Page:Inaugural lecture on The Study of History.djvu/23

 best part of their lives in the happy condition of th6 literary historian who works untrammelled by terms that have to be kept, essays that have to be heard, and lectures that have to be delivered in formal and regular sequence. Our last Regius professor but one, as all who knew him and loved him will confess, was not an ordinary college tutor though he held a tutorial post Our present Regius professor, to whose inaugural lecture we listened with such interest only last year, shared with Freeman and Froude the privilege of working when and how he pleased, save for the short time during which he took the history work of a college where history men were few and far between. All of the five whom I have named, in short, represented the class of the researcher rather than that of the professional University teacher. Some of them almost gloried in the fact that they knew nothing of, and cared little for, the way in which the average man here was receiving his education. I heard with my own ears Professor Freeman make the astounding statement that 'in the art of preparing—I will not use the ugly word cramming—an undergraduate for his class, the last bachelor who has just won his own class is necessarily more skilful than I'. At that moment (1884) I was myself that 'last bachelor', and as such could best fathom the strange misconception of our system which such a statement presupposed. Froude's Inaugural, though it spoke of Oxford history in vaguely laudatory terms, implied an almost equally complete misunderstanding of what the work of the History School really was. He advocated, as a happy suggestion, the use of plenty of early constitutional documents as a base for the study of English History—in apparent ignorance of the fact that Stubbs's Charters was already a sort of