(3) "The Universities—Letter I," Inquirer, March
25, 1854, pp. 187-188.
In this letter the humour which seems to me to have a Bagehotian
flavour occurs in the following passages on the first page. The
Inquirer's correspondent writes: "It is a great advantage to be
commonplace in your remarks (people say they are so just) . . ." Next,
after announcing that he will discuss the driest topic connected with
universities, the constitution of their governments, the writer says, "I cannot
help the subject being tedious, though Lord John might reflect before he
took the public into such places . . ." Somewhat maliciously the writer
remarks in an aside, "I suppose stupidity is of no consequence in an
infallible Pope . . ." A little later, after objecting that the Heads of Houses
would be, in the Oxford of 1854, the worst persons to rule the university,
he makes this concession: "In one respect . . . I maintain they excel all
potentates—I mean that of personal grandeur. It has been said that they
are too august. But this is only by captious and critical
persons. Right feeling men, who have been permitted to see a grave head
placidly doing nothing, will admit at once that they have observed the
grandest and most imposing of human beings."
Of the passages in the letter for which parallels may be found in the
essay, the following seems to show Bagehot clarifying and making more
explicit what he had written earlier:
I believe the best rulers of the University are those who, having
themselves been educated at it, having thoroughly profited by it, being
examples of its very best effects, have yet in addition to all this, left the
University, gone out into the world, and there learned which part of their
education has been useful, and which not; in what they have been inferior
to their competitors formed in other schools and from different methods of
instruction; what their daily experience convinces them might be added to
an old system, what rejected; which part of the new theories of the day is
mischievous error, and which beneficial and practical truth.
This appears to be an expansion upon the following passage in "Oxford" (p.
386):
The best and most natural administrative and presiding government
of a corporate body professing to promote the pursuits of education is, we
suppose, an aristocracy of the persons educated there—a select body, in
a great degree, at least, composed of those who have had a practical
experience of the benefits and evils of that institution itself, and who have
shown during the period of their education—or otherwise in
after-life—that they were competent to appreciate the one and counteract
the other.
Of parallel passages, however, the most striking is a quotation from
Bagehot's favourite novelist. The
Inquirer correspondent
writes, "You remember Sir Walter Scott used to aver 'there never was a
Dominie who was not weak'." In the Oxford essay Bagehot wrote (p. 366):
"'I never,' said Sir Walter Scott, 'knew a Dominie that was not
weak'."
