Matthew Arnold's famous description, hackneyed
though it is by quotation, gives one aspect of Oxford, an aspect
which will appeal to many beside the scholar poet:
"Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce
intellectual life of our century, so serene!
'There are our young barbarians, all at play.'
And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her gardens to
the moonlight, and whispering' from her towers the last enchantments
of the Middle Ages, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable
charm, keeps ever calling us nearer to the true goal of all of us, to
the ideal, to perfection--to beauty, in a word, which is only truth
seen from another side?"
But this is not the real intellectual charm of Oxford, which has been
ever the centre of strenuous life, rather than of dilettante
dreamings. From the very beginning, she has been a city of
"Movements." Some visitors, then, will come to Oxford as the home and
the burial-place of Roger Bacon, representing as he does the
Franciscan Order, with its Christ-like sympathy for the poor and its
early attempts to develop the knowledge of Natural Science; Oxford
was in the thirteenth century the great centre of the Friars'
movement in England.
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