I suppose that by this time your thoughts are again accommodating themselves to the position of English and of Oxford life, after so many months of a sort of cosmopolitism. I am afraid that war is becoming less and less an impossibility, and, if we get reconciled to the notion of it as a thing which may be, our passions, I am afraid, will soon make it a thing that will be. My own desire of going to Oxford was, as you know, long cherished and strong, but it is quenched now; I could not go to a place where I once lived so happily and so peaceably, and gained so much,-to feel either constant and active enmity to the prevailing party in it, or else, by use and personal humanities, to become first tolerant of such monstrous evil, and then perhaps learn to sympathize with it.

CCXLIV. TO J. P. GELL, ESQ.

Rugby, March 3, 1841.

There is really something formidable in writing a letter to Van Diemen's Land. You must naturally delight in hearing from England, and I should wish to give you some evidence that you are not forgotten by your friends at Rugby; yet how to fill a sheet with facts I know not; for great events are happily as rare with us as they used to be, and the little events of our life here, the scene, and the actors, are all as well known to you as to ourselves; in this respect contrasting strangely with our entire ignorance of the scene and nature of your life in Van Diemen's Land, where every acre of ground would be to me full of a thousand novelties; perhaps the acres in the towns not the least so. Again, the gigantic scale of your travelling quite dwarfs our little summer excursions. If I were writing to a man buried in a country parsonage, I could expatiate on our delightful tour of last summer, when my wife, Mayor, and myself, went together to Rome, Naples, and the heart of the Abruzzi. But your journal of your voyage, and the consciousness that you are at our very

antipodes, with declining summer instead of coming spring, at the beginning of your short half year, while we are beginning our long one; this makes me unwilling to talk to you about a mere excursion to Italy.

We have been re-assembled here for nearly four months; locking up is at half-past six, callings over at three and five, first lesson at seven. I am writing in the library at Fourth lesson, on a Wednesday, sitting in that undignified kitchen chair, which you so well remember, at that little table, a just proportional to the tables of the Sixth themselves, at which you have so often seen me writing in years past. And, as the light is scarcely bright enough to show the increased number of my grey hairs, you might, if you looked in upon us, fancy that time had ceased to run, and that we are the identical thirty-one or more persons who sat in the same place, at the same hour, and engaged in the very same work, when you were one of them. The School is very full, about 330 boys in all, quiet and well disposed, I believe; but enough, as there will always be, to excite anxiety, and quite enough to temper vanity.

....

My wife, thank God, is very well, and goes out on the pony regularly, as usual. We went to-day as far as the turnpike on the Dunchurch Road, then round by Deadman's Corner to Bilton, and so home. Hoskyns, who is Sandford's curate, at Dunchurch, walked with us as far as the turnpike. The day was bright and beautiful, with gleams of sun, but no frost. You can conceive the buds swelling on the wild roses and hawthorns, and the pussy catkins of the willows are very soft and mouse-like; their yellow anthers have not yet shown themselves. The felling of trees goes on largely, as usual, and many an old wild and tangled hedge, with its mossy banks, presents at this moment a scraped black bank below, and a cut and stiff fence of stakes above; one of the minor griefs which have beset my Rugby walks for the last twelve years at this season of the year.

Of things in general I know not what to say. The

country is in a state of much political apathy, and therefore Toryism flourishes as a matter of course, and commercial speculation goes on vigorously. Reform of all sorts, down to Talfourd's Copyright Bill, seems adjourned sine die; wherefore evil of all sorts keeps running up its account, and Chartism, I suppose, rejoices. The clergy are becoming more and more Newmanite,-Evangelicalism being swallowed up more and more by the stronger spell, as all the minor diseases merged in the plague in the pestilential time of the second year of the Peloponnesian war. Yet one very good bill has been brought into parliament by the Government, for the better drainage and freer room of the dwellings of the poor in large towns, and some of the master manufacturers are considering that their workmen have something else besides hands belonging to them, and are beginning to attend to the welfare of that something. If reform of this sort spreads amongst a class of men so important, I can forgive much political apathy. Whether that unlucky eastern question will prove in the end the occasion of another general war, no man can tell; but I fear the full confidence of peace is gone, and men no longer look upon war as impossible, as they did twelve months since. God bless you, my dear Gell, and prosper all your work. Remember me very kindly to Sir John and Lady Franklin.

CCXLV. TO SIR JOHN FRANKLIN, K.C.B. a

Rugby, March 16, 1841.

I ought not to have left your kind letter so long unanswered; but I have not, I trust, neglected its main business, although I cannot report any satisfactory progress, for I know not in what state the question now is, and I have been this very day writing to Mr. Stephen, to ask

a With regard to the College in Van Diemen's Land. See Letter CCXLI.

what they are about, and whether I can be of any further service.

My whole feelings go along with Gell's wishes, but I do not think that they ought to be indulged. It is a great happiness to live in a country where there is only one Church to be considered either in law or in equity; then all institutions can take a simple and definite character; the schools and the Church can be identified, and the teaching in the school-room and in the Church may breathe the same spirit, and differ only so far as the one is addressed to adults, the other to children. All this no one can love more than I do. I have the Bishop's licence we have our School Chapel, where the Church service is duly performed: I preach in it as a Minister of the Church, and the Bishop comes over every two years to confirm our boys in it. I quite allow that my position is that which suits my taste, my feelings, and my reason, most entirely.

But if I were in Gell's place, as in many other respects I could not expect all the advantages of England, so neither could I in this identification of my school with my Church. In a British colony there are other elements than those purely English; they are involved, I think, in the very word "British," which is used in speaking of our colonies. Here, in England, we Englishmen are sole masters,-in our colonies we are only joint masters; and I cannot, without direct injustice, make the half right as extensive as the whole right.

But whilst I quite acknowledge the equal rights of the Church of Scotland, I acknowledge no right in any third system, for a Church it cannot be called,-to be dominant both over the Church of Scotland and over us. I would allow no third power or principle to say to both Churches, "Neither of you shall train your people in your own way, but in a certain third way, which, as it is that of neither, may perhaps suit both." I would have the two Churches stand side by side,—each free, and each sovereign over its

own people; but I do not approve of such a fusion of the one into the other, as would produce a third substance, unlike either of them.

Now, I confess that what I should like best of all, would be, to see two colleges founded, one an English college, the other a Scotch college, each giving its own Degrees in Divinity, but those Degrees following the Degrees in Arts, which should be given by both as a University. Each college possessing full independence within itself, the education of the members of each would in all respects be according to their respective Churches, while the University authorities, chosen equally from each, would only settle such points as could harmoniously be settled by persons belonging to different Churches.

This, I think, would be my beau ideal for Van Diemen's Land; and that the English college would quickly outgrow the Scotch college,-that it would receive richer endowments from private munificence,-that it would have more pupils, and abler tutors or professors, I do not doubt. But that would be in the natural course of things, and justice would have been done to the rights of Scotland as a member of the United Kingdom.

The decisive objection to this, I suppose, would be the expense. You can have only one college, and I suppose may be thankful even for that. What is next best, then, as it appears to me, is still to provide for the equal, but at the same time the free and sovereign and fully developed action of both Churches within the same college, by the appointment of two clergymen, the one of the English, the other of the Scotch Church, as necessary members of the college always, with the title of Dean, or such other as may be thought expedient, such Deans having the direct charge of the religious instruction generally of their own people; the Dean of that Church to which the Principal for the time being does not belong, being to his own people in all religious matters both Principal and Dean, but the Dean of whose Church the Principal is a member,