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TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



those things which in our older institutions are 

 almost the atmosphere in which education lives, 

 and moves, and has its being. You have them 

 not ; and we do not for a moment underrate the 

 loss. But there are here, at any rate, two mate- 

 rials of education, which may continue through- 

 out life, and which are, perhaps, after all, the 

 only two indispensable elements — the teachers 

 and the taught. 



1. The teachers — let me say something of 

 them. When at Oxford, in my younger days, 

 there were discussions about the reforms of the 

 university ; there was one want which we regarded 

 as supremely felt, and this was the want of pro- 

 fessors, that is to say, of teachers, who might be 

 "as oracles, whereat students might come" in 

 their several branches of knowledge. These were 

 in consequence called into existence, and among 

 you also they exist already. I am not now speak- 

 ing personally of the actual professors, though 

 doubtless your practical experience of them 

 would bear out much of what I say. But I speak 

 of the advantage to any community, to any young 

 man or woman, of being brought into contact 

 with higher intelligences. No operation in the way 

 of external impulse, or stimulus, or instruction, in 

 our passage through this mortal existence, is equal 

 to the impression produced upon us by the contact 

 of intellects and characters superior to ourselves. 

 It is for this reason that a college like yours must 

 always have the chance of contributing, directly 

 and forcibly, to the elevation of those among 

 whom it is placed. A body of men, brought to- 

 gether by the enthusiasm of teaching others, 

 with a full appreciation of great subjects, with an 

 ardent desire of improving not only others but 

 themselves, cannot fail to strike some fire from 

 some one soul or other of those who have the 

 opportunity of thus making their acquaintance. 

 It need not be that we follow their opinions ; the 

 opinions may vanish, but the effect remains. Soc- 

 rates left no school behind him ; the philosophers 

 who followed him were broken into a thousand 

 sections, but the influence and stimulus which 

 Socrates left, never ceased, and have continued 

 till the present hour. If we look for a moment at 

 the records, on the one hand, of aspirations en- 

 couraged, of great projects realized ; or, on the 

 other hand, of lost careers, of broken hopes, how 

 often shall we find that it has been from the pres- 

 ence or from the want of some beneficent, intel- 

 ligent, appreciative mind coming in among the 

 desponding, the distressed, the storm-tossed souls 

 of whom this world contains only too many. To 

 take the example of two poets — one whose grave 



is in the adjacent county, one belonging to your 

 own city — how striking and how comforting is 

 the reflection of the peaceful, useful, and happy 

 close of the life of George Crabbe, the poet ; for 

 eighteen years pastor of Trowbridge ! All that 

 happiness, all that usefulness, he owed to the 

 single fact that, when a poor, forsaken boy in 

 the streets of London, he bethought himself of 

 addressing a letter to Edmund Burke. That great 

 man had the penetration to see that Crabbe was 

 not an impostor — not a fool. He took the poor 

 youth by the hand, he encouraged him, he pro- 

 cured for him the career in which he lived and 

 died. He was, it is hardly too much to say, the 

 instrument of his preservation and of his regen- 

 eration. On the other hand, when, with Words- 

 worth, we think of Chatterton, "the marvelous 

 boy, the sleepless soul that perished in his pride," 

 how impossible it is to avoid the reflection that, 

 if he had met with some congenial sphere, such 

 as this college now presents, some kindly hand 

 to lead him forward, some wise direction (over 

 and above the kindness which he met from per- 

 sonal friends) that might have rescued him from 

 his own desperate thoughts, we should have been 

 spared the spectacle of the premature death of 

 one whose fate will always rank among the tragi- 

 cal incidents of the history not only of Bristol 

 but of England. 



It is too much to expect that there may be a 

 Burke among your professors, or a Chatterton 

 among your pupils. But the hopeful and the 

 melancholy lesson are both worth remembering. 



2. And now, leaving the body of teachers, 

 these two instances remind me to turn to the 

 body of students. I can but plunge in the dark 

 to give any advice, but this much is surely ap- 

 plicable to all of them. I will do my best, and 

 perhaps here and there a word may be useful. 



Bear in mind both the advantages and the 

 disadvantages which the voluntary education of 

 students in after-life involves, by the mere fact 

 of the freedom of choice — freedom in studies, 

 freedom in subjects, freedom of opinions. A 

 self-educated man is, in some respects, the bet- 

 ter, in some respects the worse, for not having 

 been trained in his early years by regular routine. 

 We have an illustration of both the stronger and 

 the weaker side of self-education in the case of 

 Mr. Buckle, the author of the " History of Civili- 

 zation." At the time of his greatest celebrity, it 

 was often remarked that no man who had been 

 at regular schools or universities could, on the 

 one hand, have acquired such an enormous 

 amount of multifarious knowledge, and such a 



