out the greater part of the reign of Elizabeth we have evidence that nearly all the colleges,-Trinity and King's perhaps excepted at Cambridge, and Christchurch, Magdalen, and St. John's at Oxford-were in a very necessitous state. It would be easy to bring forward evidence, from college archives and other like sources, shewing how one society, in order to pay its way, was obliged to pawn the college plate; another, to forego the election of the statutable number of Fellows; a third, to refuse admission to new students, because unable to build the rooms required for their reception; while a fourth would be found groaning under an incubus of debt, contracted through inevitable borrowing to meet its current expenditure. In fact, with the exception of King's College, which was guarded from spoliation by a special charter and by special immunities, I do not suppose there was any society at Cambridge at this time-I am speaking of about the year 1576 -which was able to do more than just pay its way.

Now if any one who had not happened to have given something more than ordinary attention to the history of our universities, were to be asked how it is that we find our colleges passing somewhat suddenly from this state of penury to one of comparative opulence like that which they begin to present at the commencement of the seventeenth century, he would probably endeavour to find an explanation of the phenomenon in the growing wealth of the nation, which rendered the lands and tenements belonging to each college more productive in the form of rental, and he would perhaps be disposed to conjecture that additional bequests from individuals, desirous of aiding the cause of religion and learning, did the rest. But these considerations give us only an imperfect. solution of the difficulty. In order adequately to account for the change we have to take reckoning of a special and somewhat remarkable circumstance.

I shall have occasion, hereafter, to refer again to one of whom the Cambridge of the sixteenth century might be justly proud, and who was one of the most able, most virtuous, and most eminent men of the age-I mean Sir Thomas Smith. He was a member of

Queens' College in the reign of Mary,-a time when Cambridge was ruled, somewhat despotically but not without discernment, by her chancellor, the celebrated Stephen Gardiner, and he afterwards rose to high office in the state and became a leading politician in those days. His name, however, notwithstanding the biography which we owe to the laborious pen of Strype, had been suffered, as I cannot but think, very undeservedly to drop out of notice, until, a year or two ago, Professor Stubbs, in the third volume of his Constitutional History, brought him again to our recollection by a lengthy extract from his best-known work (that on the Commonwealth of England), containing a description of the order and formalities observed in a session of Parliament in the days of Queen Elizabeth.

Now Sir Thomas was not only a wise statesman and an able diplomatist, but he was also one of the very few in those days who bestowed any really intelligent observation on questions of national finance and on the general state of the currency. Among other proofs of his researches in this direction, there is to be found in the Appendix to his Life, by Strype, some Tables of Money which he compiled. But the special result of his observations with which we are here concerned was of the following character. It was the time when gold and silver were pouring in from the Americas in a continuous and apparently inexhaustible stream, There seemed to be no limit to the supply, and it was currently believed that there was no limit. On the other hand, land and the produce of land were alike supposed to be an ascertained maximum, the latter being liable to no variations saving those represented by bad seasons and deficient harvests. Agricultural chemistry lent no aid to nature; machinery afforded no assistance to the labourer. It was plain, therefore, that as the measure of value increased in quantity, the price of land and the price of crops, which it seemed could not increase, but the demand for which was steadily increasing, must rise, and all land-owners and cultivators of land derive a corresponding advantage. An auspicious conjunction of high qualities in Sir Thomas Smith,

cast, at this juncture, a benignant ray on the future of academic learning. He was not merely the economist and the politician, but he was also the philanthropist and the scholar; and while our landed proprietors throughout the realm were building up princely fortunes on the broad acres wrested from the monasteries, his discerning eye descried a favourable opportunity for securing to our struggling colleges a certain share in the surrounding increasing prosperity. At his suggestion an Act was passed in the thirteenth year of Elizabeth, for "The Maintenance of the Colleges in the Universities," and by this it was required that in all new leases issued by the colleges, it should be made obligatory on the lessee to pay "one-third part at least" of the old rent in corn or meal -"that is to say," says the Act, "in good wheat after 6s. 8d. the quarter or under, to be delivered yearly upon days prefixed at the said colleges," "and for default thereof, to pay to the said colleges after the rate of the best wheat and malt in the market of Cambridge." The wheat, accordingly, although it might be worth six times or ten times the money in the open market, could thus never be placed to the credit of the tenant at more than 6s. 8d. a quarter, nor barley at more than 5s. For some time past, as the newspapers shew us, the best wheat has been selling at the unusually low price of from 37s. to 44s. per quarter. There are those living who can remember how it once reached the figure of £5 per quarter, and the opposition which Robinson's Act encountered when it was proposed, in the year 1815, that whenever the price of wheat reached 80s. per quarter the importation of corn from other countries should be permitted. This one-third of the rentals paid to the colleges accordingly rose in time to be far more valuable than the remaining two-thirds, which were payable simply in the current ecin of the realm, and the revenue resulting from this third gradually came far to exceed all reasonable requirements in the direction originally indicated by the framers of the Act, who (bearing in mind, possibly, the pathetic scene described by Dr. Lever) inserted a clause requiring that the wheat, malt, or money coming of this same "third" should be expended "to the use of the relief of the commons and diet of the said colleges."

The term "commons," it may be as well to explain, denoted the meals partaken of by the members of the college in the common hall, and originally constituted the chief if not the entire maintenance of a member, whether fellow, scholar, or sizar. Originally, this allowance represented the main though not the full value of a fellowship. A recent writer on the subject, Professor Montagu Burrows, of Oxford, has indeed gone so far as to say that before this time "the whole system of regular money allowances to fellows and scholars was quite unrecognized." I do not know how far this may be correct as regards Oxford, but we have ample evidence to shew that, as regards Cambridge, it was usual, long before 1576, pay both to fellows and scholars a certain stipend, distinct from the allowance in commons. Thus we find that at King's College, then the richest in the University, but where the Provost was allowed to appropriate a share of the revenue equal to that of ten fellows, each fellow, being a master of arts, received as his stipend, £1 6s. 8d. yearly, and £4 63. 8d. for commons, besides a small allowance for clothes, or, as it was then termed, "livery." At St. John's, the college described by Lever, the majority of the fellows received 13s. 4d. stipend, and £2 12s. Od. for commons. At Queens' College, which was in somewhat better circumstances, stipend, commons, and livery amounted to £6 13s. 4d.

to

Generally speaking, the fellow of a college who received 1s. 6d. a week for what we should now term his "board," thought himself well off. Archbishop Whitgift, when Master of Pembroke, received only £4 stipend, and 1s. 6d. per week for commons. It is, I think, unnecessary that I should add anything to explain how it was that this portion of the revenue of each college eventually increased to such an extent that, as Thomas Baker, the observant historian of St. John's College, writing about the year 1707, remarks, "it usually made the third part more than the whole." The fare at the fellow's table underwent a vast improvement. And pennyworths of beef and oatmeal gave place to luxuriously spread tables, and even to banquets, at which Lucullus would not have desdained to preside, and from which an Alderman of the

Corporation of London might have retired not dissatisfied. For a long time, however, there can be little doubt that this device of Sir Thomas Smith was productive of unmixed good. In an account of the University submitted to Sir Robert Cecil in the year 1600, we find it referred to as affording "happie help," "without which the colleges," says the writer, "had many of them been left forsaken by their students long ere this." "At this day," writes old Thomas Fuller, "much emolument redoundeth to the ancient colleges of each University by the passing of this Act, so that though their rents stand still, their revenues do increase. True it is, when they have least corn, they have most bread, I mean best maintenance, the dividends then mounting the highest."

I think then, we may fairly look upon the year 1576, as that in which the colleges of both universities were first well started on the path of growing affluence, and about the commencement of the seventeenth century, they represent very fairly the half-way house between the hostel of medieval times and the societies of the present day. The ancient hostel, which was nothing more than a boarding-house for undergraduates under the superintendence of a Master of Arts, had at this time altogether disappeared, unable to maintain itself against the rivalry of the colleges, and the far greater attractions there presented,-in the shape of superior advantages for quiet study and security against the extortions and insolence of the townsmen-in bursaries, exhibitions, and scholarships, which afforded substantial aid to the real student-and in fellowships, which now began to be something far more valuable than a scholarship, and represented the crowning prize that adorned the term of the goal. Among the most important of the results attending the absorption of the great body of the students into the colleges, was the almost complete desertion of the University Schools. When Dr. Caius revisited Cambridge in the year 1558, for the purpose of refounding Gonville Hall, and giving the society the name by which it has since been more generally known, he was sadly discomfited by the spectacle in some of the common rooms of a professor lecturing to a single auditor. And