You will never begin to understand literature until you understand something of life.  These young men, your forerunners, understood something of life while as yet completely careless of literature.  After the impulse of Abelard and others had died down, the mass of students betook themselves to the Universities, no doubt, for quite ordinary, mercenary reasons.  The University led to the Church, and the Church, in England at any rate, was the door to professional life.

Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown—­I am here quoting freely—­the diplomatists, the secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the physicians, the architects, at one time the secular law-givers, all through the Middle Ages the then large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesiastics....  Clerkship did not necessarily involve even minor orders.  But as it was cheaper to a King or a Bishop or a temporal magnate to reward his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or his agent by a Canonry or a Rectory than by large salaries, the average student of Paris or Oxford or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the ’main chance’ as we say, and small blame to him!  He never at any rate looked towards Literature:  nor did the Universities, wise in their generation, encourage him to do anything of the sort.

You may realise, Gentlemen, how tardily, even in later and more enlightened times, the study of Literature has crept its way into official Cambridge, if you will take down your “University Calendar” and study the list of Professorships there set forth in order of foundation.  It begins in 1502 with the Lady Margaret’s Chair of Divinity, founded by the mother of Henry VII.  Five Regius Professorships follow:  of Divinity, Civil Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540.  So Greek comes in upon the flush of the Renaissance; and the Calendar bravely, yet not committing itself to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which concludes (as may it long conclude) with Henry Jackson.  But Greek comes in last of the five.  Close on a hundred years elapse before the foundation of the next chair—­it is of Arabic; and more than a hundred before we arrive at Mathematics.  So Sir William Hamilton was not without historical excuse when he declared the study of Mathematics to be no part of the business of this University!  Then follow Moral Philosophy (1683), Music (1684), Chemistry (1702), Astronomy (1704), Anatomy (1707), Modern History and more Arabic, with Botany (1724), Geology (1727), closely followed by Mr Hulse’s Christian Advocate, more Astronomy (1749), more Divinity (1777), Experimental Philosophy (1783):  then in the nineteenth century more Law, more Medicine, Mineralogy, Archaeology, Political Economy, Pure Mathematics, Comparative Anatomy, Sanskrit and yet again more Law, before we arrive in 1869 at a Chair of Latin.  Faint yet pursuing, we have yet to pass chairs of Fine Art (belated), Experimental Physics, Applied Mechanics, Anglo-Saxon, Animal Morphology, Surgery, Physiology, Pathology, Ecclesiastical History, Chinese, more Divinity, Mental Philosophy, Ancient History, Agriculture, Biology, Agricultural Botany, more Biology, Astrophysics, and German, before arriving in 1910 at a Chair of English Literature which by this time I have not breath to defend.