a very beautiful place, yet there are many
towns which have become scarcely less beautiful.«
    Said I: »In passing, may I ask if it is still a place of learning?«
    »Still?« said he, smiling. »Well, it has reverted to some of its best
traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its nineteenth-century
position. It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake - the Art
of Knowledge, in short - which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of
the past. Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford
and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial. They
(and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of
parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical
enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they
affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing
and worldly-wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working
classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a
mediæval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no
means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, the bores of society.
They were laughed at, despised - and paid. Which last was what they aimed at.«
    Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgments.
Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that. But I must admit that they
were mostly prigs, and that they were commercial. I said aloud, though more to
myself than to Hammond, »Well, how could they be better than the age that made
them?«
    »True,« he said, »but their pretensions were higher.«
    »Were they?« said I, smiling.
    »You drive me from corner to corner,« said he, smiling in turn. »Let me say
at least that they were a poor sequence to the aspirations of Oxford of the
barbarous Middle Ages.«
    »Yes, that will do,« said I.
    »Also,« said Hammond, »what I have been saying of them is true in the main.
But ask on!«
    I said: »We have heard about London and the manufacturing districts and the
ordinary towns: how about the villages?«
    Said Hammond: »You must know that toward the end of the nineteenth century
the villages were almost destroyed, unless where they became mere adjuncts to
the manufacturing districts