follow out any course of professional study afterwards. As things now were, it seemed to him that very few men pursued learning for its own sake, they studied merely to get a pass or a class, and both learning and teaching in the University were being degraded into a trade. He had shuddered to hear men talk of 'the tutorial profession,' and of 'the pecuniary value of a first class. To the combined lecturer' teaching was a trade, and when examinations were multiplied, and became the main object of study, there was sure to be too much teaching, and commonly in the wrong way. The duty of a University teacher was to guide his pupils to the right books, and to act as a commentator on them; but this implied that a thorough study of the subject was the aim in view. When the teacher's business was to push a man through a school, or enable him to win a first class with its pecuniary value,' he was likely to put himself in the place of the book, and, in short, a system of cram was adopted. 'I once asked a man,' said Freeman, who came to my lectures on Gregory of Tours, whether he had brought a book, meaning in my ignorance a copy of the author whom we were going to read.' 'Yes, I have a note-book,' was the reply. Here was a striking illustration of the effect of multiplied examinations and multiplied teachers, the result of forty years' tinkering with every part of the old system, that instead of reading books with a tutor, men filled their note-books with the 'tips' of a crammer, to reproduce them in the examination schools.

6

Experience of the new state of things strengthened the conviction at which he had arrived forty years before, that every examination was in itself an evil, but that if examinations were necessary evils they should be few,

searching and complete, not many and piecemeal. What he had advocated long ago, he advocated still more in view of the present system, (i) a University examination for matriculation, (ii) an examination for the B.A. degree much on the lines of the old one before the invention of Moderations, (iii) an examination in some special science for the M.A. degree. He wished to see the B.A. degree, which was now worth nothing, made respectable, the M.A. degree made honourable, and to sweep away class lists, to the great advancement of solid study and the lessening of unhealthy excitement.

The details of educational machinery discussed at the various boards of which, as Professor, he was an official member, were for the most part so irksome or distasteful to him that he very commonly went to sleep at the meetings. He exerted himself, however, successfully to resist a proposal to dispense with Greek in the Final Classical School, and he succeeded in getting Ammianus Marcellinus, Sidonius Apollinaris, and some other early writers included in the list of authors to be studied for the History School, which was a step toward breaking down the distinction between ancient and modern history.

But while he was deeply dissatisfied with the modern system of education at Oxford, he frequently said that he had no complaint to make of the men who worked it, and did their best to make it work well. He had many friends amongst the older men in Oxford, whose society he thoroughly enjoyed, such as Professor Earle, Canon Bright, Mr. Boase, Mr. Shadwell, Mr. Sidney Owen, Mr. E. B. Tylor, and Mr. Dicey, who heartily sympathized with him, and supported him in most of his efforts to promote a love of sound learning for its own

sake. And from amongst the younger graduates he gathered round him a small band of historical students, all earnest and devoted, and some of them highly distinguished scholars, such as Mr. York Powell (now Regius Professor of Modern History), Mr. Reginald Lane Poole, Mr. R. L. Nettleship, Mr. W. A. B. Coolidge, Mr. W. H. Hutton, and Mr. T. A. Archer. Nevertheless, he was at times much depressed by the feeling that he did, and could do, but little good in Oxford. He had entered upon the duties of his new office with all the zeal and energy which belonged to his nature, but as his private lectures did not 'pay' for the Schools, and his public lectures were not well adapted for a large mixed audience, they found but little favour. His predecessor, Bishop Stubbs, had undergone a similar experience, and it is a curious fact that the lectures of two of the most learned historians in Europe, replete as they were with learning, and often enlivened with witty and humorous remarks, were delivered for the most part to very empty benches.

The compulsory delivery of a fixed number of lectures, in which but few persons in Oxford seemed to take any interest, naturally became to Freeman an increasingly distasteful task. It was, therefore, in one sense a relief that broken health often rendered it necessary for him to spend most of the winter in a southern climate. Repeated visits to Sicily led to the design of writing the history of that island, and this work, once begun, engrossed the best part of his energies to the close of his life.

The two political questions in which he took most interest during the period from 1885 to 1890 were Home Rule for Ireland and what has been called 'Imperial