All the world and his wife seem to be agreed that there is something in the English system of education which can work miracles. Boys from all over the world come to England, to school and university, to be trained. And further, the English tutor and the English governess are to be found sprinkled over the globe, teaching some of the young of all nations. There is a recent fashion for German training, "because it is so thorough," and the English system of training (which can certainly fail in a very large proportion of cases to show creditable results when tested by examination paper) comes in for some merciless criticism in its own home country. Nevertheless, it still holds its reputation as the best of systems to make "character."

What exactly character signifies in this connection it would be hard to define in a phrase. But it is that something which makes the young pink English boy fresh from home step, as if by nature born to the job, into the work of administering things, governing inferiors amiably, obeying superiors cheerfully, and keeping up a high tradition of fair play and tolerance. It is that something which made a cute American, after planning out, in theory, the administrative staff of a gigantic enterprise, with experts of all nations in this and that department, to add, "Then I would have an Englishman to run the whole lot of them."

It is an education which trains the character and exercises the mind rather than one which informs—the typical English education. It can turn out, and does turn out, shoals of careless youngsters who know little or nothing of science, mathematics, philosophy, of "the humanities" even, but who give always the impression of having been "well brought up," who have a wise way of doing practical things, and who somehow or other manage to play no mean part in the governance of the world. Observing them, many a foreign parent resolves that his children shall be trained in the same way. But often he is disappointed. The system is English, and it suits the English mind. Not always is it successful with the foreigner.

All over England are spread the institutions—preparatory schools, public schools, and universities—which are given over to the making of character, and incidentally to the teaching of a few facts. In the ordinary course a boy goes to a preparatory school with a career already mapped out for him, the Navy, the Army, or the Church, or one of the learned professions. If he is destined for the Navy he has to specialise at a very early age; if for the Army, he betakes himself to a military college at a later time; if for the Church or the Bar, or the public service, he passes through the full course of preparatory school, public school, and university.

A great educational institution in England will be found, almost invariably, built in a valley or on a marsh. Perhaps this sort of low living is thought to be conducive to high thinking. A more likely explanation is that most of the great educational institutions are ancient, and in the time of their building any great concourse of people had to settle close to the banks of a stream. The situation of the schools and universities has had its influence on the course of English education. Oxford and Cambridge, brooding in their low basins, alternately chill and steamy, are ideal places to dream in, and much more suitable for the encouragement of ethical arguments than of the inclination to "hustle." What will happen to the English character when a university comes to be founded on top of a Yorkshire hill I refuse to speculate; the prospect is too remote. But there are indications of the possible course of events in the results of the Scottish universities.

The various schools and universities of England contribute largely to its list of historic and beautiful buildings. The first great educational centre was York. In Roman times York was a fine city. With the coming of the Saxons it reasserted its importance, and became the chief collegiate town of the kingdom. In the seventh and eighth centuries the chief of England's learned men hailed from Northumbria. It was in 657 a.d. that the School of York was founded by CÆdmon, first of English poets, and with the York of the early days are linked the names of the venerable Bede, "father of English learning," John of Beverley, and Wilfrid of York; also of Alcuin, a great doctor of theology, who was one of the first to hold that "chair" at Cambridge. But York suffered many vicissitudes. Wars interfered with the pursuits of the scholars. At the dawn of the twelfth century Henry I. endeavoured to restore the prosperity of the city and its colleges, with some success.

Meanwhile to the south-east, among the marshes and fens of East Anglia, scholarship had found a fitting place to dream and study. Great monastic houses at Ely and Peterborough—some of the most important in England—were the forerunners of Cambridge University. The earliest community at Cambridge was founded by Dame Hugolina in 1092, in gratitude for her recovery from a serious sickness. Cambridge has never forgotten that feminine foundation, and whilst Oxford was cold to the higher education of women movement, the other university gave the girl graduate a welcome, and pupils of two great Cambridge colleges, the "Girton Girl" and the "Newnham Girl," carried Cambridge culture wherever the English tongue was spoken.

Dame Hugolina's little foundation of six canons soon extended, until the house held thirty. In 1135 another canons' house was established, which served not only as a retreat for scholars, but as a hospital and travellers' hospice. The third foundation came in the next century, and now Cambridge University began to take definite shape. A church of the Franciscan Friars was used first for university purposes. The older and more learned friars were the professors, the novices and younger friars the undergraduates. Later, the Franciscans were succeeded by the Dominicans, and still later by the Austin Friars in the control of the nascent University. Then there began a movement to make the University independent of any monastic order, and during the fourteenth century the contest was as bitter as one could wish for. Early in the fifteenth century the University had won ground to the extent that it could act in defiance of the Bishop of Ely, and could, moreover, secure a Papal Bull in its favour.

Simultaneously with this movement of the University towards independence of the monks, there had been the inevitable contests of all university towns between "gown's-men" and "town's-men." Cambridge had never been a city of any great commercial importance. But it had its "unlearned population" engaged in connection with the fisheries, farming, and the pastoral industry. Near by, the great Stourbridge Fair—one of the most important in England—brought every year a great concourse of people with little sympathy to spare for the University students, who, in turn, despised them (or affected to) right heartily, though probably among the younger students there was a lurking sympathy for the jollity of the fairs, a good impression of which one may get from a quaint old ballad of 1762:—

It is on record that Edward I. in 1254 (whilst still Prince of Wales) visited the town of Cambridge, and acted as arbitrator in quarrels between the townsmen and the students. He decided that thirteen scholars and thirteen burgesses of the town should be chosen to represent both interests on a Board of Control. His son, Edward II., continued his father's interest in Cambridge, and maintained, at his own expense, a group of scholars there. In 1257 Hugh de Balsham, the tenth bishop of the diocese, placed and endowed at St. John's Hospital a group of secular students known as "Ely students." At this time also Walter de Merton, Chancellor of England, assigned his manor of Malden, Surrey, as endowment for "poor scholars in the schools of Cambridge, who were to live according to his directions." In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in this as at other universities, scholars lived each at his own charge. Sometimes three or four clubbed together, but each had his own "founder and benefactor." Some scholars elected their own principal, and paid a fixed rate for board and lodging, and this hostel system developed into the collegiate system which distinguishes English universities from all others. Now Cambridge has seventeen of these colleges.

Among the architectural features of special interest at Cambridge is a chapel built by Matthew Wren, the uncle of Sir Christopher Wren. It is a fine specimen of seventeenth-century work. The various college buildings date from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. The dates are: Michaelhouse 1324, Clare 1338, Peterhouse 1284, King's Hall 1337, Pembroke 1347, Gonville Hall 1348, Trinity Hall 1356, Corpus Christi 1382, King's College 1441, Queens' 1448, St. Catharine's 1473, Jesus 1495, Christ's 1505, St. John's 1509, Magdalene 1542, Trinity 1546, Caius 1557, Emmanuel 1584, Sidney Sussex 1595. Modern colleges are Downing College, Girton College, and Newnham College. Girton College occupies Girton Manor on the Huntingdon Road, an eleventh-century house built by Picot the Norman Sheriff of Cambridge. Earlier it had been the site of a Roman and Anglo-Saxon burial-ground. The college was founded by Madame Bodichon and Miss Emily Davies. Newnham College began in a hired house with five students in 1871. Miss Anne J. Clough was the founder. The present Newnham Hall is composed of several buildings acquired since.

For the historical student a brief roll of some of Cambridge's great men would include: Green, Lyly, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Nash, Fletcher, Sterne, Thackeray, Bacon, Milton, Dryden, Cranmer, the two great Cecils, Walsingham, Cromwell, Walpole, Chesterfield, Pitt, Wilberforce, Castlereagh, Palmerston, Herrick, Hutchinson, Marvell, Jeremy Taylor, Ascham, Erasmus, Spenser, Wren, Hook, Evelyn, More, Newton, and Darwin.

Meanwhile Oxford waits us, with no impatience, secure in her calm sense of dignity. There is a story of an Irishman with a great idea of his own dignity. But he was careless, he professed, as to the place at table assigned to him. "Wherever I am seated," he said, "that is the head of the table." Oxford is sometimes credited with having a feeling of rivalry for Cambridge. A mimic war of wits has been waged over the fancied rivalry, of which one epigram that sticks in my memory is, that "Cambridge breeds philosophers and Oxford burns them" (I have not the exact words, perhaps, but that is the sentiment). In truth, though, Oxford has no sense of rivalry. She knows herself to be peerless, incomparable, the centre of the educational aspiration, not only of England but of the world. In her atmosphere of drowsy ritual she broods serene as Buddha. And she does not burn philosophers nowadays, however heretical may seem to be their ideas. Indeed the Oxford of to-day shelters beneath its imperturbable calm, behind its moss-grown walls, all the "latest fashions" in beliefs.

As to the first beginnings of Oxford—the town not the University has just been celebrating its millenary—Anthony À Wood records this tale of its first origin: "When Fredeswyde had bin soe long absent from hence, she came to Binsey (triumphing with her virginity) into the city mounted on a milk-white ox betokening Innocency, and as she rode along the streets she would forsooth be still speaking to her ox, 'Ox, forth'—or (as it is related) 'bos perge,' that is 'Ox, goe on,' or 'Ox, go forth'—and hence they indiscreetly say that our city was from thence called Oxforth or Oxford." It is fairly certain that Didau and the daughter Fredeswide established a nunnery and built a church there in the eighth century. The town was rebuilt by Ethelred in the eleventh century.

Before the Norman Conquest Oxford was a notable city, often visited by the reigning kings, sometimes the meeting-place of Parliaments. This prominence brought with it many troubles. It was often sacked and in part burned. These incidents despite, it grew to be a prosperous medieval walled city. A Benedictine scholastic house on the site of Worcester College was the beginning of the University.

Early in the thirteenth century William of Durham, with a company of others, shook from off their English shoes the dust of Paris University after a "town and gown row" there, and settled at Oxford, and then the University began to take shape. He gave money to the University to found a "Hall" for students. Many other halls were founded (half of the Oxford Inns are, or were, perversion of old "Halls"). William of Wykeham gave a code of rubrics which became a legacy to the whole University. He built a college for the exclusive use of scholars of the foundation. He built also bell-tower, cloisters, kitchen, brewery, and bakehouse for "New" College. New College was the first home for scholars at Oxford. Lincoln College was next founded, after that All Souls, then Magdalen. Duke Humphrey of Gloucester gave the nucleus of the famous Bodleian library to the Benedictine monks. Christ Church was built with the revenues of a suppressed monastery.

So every step in English history for ten centuries can be remembered by the stones of Oxford. That fine library building of All Souls, which holds as one of its treasures Wren's original plans for St. Paul's Cathedral, was built out of sugar money from the West Indies, being the gift of a great sugar planter in the early days of the making of the Empire.

During the wars of Cavaliers and Roundheads Oxford suffered some shrewd blows. It was for the King always, and after the Restoration the Court recognised its loyalty. Charles II. with his Queen—and eke another lady or so as a rule—was often a visitor, and spent a great part of the Plague Year there, though "the Merry Monarch" showed no want of pluck or loyalty to his sore-stricken people during that time, and did not abandon London altogether. But all who could got out of London for a while to escape the horrors of which Pepys has given so clear a record in his diary and letters, as in the following to Lady Carteret:—

Pepys himself had taken refuge then at Greenwich. All had left who could, even to dour old John Milton, whose plague retreat at Chalfont St. Giles (Bucks) is now preserved as an historical relic, and usually holds the attention of the rushing tourist, who is "doing" England within a month, for quite seven minutes. That is really space for a matured consideration to the tourist mind.

"The motor has slowed down from seventy miles an hour to fifty miles an hour. We are passing a point of great historic interest." That is sight-seeing in Europe for the American tourist according to one of their own humorists. I have had many opportunities to observe the truth on which that sarcasm is based. Take Milton's Cottage for an instance. I had walked there from Chorley Wood one spring afternoon, and was enjoying idly the blooms in the little garden, when a motor rushed up, disgorged a party of hurried tourists, of which the man member had a guide-book. "Is this Milton's Cottage?" It was: so they entered. "Is this really Milton's chair? Sure?" It was. So they all sat on it solemnly in turn. Within five minutes their chariot of petrol had wrapped them up again, and they were rushing over the face of England to see some shrine of the Pilgrim Fathers.

But we have rambled from Oxford, which is, by the way, much cursed of the rushing tourist, who has a plan for "doing" it in an hour, and gallops from the Bodleian to Shelley's Tomb, and Addison's Walk, the Old Wall, the Tower of St. Michael's, and is away in a cloud of dust, without having gained the barest hint of the subtle persuasive charm of Oxford; without a thought of seeing St. Mary's Tower afloat in the moonlight; of hearing the choir of Magdalen; of drowsing an afternoon under the elms; or of seeking, with all due reverence and modesty, to gain an entrance to some of those august companies of Oxford—of undergraduates dreaming their exalted young dreams, of dons musing their deep thoughts.

I own to it that I feel it difficult to write of Oxford, though, alas! I am able to write with facility of many places visited and things experienced. There is something of rebuke towards quick generalisations and easy judgments in the atmosphere of the place. I have been to Oxford many times. My very first dinner in England was with the Fellows of All Souls, a feast of solemn yet cheerful splendour in four rooms, one for the dinner itself, yet another for dessert, another for coffee, and finally, another for tobacco. Another time I was at Oxford to lecture to a gathering of dons and undergraduates on social problems in Australia; yet another time to prove that the young athletes of the University were conquerable at epÉe fencing. But never have I got over a first awe of the place. To attempt to probe to its soul seems an impertinence. Oxford has an atmosphere of the Round Table.

Rather than attempt to give my own impressions, I prefer to quote others, and to state facts. That Herodotus of social life, Pepys, found Oxford "a very sweet place," spent two shillings and sixpence on a barber in its honour, and gave ten shillings "to him that showed us All Souls College and Chickley's picture." He concludes, "Oxford a mighty fine place.... Cheap entertainment." Pepys was not troubled evidently by any awe of the place. There is, by the way, astonishingly little in the poetic literature of England about Oxford, seeing that so many poets have lived and studied there.

The University of Oxford, for all its devotion to the King, would not follow James II. on the path towards Rome. When on his accession he was welcomed to Oxford, "the fountains ran claret for the vulgar." But when he tried to force his Roman Catholic nominee into the presidentship of Magdalen, he could not even get a blacksmith to force a door for him. Oxford was for the Church and the Throne, but for the Church first. Nowadays Oxford is very much interested in social problems. It is Conservative still, but many of its young men have a flavour of socialism, generally of a "non-revolutionary" and Christian type.

Material life at Oxford is exceedingly pleasant, not to say luxurious. The undergraduates "do themselves" very well. Kitchen and buttery maintain agreeably historic reputations, and the old college buildings have been modernised to the extent of admitting electric light and sanitary plumbing. But bath-rooms are rare: the good old English "tub" which a servant makes ready in the morning with a ewer of water is still a feature of the college bedroom.

It is the social life and the college system, with its fine mixture of independence and wardship, which make Oxford sought for as a school for "character." But one may also gain much learning there if one wishes. Still it is hardly essential. You may emerge from Oxford with a degree, but with astonishingly little knowledge. To the "Babu" type of mind in particular—that easily memorising, non-comprehending type of mind—a degree at Oxford is particularly easy of attainment. (The University, by the way, attracts very many coloured students, from India, from Africa, and from other parts of the world.) The man, too, of real intelligence who is willing to seek a degree in the manner of the Babu can easily fritter away the most of his student hours at Oxford, and win through his examinations by cramming at the last moment.

Since Oxford is so typical of the best of English life, it is fitting that it should be a place of very sweet and dignified gardens. There is the grandeur of elegant simplicity about Oxford gardens; and the Oxford trees—beeches, elms, limes, oaks—are surely the finest in all the world. Oxford history is curiously linked with trees. William of Waynflete commanded that Magdalen be built against an oak that fell a hundred years before, aged six hundred years. Sir Thomas Whiteway "learned in a dream" to build a college where there was a "triple elm tree," and that fixed the site of St. Thomas. To-day the green of the Spring in the precincts of Trinity and Magdalen is a green which speaks of all peace and wise comprehension.

So much space has been given to Oxford and Cambridge, where young England receives the crowning garlands of the academies, that I can do no more than briefly mention the great public schools: Eton, under the shadow of the King's castle at Windsor; Harrow, on a hill a little apart from London; Winchester, nestling in the valley where, if tradition can be trusted, King Arthur once held a court; Rugby, in the Midlands, enjoying a sturdier climate and giving to the world that very manly exercise, Rugby football. These and others might each have a book to themselves with justice. But in this volume we must move on to see something of adult England.