CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 December 1915, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES. Oxford ia in deepest mourning. Every college has lost so many, and so many of its best graduates and undergraduates—the brightest, the most able ia mind and body. In round numbers some 540 members of the university have been killed and GO are missing up to date. But if poor, bereaved and sad, she it proud in her sorrow. One of the labor leaders in Australia, a State Premier,■ said publicly the other day that Oxford and Cambridge had done more than their . share and sent too many young men, the flower of intellectual England, to fight and die. Oxford does not feel she can send too many. A recent Cambridge Review ig a tragic number, consisting of paragraphs about dead Cambridge men. At present it is estimated that 10,250 men came forward to serve their country. Already nearly one in seven is numbered among the killed, the wounded or the prisoners. The most brilliant gifts—intellectual, administrative and physical—have been offered freely and without complaint upon the altar of our country. The vice-chancellor said: "Many and diver.se were ,tho hopes and expectations we had formed for them, but every one of these has been surpassed by the event. They have all been found capable of making the greatest denial of self that men can make; they paid away their own life that the life of their fellows might be happy."

LONDON'S ART TREASURES. Though little has been said upon the subject of the protection of London'.! art treasures, the authorities have for months past been taking extensive precautions to protect them against Zeppelin attacks. Many treasures have been removed from the British Museum, but large works, like the Elgin marbles and other statuary, which cannot be hidden away, have been protected by timber bulking, sandbags, and other means About 250 pictures, the choicest in the National Gallery, have been removed from the walls, whilst the Coronation chair has been taken away from Westminster Abbey. The grand Dutch window in St. Margaret's, Westminster, has been taken out of the stonework,' and put in a safe place. This is one of the finest specimens of old stained glass in Europe. The window was presented by the merchants of Dort to Henry VII. for flis now chapel at the Abbey" It was never erected, and found its way to the Abbey at Waltham. At the time of the Dissolution it passed to the Boleyns, at New Hall. During the Civil War the window was buried, to escape the Puritans. General Monck secured its preservation, and it was restored to New Hall. In 1785 the window was purchased and presented to St. Margaret's Church. Another ecclesiastical treasure has been preserved by being buried in sandbags. The tomb of Habere, in St. Bartholomew's Church, is a beautiful work" of Gothic art. It cannot be taken down, and hundreds of sandbars are piled around and over it, to a height of 20ft. The record of Eahere's work for St. Bartholomew's Priory and Hospital is one of the romances of English history.