Mr. J. A. Fronde, the Professor of Modern History, de-
livered his inaugural lecture at Oxford on Wednesday. He had come back, he said, to Oxford, but no more to the Oxford which he knew. Keble and Newman were gone, and the system which produced such men was gone with them. Pro- fessor Fronde evidently regretted the old lines of the Oxford education. Perhaps he thought the modern system much too ambitions, eclectic, and vacillating in its aims ; but, of course, in an introductory lecture to his course on Modern History, he could not enter on a criticism of the various new schools and their defects. He treated Butler's view of human life as a state of probation, of the ultimate end of which we know very little, as " still the most reasonable that had yet been offered." He expressed his doubts whether a law of progress in human life could be discovered, -"and did not think the
state of the people in the Middle Ages so miserable as was often asserted. "In his reading of English history, there was once a warmer relation between high and low " than there is at the present time. He thought the healthiest condition of human society is when the wise rule the ignorant "with equal-handed authority over high and low, rich and poor." Perhaps so, if they would only rule them in the interests of the ignorant, and not in their own interest. But is not selfish caste-rule often much worse than the groping and blundering of popular rule ?
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