144 LETTER XIII. TO THE SAME. DEAR DAVID, WHEN you reproach me with being so long at the seat of a celebrated University, and yet preserving the most profound silence concerning tutors, professors, examinations, degrees, and all the other mighty items of academical life, you do no more than I might have expected from one, who has derived his only ideas of an university from Oxford and Cambridge. In these places, the university is everything; the houses of the town seem merely to be the appendages of the colleges, and the townsmen themselves only a better sort of menials to the gownsmen. If you hear a bell ring there, you may be sure it is meant to call together those whose duty it is to attend in some chapel, hall, or lecture-room; if you see a man pull off his hat in the street, you may be sure it is in honour of some tuft, sleeve, or scarf, well accustomed to such obeisances. Here the case is very different. The academical buildings, instead of forming the bulk and centre of every prospect-instead of shooting up towers and domes and battlements in every direction, far above, not only the common dwellings of the citizens, but the more ancient and more lofty groves of oak and elm, in which, for centuries, they have been embosomed -instead of all this proud and sweeping extent of venerable magnificence, the academical buildings of Edinburgh are piled together in one rather obscure corner of a splendid city, which would scarcely be less splendid than it is, although they were removed altogether from its precincts. In the society among which I have lived since my arrival here, (and I assure you circle has been by no means a very confined one,) I am convinced there are few subjects about which so little is said or thought, as the University of Edinburgh. I rather think, that a well-educated stranger, who had no previous knowledge that an university had its seat in this place, (if we can suppose the existence of such a person,) might sojourn in Edinburgh for many weeks, without making the discovery for him its self. And yet, from all I can hear, the number of resident members of this university is seldom below two thousand, and among those by whom their education is conducted, there are unquestionably some, whose names, in whatever European university they might be placed, could not fail to be regarded as among the most illustrious of its ornaments. The first and most obvious cause of the smallness of attention attracted to the University of Edinburgh, is evidently the want of any academical dress. There are no gownsmen here, and this circumstance is one which, with our Oxford ideas, would alone be almost sufficient to prove the non-existence of an university. This, however, is a small matter after all, and rather an effect than a cause. The members of the university do not reside, as ours do, within the walls of colleges; they go once or twice every day, as it may happen, to hear a discourse pronounced by one of their professors; but beyond this, they have little connection of any kind with the locale of the academical buildings; and it follows very naturally, that they feel themselves to have comparatively a very slight connection with academical life. They live in their fathers' houses, (for a great proportion of them belong to the city itself,) or they inhabit lodgings in whatever part of the city they please; and they dine alone or together, just as it suits them; they are never compelled to think of each other beyond the brief space of the day in which they are seated in the same lecture-room; in short, the whole course and tenor of their existence is unacademical, and by persons thinking and living in a way so independent of each other, and so dispersed among the crowds of a city such as Edinburgh, any such badges of perpetual distinction as our cap and gown, could scarcely fail to be regarded as very absurd and disagreeable incumbrances. The want of these, however, has its disadvantages as well as its advantages, even in regard to their own individual comfort. So far as I comprehend the first part of the general system of University education in this place, it is as follows. The students enter at fourteen, fifteen, or even much earlier-exactly as used to be the case in our own universities two centuries ago; for I remember it is mentioned in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs, (and that, too, as a matter by no means out of the common course,) that he was not twelve years old when he came to reside at Oxford. When they enter, they are far less skilled in Latin than boys of the same age at any of our great schools; and with the exception of those educated at one particular school in Edinburgh, they have no Greek. Their acquisition of these languages is not likely to be very rapid under the professors of Greek and Latin, to whose care the University entrusts them; for each of these gentlemen has to do with a class of at least two hundred pupils; and in such a class, it would be impossible to adopt, with the least effect, any other method of teaching than that by formal prælections. Now, of all ways, this is the least adapted for seizing and commanding the attention of a set of giddy urchins, who, although addressed by the name of "Gentlemen," are, in fact, as full of the spirit of boyish romping, as at any previous period of their lives. A slight attempt is sometimes made to keep alive their attention, by examining them the one day concerning what they had heard on the other; and this plan, I understand, begins to be carried into execution, in a more regular way than heretofore. But it is not possible to examine so great a number of boys, either very largely or very closely; and I should be very apprehensive, that their many temptations to idleness must in general overcome, with lit |