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not fall below the average in these respects, nor should I immediately set down their want of physical and moral superiority as the fault of the Institution. In all this I may be wrong; however, my plan has at any rate the advantage of enabling us to consider one thing at a time; to examine by themselves the intellectual advantages or disadvantages of the Cambridge system and then to compare them with those of any other, first similarly examined apart.

Now the University of Cambridge adopts the first rather than the third of the theories above enunciated as the true theory of a liberal education. It does not propose to itself as its primary object the giving of information, but rather the developing and training of the mind, so that it may receive, arrange, retain, and use to the best advantage, such information as may be afterwards desirable or necessary— such information as it may be the business of professional teachers to supply it, or its pleasure to collect for itself. For this training the University has decided, not in blind obedience to precedent, for the subject is undergoing discussion within its precincts every day-that classical and mathematical studies are the best means, and it undertakes to teach them thoroughly. Here, at the outset, a difficulty arises which is satisfactorily provided for. Neither the preparation nor the abilities of those who enter on any college or university course at the same time being equal, it is a question with all academical authorities, how to make a class work together so that the dull ones shall not retard, nor the bright ones hurry the rest, and that all shall be kept busy

without any being overworked. Now the Cambridge system, by its examinations of different kinds suited to different degrees of preparation and capacity, and by its private tuition (which is an integral part of the system, though existing unofficially), has provided for educating every separate student in accordance with his antecedents and capabilities, and ingeniously combines the advantages of a public and a private education.

The student then may learn more or less, but whatever the amount, he is expected to learn it thoroughly. Hence, as the first effect, he acquires habits of extreme mental accu

racy.

At our colleges it is so arranged that all the students go through the same course, at least during the most important years of their undergraduateship, and necessarily some go through it well and some ill; it is too much for some, and not half enough for others. Now at Cambridge precisely the reverse of this takes place. A student may go through a very limited or a very extensive course of reading, but whatever he passes an examination in he is required to do and know well. Even the examinations which are disparagingly known as "pass" ones, the Previous, the Poll, and (since the new regulations) the Junior Optimé, require more than half marks on their papers, and the way in which a slovenly and inaccurate man loses marks would astonish a great many of our students if subjected to them. And as we ascend to the honor examinations, the demand for precision increases with the field for its exercise, till we arrive at cases of High

Wranglers who have made not one single decided mistake in their six days' work, and of Senior Classics who "floor" the Tripos papers without an error.

It is unnecessary to enlarge on the value to its possessor of such a habit of reading, thinking, and writing accurately.

I will merely allude to one of its advantages. A Cantab is most careful in verifying references. He will not take a thing at second-hand if he can go to the original source of it. Hence he is little liable to be imposed upon by the ignorance, real or assumed, of others, or to be the innocent medium of currency for other men's blunders. I believe that a historical, antiquarian, literary, or statistical error, put forth in print or public speech, is sooner and more certainly detected in England than in any other country, and that this is owing to the influence of Cambridge men and Cambridge education.

But the English student does not only read his subjects accurately; he reads them comprehensively, and so that he can apply them. It is, indeed, impossible to avoid the imparting, in some instances, of partial and exoteric information; but as a general rule it could never be said of the Cantabs what has more than once been said of American college students, that theirs is a knowledge of particular books rather than of subjects. And in no place of education is there less parrotry, less exercise of memory, as distinguished from the acquisition of knowledge, than at Cambridge. The nearest approach to it is the case of the classical men who get up only Mathematics enough to pass as Junior Optimés. Even here the knowledge, though temporary, is real for the time; it

is not retained in the mind, because it is immediately afterwards crowded out by more interesting matter; but these men really understand their subjects for the examination, and can work, if not problems (which are the last test of a man's mathematical knowledge), at least examples, deductions, and riders in them. Let me give an instance or two of what I mean by applying knowledge. A student for classical honors in his second or third year may be utterly unacquainted with some long author like Plautus. He reads two or three of the comedies, and gets them up so carefully that he has acquired a good insight into the author's vocabulary and peculiarities of phrase and construction, so that he will make a very fair translation of a passage from any of the other plays which he has not read. Take a Cambridge Second-year man and an American graduate, both disposed to study Plato; let the former read four dialogues, and the latter eight, which will take them about the same time, each reading in the way he has been accustomed to; the Cantab from studying half the quantity, will know more about his author than the American, and will translate and explain better a passage at random from any of the other dialogues. If our Cantab be a mathematical man, his skill in the application of his knowledge will be still further increased by the symmetrical arrangement of it.

Again, the Cambridge student acquires manly habits of thinking and reading. He becomes fond of hard mental work, and has a healthy taste in his mental relaxations. The trash of the circulating library he despises as he would sugar

candy. No works of fiction but the very best, and those rarely, are to be found in his room.* His idea of light reading is Shelley's or Henry Taylor's poetry, Macaulay's Essays, a leader in the Examiner, a treatise on Ethics or Political Economy; he would laugh at you for calling this "reading" in the University sense, or study. Such a taste is indeed late in forming; when nearly a man in size and looks he is still disposed to be idle and schoolboy-like in the intervals of his hard work, and at eighteen is behind an American or Scotch youth in general information; but the habit of mind once started, he goes on drawing in knowledge from all quarters at a vast rate, and whatever he does take into his well prepared mind assimilates itself with matter already there, and fertilizes the whole, and fructifies; nothing of what he reads is thrown away.

Now the general and final effect of this energetic, accurate, and comprehensive style of working, is that the Cambridge student exhibits great power and rapidity in mastering any new subject to which his attention is necessarily turned. If he has to acquire a foreign language or a new science, to become familiar with the elements of a difficult profession, like that of the law, or even to learn the details of a large business establishment, in any case he takes cleverly hold of the first principles, and then proceeds accurately, but speedily, from step to step, till he has attained the desired knowledge.

* It was a rule of the Union Library to admit no novels, and so strictly was the rule observed that it was with great difficulty Walter Scott's could be introduced.

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