280 Darwinism and Other Essays. 



of Englishmen in the present age men like Mill 

 and Huxley, Garnett and Grote have not been 

 educated at the universities. But this accusation 

 is exaggerated and somewhat irrelevant ; for the 

 competitive system is a very modern institution, 

 and the great scholars just mentioned are in no 

 way the contemporaries of those brought up un- 

 der it. Yet, if we are to reason in this way, it 

 must be said that England has no cause to be 

 ashamed of the array of illustrious scholars which 

 she has to show for the nineteenth century. And 

 most of them have been university men who have 

 graduated either with high honours, or at least 

 with credit. 



It is not so much, however, by the number of 

 great scholars which it turns out, as by the gen- 

 eral standard of intelligence among its graduates, 

 that the system of a university is to be judged. 

 A man who lives to edit Lucretius or Aristotle, 

 as Mr. Munro and Sir A. Grant have done, will 

 most likely in his college days study for the sake 

 of study, and the competitive or any other system 

 can exert but a transient effect upon him. The 

 English universities afford great facilities to a 

 young man who desires to study in earnest, and 

 is already a scholar in embryo. But the question 

 which here especially concerns us is, What is the 



