Page:Seventeen lectures on the study of medieval and modern history and kindred subjects.djvu/46

 examinations remains what it is. There is no risk of the History Lecturers ever forming a clique, or close school of History, as a single glance at the list of them is sufficient to prove. But in the second place, the multiplication and association of lecturers enables us to offer a systematic and continuous reading of History to the student. Each lecturer will, as time advances, find out his own strongest period, or his friends will find it for him; and then the student, who chooses to give his time to the work, will be able to obtain a thorough guidance through the several stages of his subject; and the historical training will be both continuous and complete. And, in the third place, the opportunity of reading continuously, under a series of able teachers of different tones of mind and different schools of thought, will most certainly be a great advantage to the student who wishes to take History as a real part of his mental training. I hope and trust that this will always be the case; and that, although we may be earnest and glad to work together, we may never be in danger of thinking all alike, on those topics at least upon which constitutional opinion and controversial criticism must be content to permit difference of view. In this aspect the training for the School of History may become a beneficial training for public life; and although that is not the sole or the primary object in my eyes of the study of History here, it is a most important one; we must try to furnish men who will not be merely good historians, but good citizens, or, as I said before, good Whigs and good Tories. And there is another point in which great advantage may be hoped from the increase and combination of teachers, which I can only just indicate now—I mean the connexion which is to be looked forward to between the University course and the teaching of our great schools and local institutions of education.

Next to the strengthening of the historical staff, the separation of the School of Jurisprudence from the School of History is the most important point of our Oxford history. And this change, although it was anxiously desired by many teachers of both subjects, was not adopted without some serious apprehensions. Whether the joint School, so young