CHAP. XII - CONCLUSION

Summary

I might add many other sketches to my limited gallery. I have not attempted to exhaust my materials, but to select a few of our most characteristic types. Many species must, so far as I am concerned, go without a natural historian. With some I am but slightly acquainted, and some are so poor in individuals that I could not describe them without personality.

Thus I am conscious of one obvious deficiency. Oxford and Cambridge are, in the eyes of Dissenters, hotbeds of unhealthy forms of belief; they shoot out feelers towards Rome, and are not unaffected by the blight of Germanism, neologism, and various other isms of vague but diabolical intentions. Good old Churchmen, on the other hand, consider us to be the great stronghold of religion qualified by decent education; “scholars and gentlemen” are still turned out from our manufactories as some counterpoise to the prevailing glut of “literates.” We furnish arms to the youthful warriors who go out to smite the Zulu hip and thigh, and teach them to despise the gewgaws of a bastard Romanism spread to entice them from the path of duty. I could almost rise to eloquence on the subject after a perusal of certain religious journals. We must be, without knowing it, the common recruiting district of hostile sects. Jesuits in disguise are mining underground; silly Tractarians are touting for mock monasteries; wily infidels are spreading insidious unbelief.