Excerpt from Lectures on Modern History: Delivered in Oxford, 1859 61

I have failed, in spite of the kind assistance of my friends, the Librarian of the Bodleian and the Keeper of the Archives, to trace the real author of what we must allow to have been an enlightened and far-sighted scheme - a scheme which, had it taken effect, might have supplied Parliament and the public service in the last century with highly-trained legislators and statesmen, and perhaps have torn some dark and disastrous pages from our history. It is not likely that the praise is due to the king himself, who, though not without sense and public spirit, was indifferent to intellectual pursuits.

Conjecture points to Sir Robert Walpole. That minis ter was at the height of power when the professorship was founded under George I. When the foundation was confirmed under George II., he had just thrust aside the feeble pretensions of Sir Spencer Compton, and gathered the reins of government, for a moment placed in the weak hands of the favorite, again into his own strong and skillful grasp. If Walpole was the real founder - if he even sanctioned the foundation - it is a remarkable testimony from a political leader of a turn of mind prac tical to coarseness, and who had discarded the literary statesmen of the Somers and Halifax school, to the value of high political education as a qualification for the pub lic service. It is also creditable to the memory of a min ister, the reputed father of the system of Parliamentary corruption, that he should have so far anticipated one of the best of modern reforms as to have been willing to devote a large amount of his patronage to merit, and to take that merit on the recommendation of Universities, one of which, at least, was by no means friendly to the crown.

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