Guided by wise and
discerning counsels, it has made rapid and substantial advance. The
scope of its studies has been greatly enlarged, the standard of its
requirements raised. Its traditionary adherence to old methods and its
bigoted conservatism have been overcome, and with happy pliancy it has
yielded to the demands of the times and adapted itself to the new
desires and growing needs of men. Its aristocratic prejudices have not
been allowed longer to confine its privileges and its operations to one
class alone of the community,--and in identifying itself with the
system of middle-class education, Oxford has won new claims to
gratitude and to respect, and now exercises a wider and more confirmed
authority over the thought of England than ever before. To us, who take
pride in her ancient fame, who honor her long and memorable services in
the cause of good learning, who cherish the memory of the great and
good men, the masters of modern thought, whom she has nurtured, who
recall the names of our own forefathers who came out from her and from
her sister University with will and power to lay the foundations of our
state, and whom, by her discipline, in the midst of all the refinement
of hooks and the quietness of study, she had prepared to meet and to
overcome the hardships of exile, poverty, and labor, in the cause of
truth and freedom,--to us it may well be matter of rejoicing to witness
the freshness of her spirit and the spring of her perennial youth,--to
see her
"so famous,
So excellent in art, and still so rising.
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