Cambridge is often criticised because it is not Oxford. As well might one find fault with a lily because it is not a rose. Criticism of this kind starts with the belief that it is a worse Oxford, an inferior copy of the sister University. How false that is, and how entirely Cambridge is itself in outward appearance and in intellectual aims need not be insisted upon. It is true that Trumpington Street does not rival "the High" at Oxford, but it was not built with the object of imitating that famous academic street; and if indeed the Isis be a more noble stream than the Cam, Oxford at least has nothing to compare with the Cambridge "Backs."

"The Backs" are the peculiar glory of Cambridge, and he who has not seen them has missed much. They are the back parts of those of the colleges—Queens, King's, Clare, Trinity, and John's—whose courts and beautiful lawns extend from the main street back to the Cam, that much-abused and much idealised stream.

"The Cam," says a distinguished member of the University, with a horrid lack of enthusiasm for the surroundings of Alma Mater, "is scarcely a river at all; above the town it is a brook; below the town it is little better than a sewer." Can this, you wonder, be the same as that "Camus, reverend sire," of the poets; the stream that "went footing slow, His mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge."

That, undoubtedly, is too severe. Above the town it is a brook that will at any rate float such craft as Cambridge possesses, and has shady nooks like "Paradise" and Byron's Pool, where the canoe can be navigated and bathing of the best may be found; and now that Cambridge colleges no longer drain into the river, the stream below town does not deserve that reproach. Everything, it seems, depends upon your outlook. If you are writing academic odes, for example, like Gray's, you praise the Cam; if, like Gray again, writing on an unofficial occasion, you enlarge upon its sluggish pace and its mud. Gray, it will be observed, could be a dissembling poet. His "Installation Ode," as official in its way as the courtly lines of a Poet Laureate, pictures Cambridge delightfully, in the lines he places in the mouth of Milton—

Few lines in the whole range of our poetry are so beautiful as these.

But Gray's own private and unofficial idea of the Cam was very different. When he took the gag off his Muse and allowed her to be frank, we hear of the "rushy Camus," whose

Yet "the Backs" give a picture of mingled architecture, stately trees, emerald lawns, and placid stream not to be matched anywhere else: an ideal picture of what a poet's University should be. If, on entering the town from Trumpington Street, you turn to the left past the Leys School, down the lane called Coe Fen, you come first upon the Cam where it is divided into many little streams running and subdividing and joining together again in the oozy pasture of Sheep's Green, and then to a water-mill. Beyond that mill begin "the Backs," with Queens' College, whose ancient walls of red brick, like some building of romance, rise sheer from the water. From them springs a curious "mathematical" wooden bridge, spanning the river and leading from the college to the shady walks on the opposite side.

With so dreamy and beautiful a setting, it is not surprising that Cambridge, although the education she gave was long confined largely to the unimaginative science or art of mathematics, has been especially productive of poets. Dryden was an alumnus of Trinity; Milton sucked wisdom at Christ's; Wordsworth, of John's, wrote acres of verse as flat as the Cambridgeshire meads, and much more arid; Byron drank deep and roystered at King's; and Tennyson was a graduate of Trinity. Other poets owning allegiance to Cambridge are that sweet Elizabethan songster, Robert Herrick, Marlowe, Waller, Cowley, Prior, Coleridge, and Praed. Poetry, in short, is in the moist relaxing air of Cambridge, and in those

Cambridge would stand condemned were poets its only product. Fortunately, as some proof of the practical value of an University education, it can point to men like Cromwell, Pitt, and Macaulay, whose strenuous lives have in their several ways left a mark on the nation's history. Though one be not a champion of Cromwell's career, yet his savagery, his duplicity, his canting hypocrisy fade into the background and lose their significance beside the firmness of purpose, the iron determination and the wise policy that made England respected and feared abroad under the rule of the Protector. The beheading of a King weighs little in the scale against the upholding of the dignity of the State; and though a sour Puritanism ruled the land under the great Oliver, at least the guns of a foreign foe were never heard in our estuaries under the Commonwealth, as they were heard after the Restoration. Cambridge gives no sign that she is proud of Oliver, neither does Sidney Sussex, his old college. But if Cambridge be not outwardly proud of Old Noll, she abundantly glories in William Pitt. And rightly, too. None may calculate how the equation stands: how greatly his natural parts or to what extent his seven years of University education contributed to his brilliant career; but for one of her sons to have attained the dignity of Chancellor of the Exchequer at twenty-three years of age, to have been Prime Minister at twenty-five, the political dictator of Europe and the saviour of his country, is a triumph beyond anything they can show on the Isis. The Pitt Press, the Pitt Scholarship, the Pitt Club, all echo the fame of his astonishing genius.