respects—­was of opinion that the calmness and seclusion of a university were not best adapted for calling forth the efforts of genius; but that adversity and some struggling were necessary to bring out greatness of character.  He thought that praise enervated the mind, and that to bear it required a much greater degree of fortitude than to withstand censure.  The consequence of this would be, that the honours decreed in a university must be pernicious to youth.  This cannot be conceded.  Sir Egerton’s notion may be just in relation to himself, or to one or two temperaments irregularly constituted; but a university exists not for the exceptions, but for the many.  How numerous is the list of those who, but for the fostering care of Oxford or Cambridge, would have never been known as the ornament and delight of their fellow-men!  How much more numerous is the list of those, whose abilities not rising beyond the circle of social usefulness have lived “obscure to fame,” yet owe the pleasure they imparted to their friends, and the beguilement of many troubles inseparable from mortality, to the fruits of their university studies, and to a partial unrolling before them of that map of knowledge, which before those of loftier claims and some hold upon fame had been more amply displayed!  In this view of the matter, the justness of which cannot be contested, the utility of such foundations is boundless.  The effect upon the social body.—­ I do not speak of polemics, but of the sound instruction thus made available—­cannot be estimated.  In the midst of fluctuating systems of instruction, it is something to have a standard by which to test the measure of knowledge imparted to youth.  If accused of being restricted in variety of knowledge, the perfection and mastery in what is taught must be conceded to Oxford and Cambridge.  Perhaps there is too much reason to fear, that without these foundations we should speedily fall into a very superficial knowledge, indeed, of the classical languages of antiquity.  This would be to exclude ourselves from an acquaintance with all past time, except in monkish fiction and the feudal barbarism of the Goths of the north.

There are, I verily believe, or I should rather say there were, imbibed at the university so many attachments at one time to words in place of things, that the collegian in after life became liable to reproach upon this head.  Pedants are bred everywhere out of literature, and the variety in verbiage once exhibited by some university men has been justly condemned.  But while such word-worms were crawling here and there out of the porches of our colleges, giants in acquirement were striding over them in their petty convolutions.  Their intertwinings attracted the attention of the mere gazer, who is always more stricken with any microcosmic object that comes casually in the way and is embraced at a glance, than with objects the magnitude of which demand repeated examinations.  But all this while the great and glorious spring of knowledge was unpolluted.