English system, or want of system, and an almost passionate desire to
turn chaos into order by the persistent use of the critical method.

When one talks about English Education, the subject naturally divides
itself into the Universities, the Public Schools, the Private Schools,
and the Elementary Schools. The classification is not scientifically
accurate, but it will serve. With all these strata of Education, he in
turn concerned himself; but with the two higher strata much less
effectively than with the two lower. It was necessary to the theoretical
completeness of his scheme for organizing National Education, that the
Universities and the Public Schools, as well as the Private and the
Elementary Schools, should be criticised; but, in dealing with the
former, his criticism is far less drastic and insistent than with the
latter. The reason of the difference probably is that, though an
Inspector, a Professor, and a critic, he was frankly human, and shrank
from laying his hand too roughly on institutions to which he himself had
owed so much.

His feeling for Oxford every one knows. The apostrophe to the "Adorable
Dreamer" is familiar to hundreds who could not, for their life, repeat
another line of his prose or verse. It was "the place he liked best in
the world." When he climbed the hill at Hinksey and looked down on
Oxford, he "could not describe the effect which this landscape always
has upon me--the hillside, with its valleys, and Oxford in the great
Thames Valley below."

Of the spiritual effect of the place upon hearts nurtured there, he
said: "We in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that
beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth--the truth that
beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human