The reign of mere verbiage passed away; the benefits of the universities had never ceased to be imparted the whole time.  The key to the better stores of knowledge was placed in the hands of every one who chose to avail himself of its advantages.  The minds of the collegians were filled with an affection for the works of the writers of antiquity, which have been the guide, solace, and pleasure of the greatest and most accomplished men since the Christian era commenced.  Studies will teach their own use in after life “by the wisdom that is about them and above them, won by observation,” as a great writer observes; but then there must be the studies.

There seems of late years much less of that feeling for poetry than once existed; the same may be observed in respect to classical learning.  Few now regard how perished nations lived and passed away,—­how men thought, acted, and were moved, for example, in the time of Pericles or the Roman Augustus.  What are they to us?  What is blind Meonides to us, or that Roman who wrote odes so beautifully—­who understood so well the philosophy of life and the poetry of life at the spring of Bardusia?  In the past generation, a part of the adolescent being and of manhood extended a kindly feeling towards them.  We hear no admiration of those immortal strains now.  We must turn for them to our universities.  People are getting shy of them, as rich men shirk poor friends.  Are we in the declining state, that of “mechanical arts and merchandize,” to use Lord Bacon’s phrase, and is our middle age of learning past?  Even then, thank Heaven, we have our universities still, where we may, for a time at least, enter and converse with the spirits of the good, that “sit in the clouds and mock” the rest of the greedy world.  They will last our time—­glorious mementos of the anxiety of our forefathers for the preservation of learning; hallowed by grateful recollections, by time, renown, virtue, conquests over ignorance, imperishable gratitude, a proud roll of mighty names in their sons, and the prospect of continuing to be monuments of glory to unborn generations.  Long may Oxford and Cambridge stand and brighten with years, though to some they may not, as they do to me, exhibit a title to the gratitude and admiration of Old England, to which it would be difficult to point out worthy rivals.

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ENGLAND’S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary system, and the Infinite deep of the Heavens have now become common and familiar facts to us.  Globes and orreries are the playthings of our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest breath of consciousness; it is all but impossible to throw back our imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation which God had sent down among mankind.