XVII.] MY SUCCESSOR. 439 scholars and political thinkers, lectured during the sixteen years of my absence from Oxford ; there are some, however, left who remember Mr. Vaughan's lectures under the old system, the soundness and learning displayed in them and the stimulus which they supplied to the study of Modern History at the moment that it was taking its place among the recognised subjects of the Schools. It was whilst Mr. Vaughan was Professor that the School of Law and History was organised ; Mr. Goldwin Smith, as I said, lectured under the new arrangements of 1859 and was examiner in 1862. I rejoice to know that on neither of these gentlemen has the study of the subject, that I have lived and worked for, produced any exhausting or debilitating effects; and, when I consider the case of my successor designate, 'the Regius Professor elect,' and think how many books he has written, and in how many fields he has shown his prowess, and how now, some few years my senior in standing, he is preparing to take my work on his shoulders, to go on writing, to give public statutory lectures, ordinary lectures, informal instruction, and to face the Board of Faculty and the Visitatorial Board, I flatter myself that the energy with which he will go to work will not be damped with the reflexion that his predecessors ever broke down. I am very glad to welcome him back to Oxford, to the home and the studies that he has loved so well, as the great champion and representative of that branch of historic literature on which I believe the success of the study here to depend. Not that he is eminent in this alone. But I am now flattering myself and not him. And so I come to my parting words. I am going to leave Oxford, not for a place of rest, but for a post of work. I frankly confess that I have always worked towards an ideal of rest; my own anticipations have been, after a few years more here, during which I might see some of my boys started in the world, I might have retired, we will say, to the Parks, and