DIFFERENCES IN ENGLISH AND SCOTCH UNIVERSITIES.*

1. Their Preparatory Schools and Teachers.

Numerous as are the undergraduates at the English universities who do not come from the public schools, there can be no doubt that in the main the tone of the universities is taken from that of the public schools. The English public school-boy lives again at Oxford in the clique belonging to his own school; the social usages, the very phraseology, the standard of attainment, all are in the main colored by public school life. In some cases an even closer tie exists, such as that between Eton and King's college in Cambridge, or between Winchester and New college in Oxford. The Eton foundationer looks to King's as the natural goal of his school life; the Winchester boy emerges in Oxford into the society of those who have been his compeers, only a year removed, at school. In all cases, the tone alike of lecture-room and of society is a reflection of that of the schools. But while this gives a certain uniformity, it also insures in the main a certain standard of attainment. The universities can count with certainty upon a supply of fairly educated youths, possessing au average standard of intelligence, although perhaps endued with a certain monotony of tone and thought. But this is not all that the public schools do for the universities. They not only act as their nurseries, they also afford an abundant supply of more or less lucrative posts to which a training at the universities is the recognized stepping-stone. The universities possess no more unassailable source of indirect patronage than that which is open to them in the public schools. No instrument by which they can affect the broad middle stratum of society is more powerful than this, whereby they form the center, as it were, toward which the whole energies of the public schools throughout the country are tending, and the single source from which the staff of the public schools is recruited. The instruction in these schools may be defective: granted that it is so, the existence of such deficiency is recognized by the universities in tolerating the poll or pass degree. But the fact that it reaches, on the whole, a fair average, enables the universities to take for granted in those who come to them a certain amount of preliminary acquaintance with the subjects embraced in the ordinary university curriculum.

The Parochial Schoolmaster.

The type of Goldsmith's schoolmaster, the wonderment of the villagers 'that one small head could carry all he knew,' was far more common in Scotland than in England. His salary, it is true, was of the scantiest. Some £40 or £50 a year, with a scrap of cabbage garden and a very modest house, constituted the utmost emoluments of his office. His work was hard, and his days were spent in the close atmosphere of a crowded school-room, where his attention was mostly engaged in wielding the 'taws,' or indoctrinating the urchins of the village into the mysteries of their dog-eared primers. But it was not without its charms in a country which has always yielded a plentiful supply of men ready to accept an ascetic independence rather than well-cushioned subordination. To begin with, he was his own master. His tenure of house and yard was freehold; his possession could only be disturbed by costly process of law, and even then only on the assignment and the proof of unanswerable reasons. Next to the laird and the minister, his was the most respectable position in the village. He combined with the duties of pedagogue many offices, which though

British Quarterly Review, April, 1877.

they brought him in little or no money, yet brought him much influence and consideration. As Session Clerk, he generally held the ear of the minister. As Inspector of the Poor, he held a certain quasi-magisterial authority. As a ruling elder, he had the privilege of regularly-recurring invitations to the manse, and his voice might even be heard in the deliberations of the presbytery, or his form be seen in the annual procession of the black coats up the high street of Edinburgh to the General Assembly Hall. Above all, his was a 'sinecure' in the highest sense. His wants were few, and care could seldom cross the gateway of his little garden. His ambition was best gratified if the scholarship of some village hopeful, the product of long and weary hours of the soon-tobe-forgotten dominie's labors, brought home honor for himself and his old school after the annual spring prize-givings at the Scotch universities.

But whatever the reward, the work this primitive type of schoolmaster did for the Scotch universities was invaluable. By him had been trained a few of the 'pregnant spirits,' as an old college paper calls them, amongst the crowds of students who each autumn flocked to the class-rooms of Glasgow and Edinburgh, where personal teaching or supervision was a thing impossible. From him and the stray students of his training were gained those habits of study, and that love of learning for learning's sake, which made a spirit of quaint and unworldly enthusiasm not unknown in the Scotch universities. From him came that spirit of almost precocious independence of thought which constant and individual association with an older mind generally gives. He could often pride himself in being an alumnus* of some one of the universities, and in preparing his special pupils, he studied most dutifully the wants of his Alma Mater.

The disappearance of the old type of the parish schoolmaster has cut away from the universities their best source for such trained material as they formerly possessed. On systematic secondary education they could at no time rely. But they might at least reckon on a certain supply of vigorous intelligence, trained according to the diverse idiosyncrasies of teacher or pupil. On the constant friction which the intercourse of such diverse elements produced, on the heterogeneous mass of half-digested information which the Scotch student sometimes possessed, on his habituation to free and original independence of thought, it is not too much to say that the whole life of the Scotch university turned. But of late years that independent, albeit erratic, culture has gone, and yet no systematic training has come to take its place. Secondary education in Scotland languishes, not from want of material, not from indifference as to its value, but simply because that class upon whose almost gratuitous and fitful assistance it depended has been turned to other work. No village schoolmaster now could find time to prepare one or two special pupils for the universities. His time would be wasted; the average of his school would be lowered; the year would end with the disaster of an unfavorable report; and he might deservedly, as neglecting the duty which is properly his, find himself cast adrift by an unsympathetic School Board as 'incompetent, unfit, and inefficient.' The work of his profession now lies elsewhere, and he has plenty of masters ready to see that it is performed. But meantime the universities suffer. They have to stoop to the level of their students. The Greek professor at Glasgow has to initiate his

* In an interesting return published in the Report of 1837, we find that 585 parishes have parochial teachers of university training, against 241 parishes whose teachers have not had such training. Dated 1827: a similar return in 1877 would show a strange reversal of circumstances.

junior class—or Tyrones-into the Greek Alphabet. To do this for a mixed class of one hundred and fifty students, of all ages, of all degrees of mental training, of all capacities, is not only an uncongenial, it is also a hopeless task. It evidently renders impossible the achievement of any high standard of scholarship before the end of the three years' course; and as a fact, the Greek grammar, a very small amount of Greek prose composition, and the reading of it, it may be, Xenophon's Anabasis, a book of Thucydides, and a Greek play, is the measure of their achievements in Greek literature to the bulk even of the better students. The institution of the elementary Greek class is not a new one, nor is the complaint of its necessity urged for the first time in recent years; but undoubtedly the lack of that preliminary training which the old parochial schoolmasters furnished to a few students, and which more or less leavened the whole mass, has both made the necessity greater, and the demand for a remedy more urgent. It is true that a scattered few, whose training has been more systematic, come from the two or three schools in the principal cities where the system has been modeled more or less on that of the English public schools; but it is not they who give the tone to the universities, nor, perhaps, is it desirable that they should. However well trained as school-boys, they are schoolboys only; the sturdy independence, the valuable, though uncouth, originality which the typical Scotch student often possesses, is not theirs. The pity would be less did the Scotch universities feel only that they were obliged to open their doors to ill-trained school-boys; but this is not all. Plenty of good material is there, only it is often thrown away for want of a certain preliminary training. Plenty of ardor for study, plenty of earnestness in aim, is to be found in the Scotch student, but the opportunity comes too late, and the university professor only feels himself impotent to retrieve the omissions whose ill effects he sees so clearly.

2. College or Domestic Life of the Student.

The contrast between the two systems is even more marked when we begin to look at the life of the student in each country. It is a contrast visible in the very name. The youth of fourteen or upward at Glasgow finds himself in possession of the dignified title of 'student;' his compeer at Oxford, never less than seventeen or eighteen, is only 'the undergraduate.' Let us picture the life of a country student at one of the Scotch universities, situated perhaps in the center of a large commercial town. Once settled in a lodging in one of the crowded thoroughfares, his first acquaintance with the university is in the purchase of his matriculation and class ticket, a transaction carried out on exactly the same principle as if he were paying a railway fare or securing a seat at a theater. From the college notices he learns when the class opens, and at the hour-it may be eight o'clock on a November morning-he reaches the door of the lecture-room from his lodging in the town. He must find his own place in a crowd of well nigh two hundred students, and all that is required of him is that he be punctual in his attendance. For four minutes after the hour the bell continues to ring; but the instant that it ceases, though his foot may be on the last step of the staircase, a grimly humorous janitor closes the door in his face, and perhaps, with a free and easy jocularity, indulges in a little sarcasm at his expense. The roll is called, the work of the class arranged, and the routine which is to be repeated for five or six months begins. The hour passed, he leaves the room, and after one or two hours of the same sort in other class-rooms, he is, so far as the college is concerned, left to himself for the day. No attempt at moral

discipline, no attempt at tutorial guidance or assistance, no attempt to insure that some part of the day is given to private work, is ever thought of. So far as the college authorities are concerned, he is free to initiate himself into the mysteries of the tavern life of the city. In the case of Glasgow, only very recent changes have removed the dangerous attractions of that life from the very precincts of the university. In many cases, the student's lodging must still be in neighborhoods where they abound, and for all they are within easy distance. The young student's first introduction to the gateway of higher learning is blended with no impressive associations. The hurry and bustle of the city crowds in upon the college, and save for the hour or two when he is present at lecture, he is in the midst of city life. Learning dwells in no shady quadrangles; no graces of architecture carry back his imagination insensibly to the hallowed associations and the long-drawn sympathy of the past. Four centuries of university history lie behind him, but they have been centuries in which adversity has been mingled in no small degree with a scanty and rare prosperity. The continuity of their history has more than once been roughly broken. They have left no relics to tell of the devotion which a home of learning could inspire. The 'pious founder' is conspicuous only by his rarity. The Scotch student is a stranger, no doubt, to many of the influences that university life, under happier or more congenial circumstances, might give, but he deserves abundant praise in that he gains so much from the little that is given him. That bracing atmosphere of self-dependence, that pressing necessity for exertion and for self-denial, is to him the air in which he best thrives.

When he joins the university, the student does not enroll himself the member of a college which claims to dispose of some three or four years of his life. He pays a fee for six months, and at the end of that time his connection with the university ceases until it is renewed afresh the next year. When, how, or indeed whether at all, he proceed to his degree, is left entirely to his own judg ment. But at the end of each college session, the rewards for eminence in the classes are dispensed according to the votes of the students, who are thus constituted judges over their fellows; and the prizes thus adjudged are distributed, in the case of Glasgow, at a public meeting, which answers in some degree to the 'Laureation' ceremony of old days. Nay, more than this, the highest honorary office in connection with each university-an honor which, troublesome as it must often be, has been held and prized by a long line of the greatest names amongst the poets, statesmen, and orators of Great Britain-is dispensed according to the votes of the students assembled in the Comitia of four nations. Once every two or three years, the college walls are plastered with electioneering squibs, and an electoral contest, turning generally on political principles, and conducted with all the acidity of emulation which might be expected where material interests are at stake, agitates for weeks the bosoms of the youthful constituency. Nor is the office of Lord Rector one merely honorary. He may play a very important part, both in directing the government and dispensing the patronage of the university; and yet all attempts to wrest the election from the students have failed.

College Life in England.

Contrast with this the life of the English University. There the undergraduate finds college life take hold of him, even before its educational work begins. His lodging, his mode of life, his society, are all to be found within the walls

of the college. The few non-collegiate students have had no such effect in modifying the tone of either university as to make them any thing more than a rare exception. The mass of the undergraduates still come, and still must continue to come, under the influence of college life. Before a lecture is attended, before an hour's work has been done, the associations of the place, its rules, its ceremonies, its observances, have insensibly closed in upon him. He must pass a qualifying examination, in parts so simple that most Scotch students would consider it to be something of a degredation, and yet demanding a fixed and imperative modicum in certain directions, which, with his defective preliminary training, that student might find it hard to satisfy. The rules and hours for leaving college, the morning roll-call or chapel, the common meal, the halfofficial bedmaker or scout, all impress the freshman with the fact, before his first day is done, that he is the member of a monastic and disciplined institution. He must acquiesce in an unwritten social code, not severe indeed, but unbending in its strictness. His very amusements are regulated for him. When attendance at lecture begins, it is only a part of the same life. In some room -perhaps a special lecture-room-but more likely the sitting-room of the lecturer or tutor, the audience of a few undergraduates assembles. They dispose themselves round the table, and the lecture is delivered in a half conversational way. The professorial lectures in connection with the university are of course different, but form only a slight element in undergraduate life. Besides these half conversational lectures aforesaid, he is assigned to one of the tutors of the college, who is answerable for the lectures he attends, for the amount of reading he manages to accomplish, and for his general amenableness to discipline. In this bond lies one of the most valuable, and at the same time most characteristic, parts of college life at Oxford: the student is not isolated, but feels himself the member of a regulated community, and the special charge of one, at least, of those who lead it. Beyond these minor regulations, the contrast between the two university systems widens and deepens as we come to the larger range of associations comprised in the life of an English undergraduate. He must be dull of imagination—perhaps he is often dull of imagination-to feel no impulse stirred by all the historic past of which the life around him appears only the outcome of to-day. The quiet and scholastic dignity of the college precincts, the slowly amassed treasures which learning has gathered round her as the offerings of ages, the memories of the past brought home by the presence of the scenes in which that past seems still to live, all this has an influence none the less telling because often drawn in unconsciously on the part of the recipient. It may be that all this is only the fetichism of learning or education, that it is a little more than a sublimated superstition. But we must be forgiven if we cling to those associations which an English university can still give, if we find something in the possession of a dignified history and a fitting home which deepens a love in itself not unworthy, nor likely, even if ignoble, to endure too permanently amidst the opposite influences that must soon assail it.

Bright, indeed, would be the hopes for Scottish learning, if one, at least, among her seats-say the oldest, and that least pressed by the hurry and the bustle of our time-were to gain such a fabric; not of gaudy splendor, but worthy of a past so dignified, though so austere as hers. A new light would rise upon that northern shore, to replace that which shone ages back from the burnished roof of her cathedral.