Again, the German university, which, like all American universities except Princetown, has more resemblance to the Scottish universities than to those at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, is not residential nor divided into colleges, but is departmentalized into “faculties,” each with its own professors and privat docentes, or official lecturers, mostly young savants, who have not the rank or title of professor, but have obtained only the venia legendi from the university.  The lectures, as a rule of admirable learning and thoroughness, invariably laying great and prosy stress on “development,” are delivered in large halls and may be subscribed for in as many faculties as the student chooses, the cost being about thirty shillings or there-abouts per term for each lecture “heard.”  Outside the university the student enjoys complete independence, which is a privilege highly (and sometimes violently) cherished, especially by non-studious undergraduates, under the name “academic freedom.”  The German preparing for one or other of the learned professions will probably spend a year or two at each of three, or maybe four, universities, according to the special faculty he adopts and for which the university has a reputation.  There are plenty of hard-working students of course; nowadays probably the great majority are of this kind; but to a large proportion also the university period is still a pleasant, free, and easy halting-place between the severe discipline and work of the school and the stern struggle of the working world.

The social life of the English university is paralleled in Germany by associations of students in student “Corps,” with theatrical uniforms for their Chargierte or officers, special caps, sometimes of extraordinary shape, swords, leather gauntlets, Wellington boots, and other distinguishing gaudy insignia.  The Corps are more or less select, the most exclusive of all being the Corps Borussia, which at every university only admits members of an upper class of society, though on rare occasions receiving in its ranks an exceptionally aristocratic, popular, or wealthy foreigner.  To this Corps, the name of which is the old form of “Prussia,” the Emperor belonged when at Bonn, and in one or two of his speeches he has since spoken of the agreeable memories he retains in connexion with it and the practices observed by it.

Common to all university associations in Germany—­whether Corps, Landsmannschaft, Burschenschaft, or Turnerschaft—­is the practice of the Mensur, or student duel.  It is not a duel in the sense usually given to the word in England, for it lacks the feature of personal hostility, hate, or injury, but is a particularly sanguinary form of the English “single-stick,” in which swords take the place of sticks.  These swords (Schlaeger), called, curiously enough, rapiere, are long and thin in the blade, and their weight is such that at every duel students are told off on whose shoulders the combatants can rest