that, while this change had been made to
lay control, various relics of clerical dominance were still in
evidence, and, among these, the surplice worn by Bryce, a member
of Parliament, when he read the lessons from the lectern in Oriel
chapel. At another dinner I was struck by a remark of his, that
our problems in America seemed to him simple and easy compared
with those of England; but as I revise these recollections,
twenty years later, and think of the questions presented by our
acquisitions in the West Indies and in the Philippine and
Hawaiian islands, as well as the negro problem in the South and
Bryanism in the North, to say nothing of the development of the
Monroe Doctrine and the growth of socialistic theories, the query
comes into my mind as to what he would think to-day.


November 9, 1885.

Dining at All Souls with Professor Dicey, I met Professor
Gardiner, the historian, whom I greatly liked; his lecture on
"Ideas in English History," which I had heard in the afternoon,