two readers can hardly find room for sitting back to back.  The atmosphere is unpleasant and these mean little cribs, often unduly crowded, are so dark that after the 1st October the reading-room must be closed at 3 p.m.  What a contrast are the treasures in the Bodleian with their mean and miserable surroundings and the way in which the public is allowed to enjoy them.  The whole establishment calls urgently for reform.  Accommodation for the books is wanted; floor and walls will hardly bear the weight which grows every year at an alarming ratio—­witness the Novel-room.  The model Bodleian would be a building detached and isolated, the better to guard its priceless contents, and containing at least double the area of the present old and obsolete Bibliotheca.  An establishment of the kind was proposed in 1857; but unfortunately, the united wisdom of the University preferred new “Examination Schools” for which the old half-ruinous pile would have been sufficiently well fitted.  The “Schools,” however, were for the benefit of the examiners; ergo the scandalous sum of œ100,000 (some double the amount) was wasted upon the well-nigh useless Gothic humbug in High Street, and thus no money was left for the prime want of the city.  After some experience of public libraries and reading-rooms on the Continent of Europe I feel justified in asserting that the Bodleian in its present condition is a disgrace to Oxford; indeed a dishonour to letters in England.

The Bodleian has a succursale, the Radcliffe, which represents simply a step from bad to worse.  The building was intended for an especial purpose, the storage of books, not for a salle de lecture.  Hence the so-called “Camera” is a most odious institution, a Purgatory to readers.  It is damp in the wet season from October to May; stuffy during the summer heats and a cave of Eolus in windy weather:  few students except the youngest and strongest, can support its changeable and nerve-depressing atmosphere.  Consequently the Camera is frequented mainly by the townsfolk, a motley crew who there study their novels and almanacs and shamefully misuse the books.[FN#425] In this building lights, forbidden by the Bodleian, are allowed; it opens at 10 a.m. and closes at 10 p.m.. and the sooner it reverts to its original office of a book-depot the better.

But the Bodleian-Radcliffe concern is typical of the town and, if that call for reform, so emphatically does

          “Oxford, that scarce deserves the name of land.”

From my childhood I had heard endless tirades and much of what is now called “blowing” about this ancient city, and my youth (1840-42) suffered not a little disappointment.  The old place, still mostly resembling an overgrown monastery-village, lies in the valley of the Upper Thames, a meadowland drained by two ditches; the bigger or Ise, classically called the Isis, and the lesser the Charwell.  This bottom is surrounded by high and healthy uplands, not as