524 Notes of the Month on [May, 
Tt is done, your Grace.” 
“ Yes, faith, soles and all. Ay, I see every creature is good. for 
something. Now. begone, and never let me see that culprit face of 
' yours again.” 
We have long held in supreme scorn academic reputations, no matter 
how they were built, whether on the waggon-wheel verse of a Seatonian 
prize, the adust puzzling of a compend of Aristotle, the plunder of a 
regiment of obsolete sermons to fabricate a Bampton lecture, the transla- 
tion of a French algebraist, or the accumulation of all the dull, dry, in- 
compatible meanings that ever overpowered a classic through ten genera- 
tions of the Heynés, Schweighausers, and other barbarians of the land of 
beer and Meershaums. On those we look with irresistible scomm. We hear 
the triumphant flapping of their academic plumage as we hear the wings 
‘of a flight of crows from a church-yard. ‘They are the obscene plunderers 
of the dead ; the air refuses their weight, the day rejects them ; and their 
‘first flight from the towers and houses, where the “ moping owl doth to 
the moon complain,” is sure to drop them into the first mire that they 
‘could by possibility reach. It is nothing to the purpose to quote the 
great names that have issued from our halls and colleges. Where almost 
every man in the kingdom, who is not intended for a soldier or a shoe- 
maker, either goes himself, or sends his son, some must figure in the 
world, unless it be conceded that the University crushes the human 
mind into a conspicuous and irrecoverable stupidity: and this we will 
allow, is very closely borne out by the facts of the case. But still, in 
‘the mercy of nature or its scorn, bold spirits have come out from Uni- 
Versities from time to time, and Milton could not be extinguished by an 
University, though to the last hour of his life he hated it, wrote against 
it, and laboured to substitute a higher system for its sluggish formalities. 
Locke could not be extinguished by an University, though ke could be 
expelled. Newton knew all he ever knew, before his University knew 
any thing. What did Pitt—father, or son—Fox, Grattan, Canning, 
Burke, the richest mind of them all, owe to an University? But, to 
come to the living hour. 
We have had passing under our eyes a most tremendous crisis, which 
stirred, as it ought to stir, the feeling of the country, from its uttermost 
depths: which has been declared to peril, still more with every hour, 
‘the whole fabric of those rights which alone make it better to live 
than to die, without which the proudest noble of the land is a slave, and 
may be a beggar at the will of his fellow ; for as sure as there is a heaven 
above us, the admission of popery into the legislature has not been for 
love to the papists. Yet what evidence of mind have our Universities 
given in this crisis? Where are the bold orators, the vigorous sages, the 
accomplished youth, the spirits of patriots rising from the study of 
ancient wisdom and courage, to lead the trembling and perplexed genera~ 
tion up to the path of glory, from which art and corruption have 
estranged them? Not one, not one man has started from those strong ~ 
holds of knowledge and religion. Ay, one man has, and he has come 
with his robe of office on his shoulders, to declare that “ idolators are 
hot guilty of idolatry!’ Where are the bright and shining lights that 
«vere to awake and guide the land? Like the Eastern echo, when ‘the 
voice is uttered, « Where are they >” the answer is, “ Where?” «Of Cam- 
bridge, as a body, the trial is yet to be made. And we must hope’that 
