as being a convenient distance from the metropolis, fairly central for the rest of England, and possessing a gravelly and sandy soil, a good river, and other advantages. Here, accordingly, was built a vast college, the nucleus of a future group destined to eclipse both Oxford and Cambridge in its influence on English society, destined to be the nursery of a new order, the order of women free at last, and lacking only the training to enter upon their inheritance and rule the world, rule it no longer indirectly by the fawning and cajolery and chicanery which are the instruments of an enslaved race, but directly and openly in their own right and—if need should ever arise—by those resources which Science was yearly more and more transferring from the, as yet, bigger frames of half-civilised men to those most intelligent in her ways.
A staff of thoroughly qualified teachers was drawn from the most cultivated grades of society, particular stress being laid on their personal character and circumstances; all the male professors being required to be married men living with their wives, in order that no favouritism, or suspicion of it, might interfere with their relations to the students. The girls who were to form the Foundation College of the university were selected exclusively from the well-born in straitened circumstances, and this not from any sentiments which might be described as snobbish, but in order that a tone of refined simplicity might be taken by the institution at its start; that the first impression made on the towns-people of Ousebridge by the novel experiment might be a favourable one; and that the new ideas and fashions might penetrate outer society with the greater force.
The Foundation College was to be free; the other colleges which in course of time would cluster round it, would bear their own expenses, like other educational establishments; it was important that the undertaking should set out with
