All this would have been quite unintelligible to the youthful days of our friend, whom we see leisurely approaching the evening of his days in the midst of a generation that does not know him indeed, but which is certainly benefited by his presence and the picture of academic repose which he displays to his much-troubled and harassed successors: a peaceful, cloistered life; soon to leave nothing behind it but a brass in the College chapel, a few Common Room anecdotes, and a vague tradition, perhaps, of a ghost on the old familiar staircase. Far different is the lot of the Fellow _fin de siècle_; ’by many names men know him,’ whether he be the holder of an ’official’ Fellowship, or a ’Prize Fellow’ who is entitled to his emoluments only for the paltry period of seven years. And what emoluments! Verily the mouth of Democracy must water at the thought of the annual ’division of the spoils’ which used to take place under the old _régime_: spoils which were worth dividing, too, in the days when rents were paid without a murmur, and colleges had not as yet to allow tenants to hold at half-a-crown an acre, lest the farm should be unlet altogether. But now if a Prize Fellow receives his 200*l.* a year he may consider himself lucky; and remember that if he is not blessed with this world’s goods, the grim humours of the last Commission at least allowed him the inestimable privilege of marrying--on 200*l.* a year. After all, it is not every one who receives even that salary for doing nothing.
The ’official’ variety of Fellow, or the Prize Fellow who chooses to be a College Tutor, is a schoolmaster, with a difference. He has rather longer holidays--if he can afford to enjoy them-and a considerably shorter purse than the instructors of youth at some great schools. He is so far unfortunate in his predecessors, that he has inherited the reputation of the Fellows of old time. Everybody else is working: the Fellow is still a useless drone. As a matter of fact, the unfortunate man is always doing something--working vehemently with a laudable desire to get that into eight weeks which should properly take twelve; or taking his recreation violently, riding forty miles on a bicycle, with a spurt at the finish so as not to miss his five-o’clock pupil; sitting on interminable committees--everything in Oxford is managed by a committee, partly, perhaps, because ’Boards are very often screens;’ or sitting upon a disorderly undergraduate. On the whole, the kicks are many, and the halfpence comparatively few. He has the Long Vacation, of course, but then he is always employed in writing his lectures for next term, or compiling a school edition, or a handbook, or an abridgment of somebody else’s school edition or handbook, in order to keep the pot boiling--more especially if he has fallen a victim to matrimony, and established himself in the red-brick part of Oxford. It is true that there is the prospect--on paper--of a pension when he is past his work, but in the present state of College finances that is not exactly a vista of leisured opulence. Altogether there is not very much repose about _him_. College Tutors in these days are expected to work. It is on record that a tourist from a manufacturing district on seeing four tutors snatching a brief hour at lawn-tennis, remarked, ’I suppose there’s _another shift_ working inside?’ Such are the requirements of the age and the manufacturing districts.