patience to get through as fast as possible, he is nearly always pushed into a class above his real attainments, cannot profit by its teaching, and passes out of it by an examination which is illusory. With this pressure on the part of pupils and parents, and the general low standard of studies, the school authorities are apt to be slack and indulgent; two-thirds of those presented for the licenza ginnasiale and the licenza liceale now pass, but it is calculated by the Council that hardly one-third of them ought to pass. The same reasons make the provincial school councils also,-coming, as they do, within the influence of local feelings,―slack and indulgent. The provveditore and the one or two central inspectors representing the State, have had no staff through which to exercise an efficient inspection or control; for the law of 1859, while providing that the inspection of the secondary schools should be entrusted to two inspectors-general and their representatives, had omitted to say who or what these representatives should be. Nor did the university examinations, as remodelled by the legislation of 1859, suffice to raise the standard of instruction throughout the country. In the first place, the most important articles of that legislation were, as regards many universities, withdrawn or suspended. The change they introduced was too sweeping, the opposition they provoked too strong. Thus, in the great University of Naples, a university with some 5,000 students, there still continues to be no obligatory matriculation, and therefore no obligatory examination of the student at entrance. In the second place, high pitched examinations are the result, not the cause, of a high condition of general culture, and examinations tend, in fact, to adjust themselves to studies. So long, therefore, as the Italian secondary schools are what they are, the standard of university examinations in Italy, even when they are enforced, is irresistibly dragged down below the point at which the reformers of education try to fix it. The prescribed strictness is not maintained; in the university year 1862-63 the rejected candidates for degrees in the Italian universities were not more than six for every hundred who passed; in similar trials in France, Belgium, Germany, and England, the proportion rejected is far larger, though no one will say

that the candidates in these countries present themselves worse prepared than in Italy. The admission examinations show the same over-indulgence, nearly every candidate being admitted in some Italian universities, while for the corresponding examinations in France, those for the degree of bachelor, the number of rejections is on an average 20 per cent. at least, and sometimes rises as high as 50 per cent.

K

CHAPTER XI.

THE ITALIAN UNIVERSITIES.

PAUCITY OF STUDENTS IN ARTS-GREAT NUMBER OF UNIVERSITIES IN ITALY.

FROM

ROM 1858 to the present time there has been in Italy a

slight but steady falling off in the attendance at the universities. From the want of admission registers at Naples it is impossible to determine with accuracy the total number of students in the Italian Universities in a given year; 10,000, however, is not far from the mark. In the French faculties, in 1862, 23,371 students were entered; 14,364 of them in Paris alone. In the nineteen universities of Germany, exclusive of Austria, there are about 30,000 students.* It is calculated that France has about one university student for every 1,900 inhabitants, Germany one for every 1,500, Italy one for every 2,200. But the great difference between Italy and these countries is in the character of studies followed by the university students. While a fourth of the German students study letters and philosophy, the proportion of Italian students who study these is utterly insignificant. The prevalence of the study of letters is a good test of a country's general condition of culture and civilisation; and that it is so is strikingly confirmed by Turin, the centre not, certainly, of the most gifted part of Italy, but of the best governed, trained, and civilised part,-having in its university incomparably more students in letters than any other university

* So says Signor Matteucci, and I leave his numbers for the sake of the remarks he founds on them; but in 1864 there were only (in round numbers) 20,000 matriculated students in all the German universities, including those of Austria. It is possible Signor Matteucci reckons unmatriculated attendants at lectures, and so gets his high number of students, but I have been able to find no statistics corroborating the high number he assigns.

town of the kingdom. The greater part of the universities have next to none. Pavia, out of 1,200 students in the year 1864, had only eight of them in the faculty of letters. The principal of the Normal School at Pisa reports that his pupils are often the sole attendants at the lectures in the faculty of letters at Pisa, and he adds that in several universities, and notably in that of Naples, there are years in which not a single degree in letters, or, as we should say, arts, is given. Nor is this because of the greater popularity of the natural sciences. It is not the faculty of mathematical and natural sciences,—a faculty which, like that of letters and philosophy, the student in general follows simply for purposes of education,-it is not this faculty that is frequented at the expense of the faculty of letters. The throng of students is in the faculties where Brodstudien, as the Germans say, are prosecuted,-in medicine and laws. This is especially the case at Naples, where I have seen in the lecture-rooms of these faculties a concourse of students said, and I can well believe it, to number not less than 400.

The Italian universities had, in 1862-63, 714 professors, of whom 542 are full or regular professors (ordinarii). It is the abundance of supplementary professors which shows intellectual life and movement in a university; through means of their lectures a subject gets treated on all its sides, the regular professors are kept up to the mark by a competition which stimulates them, and men fitted to be, when their turn comes, regular professors, are enabled to show themselves. The extraprofessors and the Privat-docenten are thus the life of the German universities. The smaller universities there have nearly as many regular professors as the greater; what distinguishes Berlin or Heidelberg is the multitude of able men, who, as extra-professors or as Privat-docenten, are swelling the volume of university instruction there, and developing their own powers at the same time. The University of Freyburg in the Duchy of Baden has only seven regular professors less than Heidelberg; one has 34, the other 27; but Heidelberg has 53 extra-professors and Privat-docenten, while Freyburg has only 14. Berlin, in like manner, has 111 extra-professors and Privat-docenten to its 55 regular professors. In this way not

only is the teaching augmented and stimulated, but the State, which pays the regular professors, is saved expense by having to provide fewer of them, and is enabled to pay them better and to make their chairs, as they should be, valuable prizes. Neither the stimulus nor the economy are to be found in the Italian university system. The university professors are,for Italy, where officials are in general paid miserably, and none more miserably than those of secondary instruction,not ill paid. A law passed in 1862 fixes the salaries of professors in the principal universities at 2001. and 2401. a year; of those in the less important ones at 120l. and 144l. But the burden of all these salaries has to be borne by the State. Nor does it get full work out of this host of regular professors. The same laxity and want of discipline which astonish us in the secondary schools prevail generally in the universities. The students are in the habit of departing when they think term (as we should say) has lasted long enough; as vacation time approaches, which is when the students please, and not when the Regolamento pleases, the whole body of students with one accord,' says the official report, sometimes leave the schools deserted.'* Here again Turin forms an exception to the other Italian universities, and is exempt from their irregularity. Again, in France and Germany there are from thirtytwo to thirty-seven weeks of lectures in the university year, with four lectures a week from all lecturers charged with the principal matters of study; a professor's yearly course, therefore, contains from 90 to 120 lectures. From 60 to 70 lectures, or even less, is all that the Italian professors give a year. Finally, the students are in the habit of migrating from the university where they have studied to take their degree in some other university where the examinations are reported to be easier.

Italy has 15 universities,† which, with the Istituto Superiore of Florence, an establishment with a part of the teaching and of the degrees of a university, are all of them State institu

* Sulle Condizioni, &c., p. 197.

They are the following: Bologna, Pisa, Pavia, Turin, Naples, Palermo, Modena, Parma, Genoa, Catania, Siena, Cagliari, Messina, Sassari, Macerata. To these will now be added the universities of Venetia.