Considerable amusement has been caused by the letter addressed by
an "American Mother" to the Times on the subject of undergraduates' rooms at Oxford. A casual visit in the vacation revealed such squalor that the American mother is seriously thinking of abandoning her scheme of sending her son—now a. student at Harvard—to complete his education at Oxford. To change the chaste and spotless up- holstery, the "soft-toned rugs," and "fresh yet inexpensive papers" of Harvard for the grimy furniture of Oxford would be too cruel an ordeal for any American mother to inflict on a sensitive son. A College Bursar has written good- humouredly on the danger of generalising from individual cases, and we may perhaps be allowed to remind the American mother that-
" Clean paint cannot a scholar make, Nor soft-toned rugs' a sage."
If the protest be genuine—which we are almost inclined to doubt—it shows that the truth is probably to be found between the extremes of Radical criticism which denounces Oxford and Cambridge as the nurseries of luxury and ex- travagance and the sumptuary strictures of the American matron.
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