and the Lord Rochesters of the day-of men of boisterous and vulgar, or of more elegant, dissipation. It has youths who are bred not where the conversation is of Sir Robert Peel's last speech, Mr. Faraday's brilliant discovery, the new work of Mr. Southey or Mr. Moore; but of the number of pheasants bagged in the last battue, the last victim who suffered at Crockford's, the fashionable intrigue of the day: from such, as well as from the sons of virtuous and religious houses, is formed the young republic which is to be governed by the academical authorities. It is, probably, from the report, or from his actual presence at the orgies of some such individual or set, that the soi-disant Foreigner of Rank' has drawn his picture of Oxford as it is.' It should seem, indeed, from his animadversions on the 'gormandizing habits' of the Dons, as he familiarly calls the heads of colleges, that he has visited Oxford during one of those periods of hospitable festivity in which the hall tables do certainly groan under their delicate burthens; and has only mistaken this period of rare and chartered licence for the ordinary style of living.

If this nobleman' had taken the trouble to attend the examination schools; if he had condescended to inquire the relative number even of the sons of the higher aristocracy who take degrees, and take them with honour; if he had ascertained, with the more quiet and studious part of the university, the comparative estimate in which a gold tassel and a silk gown are held, with a prize or a first class; if, in short, he had not mistaken a bad set for the general tone of the university, he would have come to a very different conclusion. Both in the public school, and in the university, the most rigid discipline will strive in vain against the lavish command of money with which some injudicious parents take a pride in supplying their sons. Sumptuary laws, we have already said, will ever be evaded; and in a commercial country like ours, it is much easier to declaim against the unlimited credit which is offered by tradesmen, and the load of debt incurred by spendthrift youths, than to suggest a remedy for this acknowledged evil. The police regulations of the university are administered with a severity, and an invasion on individual liberty, which would be endured in no other part of the kingdom; but how the tradesmen of Oxford and Cambridge are to be prevented from speculating on the extravagance and the honour of young men, some of whom are in the command, many in the direct inheritance of unbounded wealth,-this we suspect to surpass all the powers vested in the university authorities. There are some sensible observations on this subject, as regards Eton, in the pamphlet of the Vindicator, who strongly animadverts on the unwise conduct of parents :—

'I allude to the means of indulgence afforded by the large supplies

of

of money received from their homes. Habits of extravagance, and of coarse and sensual gratification, are thus formed-a spirit of vicious emulation is sustained, which forces even those who have no resources of their own to keep pace with their wealthier school-fellows, at the sacrifice of their principle and the ruin of their peace. Many are led to contract bills, which can be evaded only by the loss of honour; and all in common acquire tastes and habits of expense which infallibly deteriorate the young mind, though the means of gratification may be still afforded in after life, but of ruinous consequences when they are unbefitting their rank and resources. By these means a whole corps of idle and worthless persons are retained about the college, who live upon the illicit and immoral indulgences of the scholars. The masters have attempted all the means within their power to put down the evil; but they have hitherto failed, and can never effect their purpose while the means of indulgence are so liberally supplied by parents.'-pp. 75, 76.

The real effective countervailing influence to vice and extravagance, in the public school as well as in the university, will not be a severe discipline, which cannot be maintained without a jealous and hateful system of espionage, nor without destroying that which is the great advantage of public education, the early habituating the mind of youth to self-government; it will be the encouragement of better tastes for manly amusements, and for manly intellectual pursuits. We fully concur in the sentiments of the Vindicator:

The great variety of innocent amusements afforded by the localities of Eton is, under these views, of essential importance in the discipline of the young mind. The enthusiasm of an old waterman and cricketer may perhaps be excused, if he lingers a moment to celebrate the beauty of the cricket-grounds, and to declare that the Eton water is by far the best among all our inland boat-stations, for the exercise of this most noble, and delightful, and thoroughly English sport. The regulations by which the amusements are controlled, and the boundaries of time and of place determined, are, I believe, of a peculiar kind, but are as effectual as the circumstances will permit. Though they give rise to many inconsistencies and legal fallacies, which are the subject of ordinary ridicule, they are the best that can be devised to unite the greatest possible indulgence with the most summary and imperative control. Every facility is given for the pursuit of all innocent sports, without the college bounds; but on any emergency, or any prospect of danger or excess, the closest confinement can be enforced, and all illicit practices, without the walls, suppressed.'-pp. 71, 72.

Cricket and boating, though they may lead into some expenses, will, on the whole, be the best auxiliaries to a high and liberal intellectual tone, to restrain the young mind from vulgar and pernicious immoralities. It is in youth as in after life, that vicious propensities are best counteracted, not by stern precept and rigid

law,

law, but by turning the feelings and passions into a purer channel, by giving a higher object to generous ambition, by centering the active energies on more worthy pursuits; by teaching them, in short, to find their highest gratification in mental and moral culture. Let a man's pride be to be a gentleman-furnish him with elegant and refined pleasures, imbue him with the love of intellectual pursuits, and you have a better security for his turning out a good citizen, and a good Christian, than if you have confined him by the strictest moral and religious discipline, kept him in innocent and unsuspecting ignorance of all the vices of youth, and in the mechanical and orderly routine of the severest system of education.

We have deviated much farther than we intended from the important subject of the connexion between the improvement of our public schools and that of our universities; or rather with the restoration of our universities to something nearer to their original design. If they have been in some degree lowered from the mark, the fault, however, is not their own. If the College tutors are employed in drudgery which is beneath them-in instilling the rudiments, or almost the rudiments, of Greek and Latin into their pupils-it is because those pupils are not sent to the University in the advanced state which they ought to be; but by being thus degraded (we use the term with reference to the higher studies to which his labours ought to be devoted) to the business and the toil of an usher, the mind of the tutor himself must in general be lowered, or at least prevented from expanding and improving itself as it might, if employed only in the cultivation of more mature scholarship, and more advanced science. He too contracts a distaste for his servile toil. The wearisome repetition of elementary lessons relaxes and enfeebles his interest for intellectual pursuits: at all events, he has little time for any studies, but those of preparing his pupils for the schools. The tone of his lectures is of necessity lower than it should be; and where what is absolutely necessary for a degree can be acquired only by such unremitting attention on his part, he can by no means encourage or advise his pupil to undertake any other course of study. We are persuaded that at Oxford at least, generally speaking, too much is done even for the superior young men; if they were more incited, and less unnecessarily urgedmore guided than compelled-more left to themselves, under the honourable stimulants of emulation and ambition, rather than saturated and drugged with constant lectures, the result would be far better. A few comparatively dull youths would not be screwed up by a kind of mechanical power to a higher standard; but talent would be more freely and more profitably developed. A higher tone of taste, and of intellectual feeling, would be generated; the youths would feel themselves men, labouring for their

Own

own improvement-not school-boys, drilled to perform an exacted task.

It is highly to the credit of the tutors, that with both classes-the uninstructed, and those who are of better promise-they have submitted to this voluntary servitude. If we could advise their selfemancipation from this thraldom, we are convinced that it would be for their own interest, for that of their pupils, and would tend to raise the general tone and character of the University. As to the first class of pupils, the tutors have a right to claim from the Schools, that they should not leave their proper work to be conducted by the colleges. The remedy is in their own hands. In the Prussian universities, the pupil, we believe, is not admitted without a certificate of competent proficiency from a gymnasium. No young man-at least, a candidate for a degree-should be admitted to the University without sufficient at least of Latin and Greek to pass the first Oxford examination. We know the objection to this, that it would be an edict of exclusion to many young men of rank and fortune, who have no ambition for obtaining University honours, aud have already shown their contempt for such plebeian attainments by the lordly rejection of the lessons at the school. The University certainly would lose little, in peace or fame, by the refusal to enrol these unpromising members among her more hopeful scholars. But society perhaps might suffer, if all such youths of importance-not for their personal character or talents, but from their station-should be thus thrown loose upon the world, at that critical period of life, without even that slight degree of discipline and instruction which they cannot altogether elude at the University. But for these we should suggest the possibility of forming some other kind of education, which, however imperfect, might be the best which the case would admit. Those who have acquired little Latin and no Greek at school before seventeen, may as well, perhaps, abandon the unprofitable study. Declaring then their intention not to proceed to a degree, such young men might be compelled to attend lectures on modern history, or other branches of liberal, not classical, education. Christ Church, or Trinity at Cambridge, might try the experiment, and surely would not want some accomplished member of their body qualified to instruct in these branches of literature.

If a higher standard of admission were demanded, the degree might be taken earlier, and a year at least be left for scientific or historical lectures-for chemistry, geology, astronomy, natural history for ancient and modern history-for political economyfor the studies of an university, in contradistinction from a school education; or if it be considered objectionable that the degree should thus be hastened, much more time would be applicable to

such

such pursuits, even by those most assiduously employed in the ordinary studies for the degree. In some such manner the mutual claims and interests of the various branches of an universal education might be reconciled and harmonized; a higher general system of teaching would prevail; and the Universities might again, instead of devoting their highest energies to the cultivation of the elementary parts of learning in the minds of yet almost uneducated youth, take the lead in the advancement of every branch of science and learning.

The

It is of incalculable importance that the Universities should maintain their connexion not only with the theology, but with the literature and the science of the country. But if the tutors are enslaved to the drudgery of school-instruction, or confined to the routine of books which are usually required for the public examinations-if they become heads of colleges only after their intellectual activity and literary tastes have become wearied and worn out by years of such unremitting toil-they will scarcely be able to maintain their proud position in the estimation of the country, and indeed of all Europe. They ought to consider that these magnificent establishments are meant to act as guardians of the general education of the higher classes-and that their education must in no point fall below the intellectual standard which an age of unexampled activity in every branch of literature and of science will require. The youth distinguished at his University must be prepared at all points to stand his ground in the great contest for intellectual distinction among men. Professors, some of whom at least are men of European reputation, instead of being, (we speak of Oxford,) with the exception of the Regius Professors of Divinity and Hebrew, rather a race of ornamental dignitaries, whose lectures the great mass of undergraduates, entirely occupied with their classical or mathematical studies for the schools, and the tutors, worn out with preparing the undergraduates, have no leisure to attend, might assume their proper place in the general system of education. The Bucklands, the Daubenys, or even the Wilsons, might not merely have a comparatively few ardent and zealous votaries, but it would be considered a disgrace, among all who aspire to the honours of an university education, to be entirely ignorant of any important branch of knowledge, or to have neglected such valuable opportunities of improvement, as would be afforded in every branch of polite literature, or general information.

VOL. LII. NO, CIII,

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ART.