which still is very general among studious men in Oxford. Here more than elsewhere emulation was so tempered that it lost nearly all its evil. Of course those who were reading for honours were anxious to gain them, but the life of the place was not absorbed in this struggle. It was amusing to observe how soon the ardour of some young aspirant, who had come up athirst for college honours, would cool down in this atmosphere, where the esteem of contemporaries did not rise and fall with the class list, but where the worthiest looked in their friends for something that makes no show in examinations. Of the better sort of studious men it may be said in general, that in looking forward to their future life the common idols of the market had but small hold on their affections. Indeed one of the evils of Oxford perhaps is, that these idols in many cases entirely disappear, and leave nothing sufficiently definite of a higher kind to fill their place. This may be adverted to afterwards. At present it is to our purpose to remark that Oxford does somehow make men feel that money-making and getting on are not the worthiest aims; and few inherit its better spirit without unlearning these grosser forms of idol-worship. It is not pretended that they had no idols, that they had reached that state in which a man, for duty's sake, is content to toil in obscurity, and not to be known in his generation. Blended with some wholly selfish feelings there floated before the minds of many some image of elevated character, combined with intellectual cultivation, which was not to be measured by worldly success, by legal distinctions, or church dignities, but which to attain were in itself reward enough without the adjuncts of applause. In different natures these two elements were variously combined; in some the side of religious duty was paramount, in others the notion of cultivation; but in none perhaps was either element altogether absent."

APPENDIX III

THE following is the report which appeared in a local newspaper of a Lecture which Principal Shairp gave to the University Club in Dundee, of which he was elected President :

"Principal Shairp said there was perhaps nothing which more marked the mental character of the century to which we belonged than the growth and expansion of what was called the historical spirit in every region of thought. By this he meant that men had everywhere woke up to the appreciation of a fact which had indeed been always as real to them as it was now, but which had come home to them as a practical conviction with a force it had never done before. It was this-that we men of the present hour were not only the heirs but the products of all the agesthat the thoughts and feelings within us, as much as the outward framework of our lives, were an inheritance from the past-that of all the mental and moral furniture which makes us what we are, by far the larger portion had come down to us from a remote antiquity that if we would know ourselves and understand our generation we must bear ever in mind that great atmosphere of history which encompassed us, and in which, often all unconsciously, we live and move. This sense of the historical continuity of the race, and of the power with which the past centuries press upon us, seemed to have made itself felt during the present century with such a quickened consciousness that it might almost be taken for a newly-discovered truth. The tendency was seen in the new aspect literature, with the opening of this century, put on. Since that day its effects in every department of popular literature had been visible enough, and he knew not if the force of the movement had yet spent itself. In abstract studies the same tendency was at work. Last century metaphysicians, little regarding the history of thought, made their own individual consciousness the Bible of philosophy, out of which they span with perfect confidence rounded a priori systems, that embraced, as they believed, all projects, thought, and things.

So changed was all this to-day that a man would be thought either crazed or an ignoramus who should venture on such an individualistic experiment in philosophy. Our most prominent teachers had abandoned the attempt at rounded systems, and had almost reduced philosophical teaching, both in thought and morals, to a history of the continuous movement of thought from the earliest Greek schools to the present time. In the natural sciences the tendency might be seen displaying itself in the most exaggerated form. There the historical spirit, breaking away into the prehistoric ages, piercing to the utmost confines of space and time, brought back thence a fairy tale of the doings of the first monad whence all things had come, and pretended to describe the earliest gyrations of the atoms out of which the universe had been evolved. In its pretended revelations regarding man it dwarfed all history and made our oldest chronicles seem comparatively as recent as yesterday's newspaper. . . . He then noticed the changes that had taken place in the styles of architecture. Next, in the highest region of all-in religion-we saw everywhere, though in diverse forms, the sense of unity, deeper than all diversities, which underlies the true branches of the Christian Church-the vision of the one catholic and apostolic communion so filling and penetrating the hearts of men that discords and divisions must die down before it, and in its presence mere sectarianisms could not much longer live. Their education could not but share in this historic impulse. As to the substance of what was taught both in universities and in schools it would be interesting to show how much this had been already affected by the sense of historic continuity, and how much more remained yet to be done, especially in Scotland, to give the historic spirit its full scope; but from that aspect of the subject he must turn aside. Last century the Universities in England had fallen into such a torpor that public interest in them, though it never died out, became in all save their own teachers and beneficiaries very languid. At the beginning of this century, however, public favour began to return to Oxford and Cambridge, and now they not only were doing their work as they had never done it since the Reformation, but were also taking the lead in organising middle-class school education and coming forward to meet those intellectual wants which the great centres of industry increasingly felt, and which Mechanics' Institutes had proved powerless to satisfy. As centres of thought they also powerfully influenced the intellectual, social, and religious life of the whole nation. He would not say one word in disparagement of the modern foundations. There was a wide

field of usefulness for them; but it was the more mediæval Universities which had lived down through so many centuries and were alive at every pore to the influences of the present, which most penetrated the world with their influence. The great era of the first foundation of Universities in Europe was the twelfth century, when the Universities of Paris, of Bologna, of Salerno, and of Oxford were establishedthe University of Cambridge seeming to date from the thirteenth century. He took the University of Paris as the model of our own Universities, gave a short history of it, and then gave an explanation (1) of the meaning of the name University; (2) of Faculties; (3) of the origin of academical degrees in Paris; and (4) the rise and nature of Colleges. In speaking of graduation, he remarked that it was by it a University reproduced itself, and sent forth to the world persons accredited by their stamp and seal as having made a certain definite progress in learning. It was a momentous, not to say a sacred, trust; for society looked to the University, not only to train its youth, but to send forth none with its stamp upon them but those who were really possessed of some solid attainment. It was the culmination in the crown of a University course-the flower, or rather the fruit, into which a University course should ripen. As the flower could not exist without the stem and root, so neither could a University in the proper sense exist by mere graduation. Reduce a University to a mere Examining Board, as some clever men had of late proposed, and they destroyed that which was its real life and soul. He stated that a University and a College were often spoken and thought of as one and the same. Many persons thought that a University was a school of universal knowledge. This was an entire mistake. The term University came from the Roman jurists, and meant a corporation or society combined for some specific purpose recognised by law. In its modern use University has been defined as the whole members of an incorporated body of persons, teaching and learning one or more departments of knowledge, and empowered to confer degrees in one or more Faculties. On the other hand, a College is a corporation entirely distinct from and independent of the University, endowed for the purpose of maintaining a certain number of graduates and scholars within its walls, living according to laws and usages laid down by its founder. In fact, Colleges were intended as places of residence for students, instead of their living in lodgings in a University town. He called attention to the founding of the Universities of St. Andrews (1411), Aberdeen (1494), and Glasgow (1452), the first

two being modelled on the pattern of that of Paris, and the latter on that of Bologna. At St. Andrews, after the foundation of the Colleges-the first being St. Salvator's in 1458-nearly all the students resided within their walls. After the Revolu

tion residence out of college became more common, and, with some fluctuation, continued to increase till early in this century when residence within college entirely ceased. It had ceased not from any conviction that such residence was undesirable, but wholly from the decay of the college rooms and the want of funds to maintain them. In the two ancient Universities of England, Colleges had all but absorbed the University, and had monopolised most of its functions. In Scotland the opposite process had taken place-Colleges had all but disappeared, and the Universities were all in all. In the English Universities, Colleges had taken on themselves the instruction of their students in arts, and the Faculty of Arts had all but disappeared. If the invigorating and inspiring influence that comes from the teaching of able professors speaking to the combined students of the University had been lost, much had been gained from the more careful superintendence and closer and more accurate tutorial teaching, stricter discipline, and the influence which was exercised by good tutors in well-ordered colleges. One function the English Universities had retained-that of public examination for degrees. These examinations were carefully conducted and rigorously impartial, and were carried on in that thorough and perfect manner which was only acquired by the experience and tradition of ages. In Scotland the stress was on professorial teaching. The teaching was still in the hands of the University, and the students felt the stimulating influence of professors' lectures. only with this were combined a higher standard of attainment in average students when they entered the University, their influence would be much more powerful. From want of this preliminary training the Universities greatly suffered. The blame was not, however, with the Universities, but from want of good schools in sufficient number, and the unwillingness or inability of parents to keep their children long enough at school. He believed that with the materials at their disposal, and the state of preparation with which most students went to college, the Universities could hardly do more than they were at present doing. Would the day ever dawn in Scotland when the average student would come to the University at as ripe an age and as well prepared as they now were when they entered the best Colleges of Oxford and Cambridge? As for the mode of living of the students, lodging where and how they would in the town, he did not think