and Trigonometry; Secondly, The Differential and Integral Calculus and its applications; Thirdly, Mechanics, including also reference to the solar system, and embracing the substance of the three first sections of Newton's Principia, which are also read in the original forms; Fourthly, Principles of Hydrostatics, Optics and Plane Astronomy. The examinations take place twice a year. Prizes are given for the encouragement of composition in prose and verse, in Latin and English. There are also public scholarships which operate as rewards and encouragements of general proficiency and particular acquirements. These include Classical Literature, Mathematics, Hebrew, and Law. The university also affords facilities for the acquirement of various branches which do not enter into the qualification for a degree. Thus the several professors of geology, chemistry, and many other branches of science, are always provided with classes, often with numerous ones.

"We now proceed to the college preparation for public examinations. It is this that really constitutes an Oxford education. The process of instruction in the colleges, is by means of recitations. Every head of a house appoints a certain number of tutors for the purpose. Questions are put by the tutor, and remarks are made by him on the book which is the subject of study. He also gives directions as to the proper mode of studying. The students usually attend two, or three, or four tutors, who thus instruct in different branches. The college tutor moreover has interviews from time to time with his pupils, separately, to ascertain the individual's state of preparation, to assist him in his difficulties, &c. Besides these college tutors, however, there are private tutors, who look after the studies of individuals, and prepare them for attendance on the exercises of the college tutors. These private tutors are very useful to that large class of students who go to college prepared insufficiently The course of college instruction closes at the end of each

term with a formal examination of each member separately, by the head and tutors who assemble for this purpose. This summing up is called technically collections or terminals. Each student presents himself in turn with the books in which he has received instruction during the term, and in many colleges with the essays and other exercises which he has written, his analysis of any scientific works, abridgments, histories, &c. In some colleges the students are. required to present some book also in which they have not been taught during the term. Besides the other studies pursued in the colleges, the students write weekly short essays on a given subject, occasionally interchanged with a copy of Latin verses for those skilled in Latin versification. The liberality of donors has enabled the colleges to provide, indirectly, for the promotion of study, by means of exhibitions, scholarships, and fellowships. Every college and hall examines, if it thinks fit, its own candidates for admission, and pronounces, each according to a standard of its own, of their fitness, or unfitness for the university. The university has public examinations of its own, called responsions, for members who have been matriculated, not less than six, nor more than nine terms. These are conducted, principally, with a view to ascertain the elementary knowledge of the student, rather than his progress in those branches of learning which he is supposed to be pursuing." The same journal states that the necessary incidental expenses at Oxford amount, usually, to about ninety pounds in the year. The whole cost, even to an economical student, is estimated by McCulloch, at two hundred pounds to two hundred and fifty pounds per annum, exclusive of the private tutor's fee-fifty pounds.*

* The whole Revenues of Oxford, Cambridge, and Dublin, were stated in 1838 to be

Oxford Colleges...L.152,670 University.........L. 22,000 Total.........L.174,670

Cambridge ditto

Dublin ditto......

133,268 Ditto

31500 Ditto

16,000 Ditto......... 149,268 Ditto......... 31500

I shall now briefly conclude this chapter with a hasty allusion to the general current of school education, which may be said to have scarcely flowed through Europe in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. The pool was indeed nearly stagnant, but the angel was about to trouble the waters, and from the new movement by which the fifteenth century was torn, there has arisen a fountain of knowledge, welling forth, and distributing unutterable benefits, to the whole human race. It may be doubted whether except in Divine Revelation, any great gain to mankind, has been unattended by evil; but it never can be doubted that of all the achievements of the human mind, quick and cheap printing is the one which has proved the most universal benefactor.

Humanly speaking, it has disencumbered thought of the trammels of space, accident and time, and the accumulating periods and experiences of man, do but add to the facilities which this simple key has furnished for the opening of the treasure-house of nature. I have yet however to mention one or two facts anterior to the era of modern civilization proper; an era which may fairly be said to have commenced with the invention of printing, or about 1450, when the Mazarine Bible was prepared.

I have already alluded to the unsatisfactory method which was practised in Europe in procuring teachers for the scattered schools in each country :- -I may add that further abuses crept in, and made that system unseemly in operation, which was at first ill-digested in theory.

The elder pupils of classes often travelled in bands throughout the continent, pretending to mysterious powers and practising on the credulity or weakness of those who seemed to offer convenient facilities for being duped. They sometimes performed plays, and were thence called. histriones; sometimes they were known as idlers, (vacantivi;) occasionally they took with them younger pupils, whose

duties seem to have been to supply by theft, any deficiencies which might occur in the amount of the disreputable gains of the party.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these vacantivi were numerous in Germany, and it is not surprising that they were often as ignorant as they pretended to be learned :— frequently they were unable to construe Latin, and yet to teach it was one of the simplest of their professions. They wore swords (being students) and were choleric and impatient of insult; and all their quarrels were decided by an appeal to arms. One of Luther's complaints in the sixteenth century was against the vagrants who were appointed teachers.

Thus distractedly and insufficiently were supplied the means of education in the times I speak of;-efforts were doubtless made by distinguished men who sought to redeem their age from the disgrace of ignorance, and it cannot be said that these efforts were fruitless. By Lorenzo de Medicis, his son Leo X., the German Reformers in the early part of the sixteenth century, the counter-irritation of the Jesuits, whose educational efforts ought not to be lightly esteemed, the labors of the Piarists, and by many more confined, but no less laudable exertions, a love of letters was preserved amongst mankind; but it must be admitted that the tendency of every educational effort made previous to the formation of the American New England Colonies was limited in its scope. The bulk of the people were beyond the pale of learning; the treasure-house was not open to them, and it was not looked upon as their right to possess a key to the stores of truth. The utter ignorance in which the working classes were plunged, may perhaps excuse, if it cannot justify, the manner in which they were debarred from all intellectual enjoyment. Let any one picture to himself the long winter nights in those climates in which darkness reigns double the number of the hours of the day, and let him then reflect

upon the stolid and moping frame of mind which would ensue, if a family, unable to read, and excluded from conversation about foreign countries, were now to be shut up and hemmed in with the ordinary restrictions of the fifteenth century.

Even those who could read, amongst the upper classes, found it no light task to buy a book, and how could the poor expect such a possession? Cheerless indeed was the lot of the peasantry, to whom our countryman Gray thus beautifully alludes:

But knowledge to their eyes her ample page,
Rich with the spoils of time, did ne'er unroll;
Chill penury repressed their noble rage,

And froze the genial current of their soul.

Milton was as little bent on perpetuating the distinctions of class as any writer of his time, but, in his treatise on education, it is manifest that he considers the boon of learning to be one to which "noble and gentle youth" only can hope to aspire. As a fit introduction to a narration of what was done by his fellow Puritans across the Atlantic, I shall, however, quote his graphic description of the uses of education. "The end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents, by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the nearest, by possessing our souls of true virtue, which, being united to the heavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest perfection. But because our understanding cannot found itself but on sensible things, nor arrive so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be followed in all discreet teaching."