Said I: "How about the smaller towns?
I suppose you have swept those away entirely ?" "No, no," said he, "it hasn't gone that way.

On the contrary, there has been but little clearance, though much rebuilding, in the smaller towns.
Their suburbs, indeed, when they had any, have melted away into the general country, and space and elbow-room has been got in their centres: but there are the towns still with their streets and squares and market- places; so that it is by means of these smaller towns that we of to-day can get some kind of idea of what the towns of the older world were like;--I mean to say at their best." "Take Oxford, for instance," said I.
"Yes," said he, "I suppose Oxford was beautiful even in the nineteenth century.

At present it has the great interest of still preserving a great mass of pre-commercial building, and is a very beautiful place, yet there are many towns which have become scarcely less beautiful." Said I: "In passing, may I ask if it is still a place of learning ?" "Still ?" said he, smiling.

"Well, it has reverted to some of its best traditions; so you may imagine how far it is from its nineteenth-century position.

It is real learning, knowledge cultivated for its own sake--the Art of Knowledge, in short--which is followed there, not the Commercial learning of the past.