Page:Studies of a Biographer 3.djvu/171

 Corn Laws to the question whether 'A is A' can be properly called a 'law of thought.' Oxford, on the contrary, according to Bagehot, was recommended by authorities as a place where 'the appetite for knowledge was repressed,' a sleepy hollow in which the Thirty-nine Articles were taken to represent ultimate logical categories. An orthodox University, of course, looked stupid enough in Gower Street, the natural home of heterodoxy. Oxford men were deeply agitated by what they innocently took to be thought, but to Bagehot, in spite of certain faint proclivities towards Catholicism, their speculations appeared to be futile danglings after extinct phantasms. Oxford, indeed, provided him with one most congenial friend in Arthur Clough. But Clough represented the revolt against the Oxford of Newman developing into a mellow, all-round cynicism. The true cynic should perceive that neither side has a monopoly of humbug. Bagehot's views of many things might be expressed, as Hutton remarks, in Clough's lines—

which some people, with Emerson, translate as really meaning that 'Nothing is either true or