In Praise of Oxford

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Excerpt from In Praise of Oxford: An Anthology in Prose and VerseThe present work owes its origin to the suggestion of one of those gifted friends whose day dreams sometimes take the form of book-titles. Travelling upon the London and North-Western Railway one evening in the summer of 1904, he saw the words 'In Praise of Oxford, ' in letters of gold upon the horizon somewhere above Harrow Weald Common. For some weeks after this I devoted all my spare time to transcribing passages about Oxford that I had become familiar with in my reading. The result was a triumphant solution of the problem of writing without tears. The pieces transcribed were all charming and all well known. In a plush binding, during the first half of December, in Oxford Street, among the feminine relatives of 'Oxford men, ' they would have sold, as Jasper Milvain puts it, like hot cakes. But the well-known nerve which has stood so many of our anthologists in good stead failed me at this juncture.Thinking it desirable, in the case of so august a subject, that knowledge should be added to enthusiasm, I was happily inspired to call in the aid of my friend Harold Spencer Scott. Under his tuition I soon discovered that what I had hitherto regarded as one of the easiest achievements in the sphere of compilation was in reality one of the most difficult. I now perfectly understood - what I had always hitherto professed to regard with incredulous amazement - why Oxford had never managed to write its own history. The fact being that Oxford is not merely an exceptionally bright or vivid page from the History of England, but that in order that we may understand it, it needs the whole of that history as a commentary. The story is told of the candidate for orders, who, when asked if he had been at Oxford, replied that he thought not, but that he had been twice at Abingdon. He made the mistake of regarding Oxford as a place, nor is Oxford by any means devoid of locality. To many besides the county historians it appears as the capital of a shire. To many it is a noisy market-town, full of bright shops, to others a yeomanry centre, to others an assize town, and to not a few an annual fair.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.