It is impossible to read the biographies of some of our most celebrated men, and not to see that with means scanty enough they were enabled to keep their terms with honour, and in the end confer additional celebrity upon the noble foundations where they had studied.  If such be the case, we have only the result of personal good or ill conduct to explain the whole of the affair.  But enough on this subject.

But it is not the venerable appearance of University College, hallowed by the associations of so many centuries in age, nor Queen’s opposite, nor All Souls’, nor any other of the colleges as mere buildings, that so connect them with our feelings.  We must turn the mind from stone and wood to the humanity in connection with them.  It is that which casts over them the “religious light,” speaking so sadly and sweetly to the heart.  In University College we see the glorious name of Alfred, and nearly a thousand years, with their perished annals, point to it as the witness of their departed successions.  Who on seeing New College does not recall William of Wykeham? and then, what a roll of proud names own this renowned university for their Alma Mater.  The very stones “prate of the whereabout” of things connected with the development of great minds, and while we look without fatigue at the gorgeous mass of buildings in this university, we feel we are contemplating what carries an intimate connexion, in object at least, with that all of man which marches in the track of eternity.  It is not mere antiquity, therefore, on which our reverence for a great seminary of learning is founded.  Priority of existence has no solid claims to our regard, except for that verde antique which covers it, as it covers all things past. good or indifferent; it is the connexion of the foundation with the history of man—­with the names that, like the flowers called “immortals,” bloom amid the wrecks and desolateness with which the flood of ages strew the rearway of humankind.

Of late there has been small response to feelings such as these in the great world, for we have not been looking much toward what is above us, nor discriminating from meaner things those which approach to heroic natures.  We must abandon Mammon, politics, and polemics, when we would approach the threshold of elevated meditation—­when we dwell on the illustrious names of the past, and tread over the stones which they trod.  I never wandered along the banks of the sedgy Cam, at that lone, twilight hour, when the dimness of external objects tends most to concentrate the faculties upon the immediate object of contemplation, but I have fancied the shades of Bacon, Milton, or Locke, to be near me, as the Indian fancies the shades of his fathers haunt the old hunting-grounds of his race.  I know that these are heterodox feelings in the present day.  I know that he who speaks of Homer or Milton, for example, is continually answered by the question, “Who reads them now?” The truth being, perhaps, that we are getting too