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intelligence in me than in a just fledged owlet, or just open-eyed puppy, disconsolate at the existence of the moon.

211. Out of my feebly melodious complaints to that luminary, however, I was startled by a letter to my father from Christ Church, advising him that there was room for my residence in the January term of 1837, and that I must come up to matriculate in October of the instant year, 1836.

Strangely enough, my father had never inquired into the nature and manner of matriculation, till he took me up to display in Oxford;-he, very nearly as much a boy as I, for anything we knew of what we were about. He never had any doubt about putting me at the most fashionable college, and of course my name had been down at Christ Church years before I was called up; but it had never dawned on my father’s mind that there were two, fashionable and unfashionable, orders, or castes, of undergraduate at Christ Church, one of these being called Gentlemen-Commoners, the other Commoners; and that these last seemed to occupy an almost bisectional point between the Gentlemen-Commoners and the Servitors. All these “invidious” distinctions are now done away with in our Reformed University. Nobody sets up for the special rank of a gentleman, but nobody will be set down as a commoner; and though, of the old people, anybody will beg or canvass for a place for their children in a charity school,¹ everybody would be furious at the thought of his son’s wearing, at college, the gown of a Servitor.

212. How far I agree with the modern British citizen in these lofty sentiments, my general writings have enough shown;² but I leave the reader to form his own opinions

¹ [For Ruskin’s experiences in this respect as a Governor of Christ’s Hospital, see Vol. I. p. 499; and Time and Tide, Vol. XVII. p. 418.]

² [See, for instance, Vol. XVIII. p. 183, and Vol. XX. p. 111; and compare, below, p. 209. On this point Gladstone agreed with Ruskin. Dean Kitchin has recorded a dinner at the Deanery at Oxford, at which Gladstone and Lord Selborne were among the guests. “The matter discussed was an order issued by the Dean (Liddell) that in future all distinctive differences of dress, and all differences of fees, for Noblemen, Gentlemen-Commoners, or Servitors, should cease, and that

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