R,CHARD MONCKTON MILNES was born in the year - OUDL Home

§10Oxford in the 'SeventiesBy R W. MACANI. THE COMMEMORATION OF 1870T HE Old Order was not quite a thing of the past inOxford at the dawn of the fourth decade of the Victorianage. Mr Gladstone, elected in 1847 one of the ParliamentaryBurgesses of the University and ' rusticated ', soto speak, in 1865, for his latent Liberalism, had travelledvia West Lancashire and Greenwich to Downing Streetby November, 1868, to rule and reign for five sessions ofhighly contentious legislation. Reform was the order ofthe day. All the world was on the move. The depressionof the first decade of the Queen's widowhood was beginningto lift. Schleswig Holstein (1864), Sadowa (1866),and in this very year of grace, 1870, Sedan and Versailleshad exalted Prussia to German, and Germany to continental,primacy. But that was hardly a triumph forLiberalism, though it was a good advertisement forGerman culture and science. England was not quitehappy about it. Oxford was not quite happy about it,or about herself, even though in that very summer theUniversity had been celebrating a specially brilliantCommemoration of Founders and Benefactors, with itsnew Chancellor, Lord Salisbury in the chair, two daintypages, little Lords Cranborne and William Cecil, to upholdhis black and gold train, and a crowd of eminentrecipients of degrees, honoris causa, among them thePresident of the Royal Academy to represent Art, andMr Matthew Arnold of Oriel College, to personify Letters,