The Queen ' s College IT is particularly important at the present
time that we should look back over the history of our educational institutions. The rapid changes and the spectacular expansions of our own time are lesi likely to bewilder us if we can relate them to a long record of adjust- ment to new social needs. We can only judge which elements in our educational tradition are worth struggling to preserve, and which can be sacrificed without loss, if we have a long perspective to guide us. Unfortunately the number of really satisfactory histories of schools and colleges is small. Too often the authors have no quali- fications but a pious industry ; their over-detailed pages omit nothing but the relationships between their subject and the social background which shaped it, which alone could give their researches any great significance. It is all the more satisfying to read a college history ai admirable as Mr. Hodgkin's. That he should have been successful is not surprising in view of his reputation as an historian, but it i, particularly pleasing that he has kept the proportions of his book so just that it should be read, not only by members of his college and his university, but by a much wider audience interested in a particularly interesting aspect of social history. The Queen's College was founded just over six centuries ago and was the sixth of the Oxford colleges. Its record has, perhaps not been spectacular. It has had its great names ; Wyclif, Addison, Bentham (who, like so many great men, was far too ungenerous in his recollections of his education), Temple and many more have been members of its society. But on the whole it has not been chosen for the sons of the great ; its social affiliations have been middle rather than upper class, and its products have been able rather than brilliant, respectable rather than obviously influential. Mr. Hodgkin has made what might have been a pedestrian record into a fascinating one by relating it at every stage to the problem, facing the university itself and, further, to the general background of society and culture. We see the mediaeval hall become, by a revolutionary change in the fifteenth century, a college with teaching fellows and paying commoners, a change confirmed and consolidated in the troubled years of the sixteenth century. It is a remarkable chapter in English education, and much can be learned from it Though Mr. Hodgkin is modest about the light which he is able to throw upon this very obscure change, he has in fact a number of illuminating passages bearing upon it. A period of prosperity in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries resulted in a vast building programme, and a number of the many excellent illustrations arc naturally devoted to its results. But there followed the decline that reduced almost the whole of English higher education to sterility and torpor. It would be interesting to know how the eighteenth century was able to build such remarkable standards of taste, of scholarship and of creative achievement upon such insecure educational foundations. It IS possible that Mr. Hodgkin underestimates the influence which the decay of the schools had upon the universities, a decay that arose in large measure from a curriculum resolutely impervious to change. He describes well the part which Queen's played in the age which followed of conscious educational enquiry and activity by the State, and the immense improvements that resulted, particularly in the standards of tutorial work. Of the modern tutorial system at its best (in T. H. Grose) Mr. Hodgkin writes: "He did not dedicate himself to education like the Jesuits in order to carry on propaganda for a Church. His care was to guide his pupils through the diffi- culties of early manhood, to help them to form their tastes in art and literature, to make them think and see that there were questions in philosophy worth asking and worth answering." Here, one feels, is the secret of the influence of our great schools and universities. - However dimly their lights may burn from time to time, their enduring tradition is one of great personal teaching. If that tradition could be spread and consolidated there would be fewer fears of a 'crisis in the universities" or in our education as a whole. It is because Mr. Hodgkin makes this plain that many others will be grateful to him besides those of us who owe much to the Queen's
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