Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/393

 on Anglo-Norman Procedure, and the collector of the Placita Anglo-Normannica. Well, and let me confess—I hope that I have not been guilty of dishonestly receiving honours meant for other people—let me confess, that it has been exceedingly pleasant to me to receive from the Academies of Germany their recognition that the labours of the Oxford school have not been thrown away. I am very proud to be the recipient of diplomas signed by Döllinger and Giesebrecht, by Curtius, Pauli, Ritschl, and Dove, and to be numbered among the members of the American Academy.

But it is time that I should go on to another point. Since 1876 we have gone through the throes of a Commission and begun the struggles of a reorganisation. There is no reason why I should either speak or be silent about the general conduct of the Commission or the probable working of its results, except in relation to our own study and to the character of Professorial work as likely to be affected by the changes that are coming or come. I could have wished that the Commission had had more sympathy with literary and historical studies, that it had shown more appreciation of the true character of Professorial teaching, that it had seen, more distinctly than the new statutes seem to show that it did see, the imprudence of arranging the duties of Professors, the number and character of their lectures, not according to the nature of the subject but according to the amount of stipend forthcoming in the several cases. It surely was not necessary to treat the idle Professor as the typical Professor; it surely might have been enough to take the best means to secure a good Professor and have left him to work, not nominally but really, in the way in which he knew he could do the most good. Surely the idle professor, the chimaera bombinans in vacuo comedens secundas intentiones, should have been caught before he was tortured. No man has a greater capacity for idleness than I have, nor a greater desire of rest; sometimes I think the love of idleness is the greatest spur to exertion: anyhow I have been made to work, even without the Visitatorial Board. But what I want to say is this: it is possible in certain subjects to carry on research and elementary