560 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



stay at the university, owed little or nothing 

 to the studies of the place. Southey says he 

 only learned to swim there badly ; Byron 

 was ruined there ; and the beautiful genius 

 of Shelley found there, instead of the help 

 and guidance it so much needed, only cruel 

 and ignominious abuse. Keats, some of 

 whose exquisite poems breathe the very spirit 

 of classical antiquity, was a stable-keeper's 

 son, and never studied at public school or 

 university. England's eminent surgeons and 

 physicians are not university men ; and what 

 is it that in that country keeps theology so 

 far behind all other sciences, but the fact 

 that the clergy are the only profession who 

 are compelled to subject their minds to the 

 full " dementalizing " power of Oxford train- 

 ing? What power less potent could produce 

 the bigotry of an English High -Church 

 bishop ? I am not forgetful of the eminent 

 names that may be produced on the other 

 side; but, even in regard to these, the ques- 

 tion must always he asked, How far was their 

 eminence due to their education ? The real 

 relation in which the English schools and 

 universities stand to her greatest minds, even 

 in the past, and the share which university 

 teaching really had in training them, is a 

 problem that still needs elucidation. " We 

 are not sure," says the present Lord Brough- 

 am, writing in 1826, " whether the result of 

 the investigation would be so favorable as 

 is commonly supposed to Oxford and Cam- 

 bridge. And of this we are sure, that many 

 persons, who, since they have risen to emi- 

 nence, are perpetually cited as proofs of the 

 beneficial tendency of English education, 

 were at college never mentioned but as idle, 

 frivolous men, fond of desultory reading, and 

 negligent of the studies of the place. It 

 would be indelicate to name the living ; but 

 we may venture to speak more particularly 

 of the dead. It is truly curious to observe 

 the use that is made, in such discussions, of 

 names which we acknowledge to be glorious, 

 hut in which the colleges have no reason to 

 glory that of Bacon, who reprobated their 

 fundamental constitution ; of Dry den, who 

 abjured his Alma Mater, and regretted that 

 he had passed his youth under her care ; of 

 Locke, who was censured and expelled ; of 

 Milton, whose person was outraged at one 

 university, and whose works were committed 

 to the flames at the other. 



It may, perhaps, be argued that many of 

 the M uneducated " men whom I have been 

 enumerating would have been the better for 

 a university training. For a true university 

 training, no doubt they would one that 

 would have developed all their powers har- 



moniously, while it gave full play to their 

 special genius. With the advocates of such 

 a training, I have here no controversy ; I 

 will even grant that many of these writers, 

 in spite of their genius, betray the faults 

 which are wont to mark the self-educated 

 man. But would it have been better for Mr. 

 Buckle himself if, by a long course of non- 

 sense-verses, the attempt had been made to 

 flatter and polish him down to the regulation 

 standard of Oxford mediocrity ? Mr. Buckle 

 at least stimulates us to think ; can as much 

 be said of Oxford bishops ? There is a pas- 

 sage in a recently published book of travels 

 in Eussia, by Professor Piazzi Smyth, the 

 Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, which bears 

 on this question and records a somewhat sur- 

 prising conclusion. Describing a conversa- 

 tion he had with that eminent astronomer, 

 Struve, as to the results of their experience 

 in university teaching, both agreed that on 

 many points further inquiry was greatly 

 needed ; but Professor Struve said that " this 

 conclusion had been drawn independently 

 by so many differently circumstanced men 

 in the Eussian and German-Baltic provinces, 

 from the general impressions which their 

 recollections gave them, that there could be 

 little doubt of its containing much truth 

 truth, too, of a startling character : the first 

 hoys at school disappear at the colleges, and 

 those ivho are first in the colleges disappear in 

 the world." I am not sure that a similar 

 conclusion would not follow from a similar 

 investigation into our own, as well as into 

 English and German academical history, and 

 that it would not be found that the men most 

 useful and successful in after-life were not 

 those who had placed themselves most fully 

 under the influence of college training, or 

 been stimulated to exertion by mere hope of 

 college rewards, but those who had been mos^ 

 successful in escaping its narrowing influences, 

 while, on the other hand, they had also es- 

 caped the still greater dangers of idleness and 

 dissipation in the formative period of their 

 history men who had cast from them the 

 trammels of pedantry, and with independent 

 energy marked out their own career. 



We publish the first of a series of 

 articles on some of the political tend- 

 encies of the times, by Herbert Spen- 

 cer. The present paper, though treat- 

 ing of affairs in England, and there- 

 fore full of English illustrations, will be 

 found to have a bearing upon urgent 

 questions in this country, and to in- 



