uates. As each year had its own prescribed subject, this involved an acquaintance with all the subjects embraced in the curriculum on the part of the regent; or, to speak more correctly, it made it probable that the regent had no more than a general acquaintance with any. To a certain extent, the commissioners were conscious of this defect, but they provided only a partial remedy. They recommended that there should be a 'fixed regent' for the Greek class, whose business it should be to teach the students of one year only, and to teach them nothing but Greek. To this most of the universities objected, but none more than the University of Glasgow. This goes, they seem to say, either too far, or not far enough. It implies a slight on our knowledge of Greek, which we believe to be undeserved. But if it is to be partially carried out, let it be done in full. With all submission,' they go on, 'the pluralitie of our number here doe think the fixation of all classes in everie universitie verie necessarie;' and they proceed to give their reasons. It prevents jealousy and animosity between the regents: men, besides, 'are more fit for teaching that part allotted to them, than by this ambulatorie way they can be.' In this suggestion, the 'masters of the College of Glasgow' hit upon the very point on which the future character of the Scotch universities was in a great degree to hinge. The regents were evidently like the tutors in an English university. They had a certain number of students to look after: they superintended all their work: they gave their personal advice and help: but they did not stand, as it were, at the gateway of some special domain of knowledge, to deeper researches in which they might open the way. When the regents ceased to rear the Bajan up to the Magistrand, when they were allocated to one special branch of learning, they then ceased to be tutors, and became professors, and the first hint of the change comes in this remonstrance on the part of Glasgow University, addressed to the commissioners of 1695.

But the interference of the commissioners with the studies of the universities did not end here. The regents they recommend are not to be appointed without standing a competition by any one who may challenge their claim; and this claim is to be made good only 'by dispute and programme in case of competition.' Whether this would attract the best masters of higher learning may well be doubted, but more than this was to be taken into account in making these appointments. 'Not only the abilities and learning of the parties' are to be considered, 'but also their piety, good life and conversation, prudence, fitness for the place, affection for the government of Church and State now established, and other good qualifications complexly.' In other words, a good political adherent would run the best chance of appointment, and the commission manages to say so pretty plainly.

Thus appointed, the regents are to teach what they are told, and no more. In the first year, Greek, and it alone, is to be taught; in the second (semi or samen) year, 'Logicks, without mixture of what concerns Metaphysicks;' in the third, Ethicks, general and speciall;' and in the fourth, 'Speciall physicks and pneumatologia (psychology).' More than this, the students are not to spend their time in writing their courses of philosophy in their class,' but there is to be 'printed an uniform course of philosophy, to be hereafter taught in all the colleges.' It is this last restriction, as well as the banishment of metaphysics, that chiefly rouses the discontent, as far as they dare show it, of the universities. Glasgow, for some reason or other, is ready to submit to it; and in their overture, the masters of that university even hint that it might be well to assign

to each university its own special subject-logic and metaphysics (they object to give up the latter) to one; ethics to another; physics to a third; and to a fourth, mathematics.

But Edinburgh and St. Andrews employ both expostulation and banter to meet the proposal. We indeed approve,' says St. Andrews, 'that masters be not allowed to teach or vent errors, or dangerous principles, and are sure none can be charged upon us.' But this is a different matter from having a printed course, which is to supply irregularity of attendance, to limit the teacher, and through which students may trust to 'the help of country pedants, . . . which may in a short time bring schools in contempt, and multiply dunces in the name of scholars. We think it hard,' they say, 'to stint or confine from improving notions and inventions in matters merely philosophick, seeing men soon and often alter their thoughts.' Then as to writing the dictates. 'To write,' they say, 'is not altogether in vain; many remember things the better (that) they write them, and students should not be dry-fingered.' But it is the banter of Edinburgh which is most amusing. 'We heartily concur in your lordships' suggestions,' they say, 'not doubting but your lordships will at the same time be careful to prevent the inconveniences which attend all changes, and may attend this change of the method of learning.' The worst of it is that no such 'compleat system of philosophy' is quite ready to their hand. 'We know one indeed, the Philosophia vetus et nova, but (this to a Parliamentary commission in 1695) it is done by a Popish author, and smells rank of that religion. Though it be a pretty book, yet it can not be the standard to be taught, laboring with obscurity, unintelligible by youths; short in the topicks, running out into digressions idly, and making use (horrible to say!) of Protestant arguments as examples of sophisms.' The commissioners were surely not thinking of this? But 'Derodon, his logicks are too prolix; Burgesdick's logicks hardly deserve the name.' It can not be 'Henry Moor's ethicks,' they are 'grossly Arminian.' Mr. Gauen, 'he is prolix in his didacticks. Le Clerk is merely scepticall. For Descartes, 'and others of his gang,' they have each and all their own inconveniences. 'So, upon the whole, we can not think of any course of philosophy extant sufficient to be taught. So perhaps we might humbly suggest that the present method be kept until your lordships, in your wisdom, can supply us with one complete printed course.'

ment.

Commission of 1826 and 1830-New Commission, 1877.

Under Sir Robert Peel's Ministry in 1826, a Royal Commission was issued and renewed in 1830, which reported in 1837 in four folio volumes, full of ma terial for a history of the universities, and wise suggestions for their improveThese suggestions were considered, and entered into the act of 1858, and the subsequent action of the commissioners appointed under that act for the reorganization of the universities. By that act subscription to the Coufession of Faith was abolished, and the headships of the universities were no longer made prizes of the National Church, and the administration of each university was greatly simplified.

19

The new Commission of 1876, is composed of the Lord President of the Court of Sessions, two members of the College of Justice, the Lord Advocate, the Duke of Buccleuch, Sir William Maxwell, Chancellor of the University of Glasgow; Dr. Lyon Playfair, of the University of Edinburgh; Mr. Froude and Mr. Huxley, who have been Lord Rectors of St. Andrews and Aberdeen.

DIFFERENCES IN ENGLISH AND SCOTCH UNIVERSITIES.*

1. Their Preparatory Schools and Teachers.

Numerous as are the undergraduates at the English universities who do not come from the public schools, there can be no doubt that in the main the tone of the universities is taken from that of the public schools. The English public school-boy lives again at Oxford in the clique belonging to his own school; the social usages, the very phraseology, the standard of attainment, all are in the main colored by public school life. In some cases an even closer tie exists, such as that between Eton and King's college in Cambridge, or between Winchester and New college in Oxford. The Eton foundationer looks to King's as the natural goal of his school life; the Winchester boy emerges in Oxford into the society of those who have been his compeers, only a year removed, at school. In all cases, the tone alike of lecture-room and of society is a reflection of that of the schools. But while this gives a certain uniformity, it also insures in the main a certain standard of attainment. The universities can count with certainty upon a supply of fairly educated youths, possessing an average standard of intelligence, although perhaps endued with a certain monotony of tone and thought. But this is not all that the public schools do for the universities. They not only act as their nurseries, they also afford an abundant supply of more or less lucrative posts to which a training at the universities is the recognized stepping-stone. The universities possess no more unassailable source of indirect patronage than that which is open to them in the public schools. No instrument by which they can affect the broad middle stratum of society is more powerful than this, whereby they form the center, as it were, toward which the whole energies of the public schools throughout the country are tending, and the single source from which the staff of the public schools is recruited. The instruction in these schools may be defective: granted that it is so, the existence of such deficiency is recognized by the universities in tolerating the poll or pass degree. But the fact that it reaches, on the whole, a fair average, enables the universities to take for granted in those who come to them a certain amount of preliminary acquaintance with the subjects embraced in the ordinary university curriculum.

The Parochial Schoolmaster.

The type of Goldsmith's schoolmaster, the wonderment of the villagers 'that one small head could carry all he knew,' was far more common in Scotland than in England. His salary, it is true, was of the scantiest. Some £40 or £50 a year, with a scrap of cabbage garden and a very modest house, constituted the utmost emoluments of his office. His work was hard, and his days were spent in the close atmosphere of a crowded school-room, where his attention was mostly engaged in wielding the 'taws,' or indoctrinating the urchins of the vil lage into the mysteries of their dog-eared primers. But it was not without its charms in a country which has always yielded a plentiful supply of men ready to accept an ascetic independence rather than weli-cushioned subordination. To begin with, he was his own master. His tenure of house and yard was freehold; his possession could only be disturbed by costly process of law, and even then only on the assignment and the proof of unanswerable reasons. Next to the laird and the minister, his was the most respectable position in the village. He combined with the duties of pedagogue many offices, which though

* British Quarterly Review, April, 1877.

they brought him in little or no money, yet brought him much influence and consideration. As Session Clerk, he generally held the ear of the minister. As Inspector of the Poor, he held a certain quasi-magisterial authority. As a ruling elder, he had the privilege of regularly-recurring invitations to the manse, and his voice might even be heard in the deliberations of the presbytery, or his form be seen in the annual procession of the black coats up the high street of Edinburgh to the General Assembly Hall. Above all, his was a 'sinecure' in the highest sense. His wants were few, and care could seldom cross the gateway of his little garden. His ambition was best gratified if the scholarship of some village hopeful, the product of long and weary hours of the soon-tobe-forgotten dominie's labors, brought home honor for himself and his old school after the annual spring prize-givings at the Scotch universities.

But whatever the reward, the work this primitive type of schoolmaster did for the Scotch universities was invaluable. By him had been trained a few of the 'pregnant spirits,' as an old college paper calls them, amongst the crowds of students who each autumn flocked to the class-rooms of Glasgow and Edinburgh, where personal teaching or supervision was a thing impossible. From him and the stray students of his training were gained those habits of study, and that love of learning for learning's sake, which made a spirit of quaint and unworldly enthusiasm not unknown in the Scotch universities. From him came that spirit of almost precocious independence of thought which constant and individual association with an older mind generally gives. He could often pride himself in being an alumnus* of some one of the universities, and in preparing his special pupils, he studied most dutifully the wants of his Alma Mater.

The disappearance of the old type of the parish schoolmaster has cut away from the universities their best source for such trained material as they formerly possessed. On systematic secondary education they could at no time rely. But they might at least reckon on a certain supply of vigorous intelligence, trained according to the diverse idiosyncrasies of teacher or pupil. On the constant friction which the intercourse of such diverse elements produced, on the heterogeneous mass of half-digested information which the Scotch student sometimes possessed, on his habituation to free and original independence of thought, it is not too much to say that the whole life of the Scotch university turned. But of late years that independent, albeit erratic, culture has gone, and yet no systematic training has come to take its place. Secondary education in Scotland languishes, not from want of material, not from indifference as to its value, but simply because that class upon whose almost gratuitous and fitful assistance it depended has been turned to other work. No village schoolmaster now could find time to prepare one or two special pupils for the universities. His time would be wasted; the average of his school would be lowered; the year would end with the disaster of an unfavorable report; and height deservedly, as neglecting the duty which is properly his, find himself cast adrift by ar unsympathetic School Board as 'incompetent, unfit, and inefficient.' The work of his profession now lies elsewhere, and he has plenty of masters ready to see that it is performed. But meantime the universities suffer. They have to stoop to the level of their students. The Greek professor at Glasgow has to initiate his

* In an interesting return published in the Report of 1837, we find that 585 parishes have parochial teachers of university training, against 241 parishes whose teachers have not had such training. Dated 1827: a similar return in 1877 would show a strange reversal of circumstances.

junior class-or Tyrones-into the Greek Alphabet. To do this for a mixed class of one hundred and fifty students, of all ages, of all degrees of mental training, of all capacities, is not only an uncongenial, it is also a hopeless task. It evidently renders impossible the achievement of any high standard of scholarship before the end of the three years' course; and as a fact, the Greek grammar, a very small amount of Greek prose composition, and the reading of it, it may be, Xenophon's Anabasis, a book of Thucydides, and a Greek play, is the measure of their achievements in Greek literature to the bulk even of the better students. The institution of the elementary Greek class is not a new one, nor is the complaint of its necessity urged for the first time in recent years; but undoubtedly the lack of that preliminary training which the old parochial schoolmasters furnished to a few students, and which more or less leavened the whole mass, has both made the necessity greater, and the demand for a remedy more urgent. It is true that a scattered few, whose training has been more systematic, come from the two or three schools in the principal cities where the system has been modeled more or less on that of the English public schools; but it is not they who give the tone to the universities, nor, perhaps, is it desirable that they should. However well trained as school-boys, they are schoolboys only; the sturdy independence, the valuable, though uncouth, originality which the typical Scotch student often possesses, is not theirs. The pity would be less did the Scotch universities feel only that they were obliged to open their doors to ill-trained school-boys; but this is not all. Plenty of good material is there, only it is often thrown away for want of a certain preliminary training. Plenty of ardor for study, plenty of earnestness in aim, is to be found in the Scotch student, but the opportunity comes too late, and the university professor only feels himself impotent to retrieve the omissions whose ill effects he sees so clearly.

2. College or Domestic Life of the Student.

The contrast between the two systems is even more marked when we begin to look at the life of the student in each country. It is a contrast visible in the very name. The youth of fourteen or upward at Glasgow finds himself in possession of the dignified title of 'student;' his compeer at Oxford, never less than seventeen or eighteen, is only 'the undergraduate.' Let us picture the life of a country student at one of the Scotch universities, situated perhaps in the center of a large commercial town. Once settled in a lodging in one of the crowded thoroughfares, his first acquaintance with the university is in the purchase of his matriculation and class ticket, a transaction carried out on exactly the same principle as if he were paying a railway fare or securing a seat at a theater. From the college notices he learns when the class opens, and at the hour-it may be eight o'clock on a November morning-he reaches the door of the lecture-room from his lodging in the town. He must find his own place in a crowd of well nigh two hundred students, and all that is required of him is that he be punctual in his attendance. For four minutes after the hour the bell continues to ring; but the instant that it ceases, though his foot may be on the last step of the staircase, a grimly humorous janitor closes the door in his face, and perhaps, with a free and easy jocularity, indulges in a little sarcasm at his expense. The roll is called, the work of the class arranged, and the routine which is to be repeated for five or six months begins. The hour passed, he leaves the room, and after one or two hours of the same sort in other class-rooms, he is, so far as the college is concerned, left to himself for the day. No attempt at moral