the bed-chamber) to Mr. Raleigh, to command him to come to him; and being brought in, the king, after using him with great civility, notwithstanding told him plainly, that when he was prince, he had promised the Earl of Bristol to secure his title to Sherborne against the heirs of Sir Walter Raleigh; whereon the earl had given him, then prince, ten thousand pounds; that now he was bound to make good his promise, being king; that, therefore, unless he would quit his right and title to Sherborne, he neither could or would pass his bill of restoration."

Young Raleigh, like a good Englishman, " urged," he says, "the justness of his cause; that he desired only the liberty of the subject, and to be left to the law, which was never denied any freeman." The king remained obstinate. His noble brother's love for the mighty dead weighed nothing with him, much less justice. Poor young Raleigh was forced to submit. The act for his restoration was past, reserving Sherborne for Lord Bristol, and Charles patched up the scoundrelly affair by allowing to Lady Raleigh and her son after her, a life pension of four hundred a year.

Young Carew tells his story simply, and without a note of bitterness; though he professes his intent to range himself and his two sons for the future under the banner of the Commons of England, he may be a royalist for any word beside. Even where he mentions the awful curse of his mother, he only alludes to its fulfilment by "that which hath happened since to that royal family, is too sad and disastrous for me to repeat, and yet too visible not to be discerned." We can have no doubt that he tells the exact truth. Indeed the whole story fits Charles's character to the smallest details. The want of any real sense of justice, combined with the false notion of honour; the implacable obstinacy; the contempt for that law by which alone he held his crown; the combination of unkingly meanness in commanding a private interview, and shamelessness in confessing his own rascality-all these are true notes of the man who could attempt to imprison the five members, and yet organized the Irish rebellion; who gave up Stafford and Laud to death as his scapegoats, and yet pretended to die himself a martyr for that episcopacy which they brave, though insane, had defended to death long before. But he must have been a rogue early in life, and a needy rogue too. That ten thousand pounds of Lord Bristol's money should make many a sentimentalist reconsider (if, indeed, sentimentalists can be made to consider, or even to consider, any thing) their notion of him as the incarnation of pious chivalry.

At least the ten thousand pounds cost Charles dear. The widow's curse followed him home. Naseby fight and the Whitehall scaffold were God's judgment of such deeds, whatever man's may be.

Scottish University Reform.

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ART. II.-1. The Universities of Scotland, Past, Present, and Possible. By JAMES LORIMER, JUN., Esq., Advocate. Edinburgh, 1854.

2. The Scottish University System Suited to the People: a Lecture. By the Rev. PHILIP KELLAND, M.A., F.R.S. London and Edinburgh, 1854.

3. University Reform.

By JOHN S. BLACKIE, Professor of Greek in the University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh, 1848. 4. Report of the Commissioners appointed to Visit the Universities and Colleges of Scotland. Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed, 7th October 1831.

THE present, our readers are aware, is not the first occasion, on which we have endeavoured to speak a seasonable word on the condition of our Scottish Universities. To the intelligent we need make no apology for placing the same matter a second time, but in a more full and practical form, before them. The recent changes, however inadequate in the sister institutions of England, and the new principle of examination already introduced into certain departments of our civil service, and impending in others, invest this subject now with a direct and primary interest that did not otherwise belong to it. On few subjects, moreover, we fear, does a greater amount of self-satisfied ignorance and easy indifference prevail. Universities are an affair, people are apt to think, that belongs to the learned; and the general public have as little to do with them as they have with the philology, theology, istology, palæontology, and other speculative merchandise in which they deal. But this is a mistake. The public alone in this country can improve or remodel public institutions; besides, learned men, in practical matters, are often "a feeble folk," and are sometimes no more able to improve their own learned institutions than they are to mend their own shoes. As little is it true that the public have no interest in the state of the highest institutions of learning in this country. A man has to do not only with the one cistern in his own house from which he draws his water, but with the far fountains in the hills from which the supply comes. If these are troubled or scanty, or if the system of pipes by which they are led and distributed is defective, the private cistern will soon cease to supply the householder with a full and liberal draught. We buckle ourselves, therefore, to this subject with a distinct feeling that we are about to deal practically with one of the most practical matters .that affect the general wellbeing of the whole community, and

with the most honest desire to look the whole truth in the face, and to weave over no point of rottenness with a rose-coloured tissue of fine phrases. Let our readers judge for themselves. They ought to have some reminiscences from their juvenile days, which will enable them to test the truth of our statements, and to judge of the soundness of our views.

What is a university? A university is a sort of corporate Establishment instituted for the intellectual elevation of the community by means of publicly recognised teachers, in the same way that a church is such an Establishment existing for the sake of the moral elevation of the community. And as the Church is the highest and most accomplished engine which the state recognises for the religious training of the people, so a university exists for the purpose of training the people intellectually at that highest stage where education, strictly so called, ends, and the business of life begins. For unless we include this element of degree in our idea of a university, we shall have no means whereby to distinguish between this institution and a school; from which, however, universities are in popular language, and in practical effect, everywhere distinguished, just as much as a mighty mountain is from a little hill, or the sounding ocean from a quiet bay. And further, as that is the best church which teaches the most exalted religion with the widest comprehensiveness, and by the most dexterous appliances, so that is the best university which teaches science and learning, art and literature, at the highest point, to the widest extent, and by the most dexterous system of indoctrination.*

Starting from this definition we shall have no difficulty in gauging the character of academical institutions in Scotland; and the remarks which we may have to offer will, we have reason to believe, meet with a ready consideration in an age when the most important changes are taking place in the general ma

* Obvious as is this distinction between the proper provinces of a university and a church, Dr. Pusey, in the following notable passage, with the view of defending the manifest shortcomings of the English collegiate system, thus plausibly confounds them :-"The problem and special work of a university is not how to advance science, not how to make discoveries, not to form new schools of mental philosophy, nor to invent new modes of analysis, not to produce works in medicine, jurisprudence, or new theology; but to form minds religiously, morally, and intellectually, which shall discharge aright whatever duties God in his providence shall appoint to them. Acute and subtle intellects, even though well disciplined, are not needful for most offices in the body politic. The type of the best English intellectual character is sound study, thoughtful, patient, well disciplined judgment. It would be a perversion of our institutions to turn the university into a forcing house for intellect."-Collegiate and Professorial Teaching. London, 1854. P. 215. According to this definition, there is no difference between a university and a church; and in fact, Dr Pusey, like the Jesuits, and all who believe in a divinely appointed infallible clergy, are quite consistent in arrogating to that clergy, as such, the complete monopoly of all education, moral and intellectual.

A University not a School.

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chinery for the extra academical diffusion of knowledge, and when it is impossible for any man with his eyes open to believe that our highest educational institutions, with an organization made to serve the needs of the sixteenth century, can, without very considerable expansion and modification, stand in the same commanding relation to the nineteenth.

We shall leave untouched the historical question, how far even the wise and influential men of the sixteenth century were in a condition to erect academical institutions so thoroughly furnished in all respects as to satisfy the highest intellectual wants of the age to which they belonged. It is much to be suspected that the religious lords of this country who helped King Harry, and those that came after, to drive the ignorant monks out of their lazy cloisters, were not equally solicitous to erect academic houses where monks of real learning might employ their leisure beneficially in teaching the young idea how to shoot to the top capacity of the time. But universities, such as they were then, certainly met the wants of the age to which they belonged much more completely than they can be expected to do now. Classical learning, for example, was then a great living power in the moral and intellectual world, not as one may now too frequently find it, an old curiosity shop in the hands of a bookish showman, or a venerable bauble carved with strange images in the hand of a pedant. Leaving such historical contrasts, however, we shall address ourselves directly to answer the question, how far the universities of Scotland, as they now stand, are suited to the wants of the people and the age to which they belong; and, in framing our reply, we shall measure existing academical institutions in this country by an ideal derived partly from the essential nature of the thing, partly from striking points of contrast presented by the universities of the sister country, and by that most academical of all European countries, Germany.

We shall commence with the first point mentioned in our definition, viz., that of grade or pitch. A university is to be regarded as in a normal and prosperous condition only while it maintains by a marked boundary visible to all eyes, the native difference between an academical institution and a school. A university is not an establishment for drilling boys and inculcating elements, but for stimulating, enlightening, directing, and elevating young men. If elements are sometimes taught in a university, it is only by an exceptional necessity, as in the case of Sanscrit, Chinese, or Arabic, and other subjects which do not belong to the curriculum even of the highest schools, and which, if taught at all, must be taught from their very starting-point at a university; taught however, be it observed, even in their elements, not to boys, but always to men, or to

youths verging on manhood; for these latter only form the proper population of a university as distinguished from a school. And generally we may say, that wherever teaching of a merely elementary nature is practised in a university, this takes place with subjects which never can in the common course of instruction fall within the compass of the puerile mind, or for the teaching of which no sufficient school organization exists. The simplest elements of botany and zoology, for instance, may be taught in a university, though the elements of these sciences are of a nature peculiarly fitted for the understandings of boys; but this, wherever it takes place, arises from the incompleteness of the school curriculum, and is always to be regarded as in so far a departure from the proper business and the peculiar function of a university.

The amount of merely elementary instruction communicated at any given university, may therefore be taken as a very fair index of the degree to which that institution answers its proper purpose, or of the degree to which by evil circumstances it is forced to condescend to the inferior function of mere schooling. Tried by this test, the Scotch universities, we must confess, are sadly and notoriously deficient. The mere character of the population of our academic halls in the faculty of arts, will, at a single glance, reveal to the eye of the stranger the glaring fact of our academic dwarfishness. The majority of those who frequent the classes of the first two or three years of a Scotch curriculum, display the faces and exhibit the manners of boys. We feel these little academicians in red gowns and velvet collars who dot the sober streets of remote Aberdeen from November to April, are altogether a different generation from either the heavy booted swashbucklers of Bonn and Jena or the blackgowned square-capped proprieties that mince along the pavements of clerical Oxford. It is in vain to shut our eyes to the fact that these pretended students are mere boys; and the institutions in which they receive instruction, are plainly performing the part which the upper classes of good schools play in England and Germany. Further proof is not necessary. But if an educational tourist fresh from the prelections of Boeckh and Lobeck in Germany, were to enter any of the Greek and Latin classes in any of the Scotch universities, he would see things done and taught there which he might justly consider as very far from creditable to the countrymen of George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. If in Edinburgh, he might learn that the most zealous patrons of academical learning in that city are the shopkeepers and the men of business in the municipal corporation,-men who, some three years ago, made no small sensation in the academical world by enacting that the Alpha, Beta,