In the Oxford Congregation on Tuesday, the Statute for the
abolition of the Professorship of Poetry, and the establishment of a new chair of English Literature and Poetry, to which Merton College undertook to contribute, was rejected by 94 votes against 25. The general feeling appeared to be that this chair, as it now exists, affords an opening for eminent men who have something to say, and enables them to address the University, and that the stimulus thus afforded to University studies is of the greatest possible advantage. It would be undesirable, in the opinion of the majority, to found what would be a new tutorship on the ruins of a famous professorship to which such men as Kahle and Matthew Arnold had lent dis- tinction. We sympathise with this objection. Certainly Matthew Arnold could never have delivered the admirable lectures on " Translating Homer," on " Celtic Literature," and on "Heine " in Oxford, but for the existence of a professorship that made no alarming demands on the time of a busy Inspector of Schools. And that these lectures were a great stimulus to the University, no one can seriously doubt.
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