addition to the Principal. The students in each faculty are gathered from far and wide. A considerable nucleus in each consists of Edinburgh natives or residents. Of the rest many are from other parts of Scotland; but a goodly proportion are from England, Ireland, and the Colonies. There is no means of discriminating the students of the different faculties from each other, so long as they are wending their way to the college portico from the surrounding streets, unless it be by the comparative juvenility of most of the students of Arts, and by those minute physiognomic differences which enable an expert to distinguish a jolly young medical from a prematurely-sharp leguleian, and either from the solemn dedicatee to divinity. Nor, indeed, is there any means in Edinburgh of distinguishing between Town and Gown in the streets at all. The taste of modern Athens has disdained, or long discarded, any academic costume for the students. While in Oxford or Cambridge, the townsmen, awed by the constant stream of caps and gowns, must feel themselves but as Vaisyas and Sudras in a city of the Brahmins, and while in all the Scottish University-towns, except Edinburgh, the streets in winter days are made picturesque by the far-seen bits of scarlet on the backs of the students of Arts, in Edinburgh you might walk about the streets all day without knowing that there was a student in it.

On the whole, to a stranger-student from any other part of Scotland the conditions of Edinburgh University, on his first arrival, and for some time afterwards, do seem unsocial. It is not only that the students do not reside in the University, meet at no common table, live in no sets of chambers built for the purpose, but are scattered all over the town, where they will and how they will, in lodgings or with relatives. In this the University of Edinburgh does not differ from the other Scottish Universities. Nor does the absence of academic costume contribute much to the feeling, though it may contribute somewhat. It is partly the numerousness of the

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students, preventing them from ever seeing themselves all together, and obliging their dispersion into classes, meeting simultaneously and independently at all sorts of hours; and partly, I think, it is the chill elegance of the quadrangle itself. For a strangerstudent, after a walk in a dull November morning through a city all otherwise strange, to arrive for the first time in this quadrangle, with its columns, its balustraded stone-walk, and its doors leading he knows not whither, is perhaps a unique experience of inquisitiveness struggling with loneliness. feels that he is committed to a mode of life of which the possibilities are undiscerned, and, in retrudging his way through the streets, thinking of it all, he wonders what is to come of it. What is to come of it! There is to come of it, if all goes well, and the connexion with the University lasts long enough, a love for the University, and a pride in having belonged to it, as great as any man can feel anywhere for the place where he has been educated. Not even the affection of Oxford and Cambridge men for their universities, or for the particular colleges where they had rooms on well-remembered stairs, can exceed that which the alumni of Edinburgh University bear to it, though their recollections of it are not of residence within its walls, but chiefly of attendance on their appointed classes in it for three or four consecutive winters. For the University was not only the building, but the whole student-life of which the building was the centre. The walks and talks with fellowstudents all over the city and about its suburbs, no less than the solitary readings and ruminations of individual students at their firesides, were part of the University, and had their occasion and inspiration from within its walls. And within the walls themselves what memorable things happened! What enthusiasms swept round the cold quadrangle, what glorious scenes there were in its class-rooms, what varied excitement was there communicated, what friendships were formed, what breaks there

were into the woods and forests of knowledge, showing vistas along which it might be a delight to career throughout a long future, till only the sunset of life should close in the enchantment!

Much of the peculiar power and distinction of the Edinburgh University has consisted in its having generally had among its professors contemporaneously two or three men not merely of admirable working ability, but of exceptional genius or greatness. The professorial system, on which this, like the other Scottish Universities, is constituted, certainly has its drawbacks. In these modern times, when the whole encyclopædia of knowledge, in every department, is accessible in books, colleges and universities, it may be plausibly argued, are either of no use, or are of use only in so far as they organize the business of private reading, promote it, direct it, make it more accurate and exquisite, and surround it with splendid moral and sentimental accompaniments. To some extent, in the English Universities, they have conformed to this notion of the universities as a means for organizing, aiding, and drilling private perseverance in reading. They speak there of reading mathematics, reading physics, reading chemistry, reading political economy. The phrase, in this generalized sense, is unknown in Scotland. Pinkerton's complaint, made seventy years ago, that his countrymen, with plenty of natural ingenuity, were unable to turn it to substantial account for lack of a sufficient nutriment of learning, and were often whirling their ingenuity elaborately in vacuo, is true in a great measure yet. Connected with this deficiency, partly as cause, and partly as effect, is that professorial system in the Scottish universities according to which knowledge in the great subjects of liberal study is supposed to be acquired by listening to courses of lectures on those subjects, prepared and delivered by men who have made them especially their own. Aware of the defects of this professorial method, the Scottish Universities have recently been taking pains to remedy them, not only by an increased use of that spur of examina

tions of which there has been so general an application of late throughout the country, but also by introducing as much of the tutorial method as possible in aid of the professorial. And yet, on the other hand, no one whose experience is wide enough to enable him fully to appreciate the merits of both methods but will maintain the enormous superiority, in certain circumstances, and for certain effects, of the professorial over the tutorial. It is not only that the majority of young men will not read and do not read, and that it is at least something if these are physically detained for a session or two in a room where certain orders of notions are kept sounding in the air, and where, unless they are deaf, they must imbibe something of them. In addition to this there is the fact that certain subjects-they are those, I think, which do not consist so much of a perpetually increasing accumulation of matter as of a moving orb of ideas, undergoing internal changes do admit of being more effectively learnt, with something like symmetry and completeness, from competent oral exposition to large numbers at once than from reading under tutorial superintendence. But, whether in these subjects or in any others, the grand advantage of the professorial system lies in the chance it affords of the appearance of men of great intellectual power in a position, relatively to the rising generation, of the utmost conceivable influence. Nowhere is there such an action and reaction of mind, such a kindling and maintenance of high intellectual enthusiasm, as in a university class-room where a teacher whose heart is in his work sees day after day before him a crowded audience of the same youths on the same benches, eager to listen, and to carry away what they can in their note-books. Nowhere is a man more likely to be roused himself by the interest of his subject, and nowhere are the conditions so favourable for the expeditious and permanent conveyance, not only of his doctrines, but of the whole image of himself into other minds. Whenever, accordingly, it does chance that men of exceptionally powerful

personality are found in this position, there society has the benefit of a didactic use of these men incalculably more energetic and intimate than if they had been confined to authorship, or to that comparatively cooler exercise of personal influence for which conversation in short flights with a few at a time affords opportunity. Now, if we were to look for the university whose history has afforded the most striking illustrations of this matchless advantage of the professorial system, what university would suggest itself sooner than that of Edinburgh? There may have been other universities where till lately the drill in Latin and Greek, and the general habits of class-work, were more exact, sound, and business-like. But there has been no university more conspicuously fortunate in the possession always of, say two, or three, or four men simultaneously, of the highest power, shedding lustre over the whole body of their colleagues, and exercising an influence incalculably beyond that of ordinary scholastic reckoning.

Two or three and twenty years ago one of the great attractions in Edinburgh University was the class-room of Dr. Chalmers, called the Divinity Hall. It was on the right of the quadrangle, immediately after entering through the portico from the street, and the access to it was by a narrow flight of stone stairs leading to a kind of stone-gallery looking upon the quadrangle. In this stonegallery, or about the portico and quadrangle, would be lounging at an early hour in the forenoon, waiting the doctor's arrival, the members of his audience. They were mostly young Scotsmen of from eighteen to five-and-twenty, destined for the Scottish Kirk; but there was a considerable sprinkling of young Irish Presbyterians, together with a group of oldish military officers, who, after their service in India or elsewhere, had settled for the quiet evenings of their lives in Edinburgh, and, partly to while away the time, partly from a creditable interest in theological matters awakened at last in their grizzled noddles, had taken to attending Dr. Chalmers's lectures. Occa

sionally there would be a stranger or two of distinction. Punctually a few minutes before the hour the Doctor would arrive among the gathered groups expecting him. His manner on arriving was generally hurried and absent, and he disappeared at once into his vestry or ante-room, there to put on his gown, and his little white Geneva bands, a pair of which he usually kept in an odd brown-covered old volume of Leibnitz that lay handy for the purpose on a side-table. Sometimes one or two of the strangers would follow the Doctor into the vestry to bid him good morning before lecture, but he did not like the intrusion. Meanwhile, the doors of the Hall having been opened, the audience had entered and filled it. It was more like a dingy ill-contrived little chapel than a classroom, having a gallery raised on iron pillars over the back rows of seats so as to darken them, and a pulpit opposite this gallery rising to a level with it. The students, properly so called, the number of whom was from 100 to 130, occupied the seats below, clear of and under the gallery; and in the comparatively empty gallery, not much minded of the Doctor, who generally looked downwards to his students, sat the strangers of distinction and the military veterans. Emerging from the vestry by its private entrance into the Hall, the Doctor, now in his gown and bands, still rather hurried and absentlooking, mounted the pulpit, a sight for any physiognomist to see. Then generally, after a very brief prayer, which he read from a slip of paper, but in such a way that you could hardly detect he was reading, the business of the hour began. Not unfrequently, however, it would turn out that he had forgotten something, and, muttering some hasty intimation to that effect instead of the expected first words of his prayeronce, I am told, it was this surprising communication, delivered with both his thumbs up to his mouth, "My artificial teeth have gone wrong"-he would descend again from the pulpit and go back to his vestry. On such occasions

it was a chance if he did not come upon one or two late comers availing themselves of that quiet means of entrance, engaged while they did sc in the interesting process of measuring their heads with his by furtively examining and trying on his vast hat. Suppose all right, however, and the lecture begun. It was a perfectly unique performance every lecture a revelation, though within so small and dingy a chapel, of all that the world at large had come to wonder at in Chalmers. For the most part he sat and read, either from his manuscript or from some of his printed books, from which he had a most dexterous art of helping himself to relevant passages-sat and read, however, with such a growing excitement of voice and manner that whether he was reading or not reading was never thought of. But every now and then he would interrupt his reading, and, standing up, and catching off his spectacles so that they hung from his little finger, he would interject, with much gesticulation, and sometimes with a flushing of the face, and an audible stamping of the foot, some little passage of extempore exposition or outburst. No one lecture passed in which the class was not again and again agitated by one of those nervous shocks which came from Chalmers's oratory whenever and about whatsoever he spoke in other public places. Clamours of applause had, indeed, become habitual in the classroom; and, as, in spite of their apparent indecorousness in such a place, they were justifiable by the audience on the plain principle, "If you lecture like that, then we must listen like this," he had been obliged to let them occur. Only at the natural moments, however, would he tolerate such interruptions. He was sensitive to even a whisper at other times, and kept all imperiously hushed by an authority that did not need to assert itself. To describe the matter of his lectures would be more difficult than to give an idea of their form. It was called Theology, and there certainly was a due attempt to go over the topics of a theological course,

with frequent references to Butler, Paley, Jonathan Edwards, the Theologia Elenctica of Turretin, and, by way of general text-book, to Dr. George Hill's Lectures in Divinity. But really it was a course of Chalmers himself, and of Chalmers in all his characters. Within two or three consecutive sessions, if not in one, every listener was sure to be led so completely and with so much commotion through the whole round of Chalmers's favourite ideas, that, if he remained ignorant of any one of them or unsaturated with some tincture of them all, it could only be because he was a miracle of impassiveness. But through all and over all was the influence of a nature morally so great that by no array and exposition of its ideas, repeated never so often, could it be exhausted, and by no inventory of them represented. Merely to look at him day after day was a liberal education.

One of Chalmers's colleagues in the Theological Faculty of the University (in which faculty there were then but three professors in all) was a certain clerical old gentleman, with a great squab bald head, fat pinkish-white cheeks, portly and punctiliously clean general appearance, and very fat calves neatly encased in black stockings, who professed to teach the Oriental languages. Considering the little I have to say of him, I need not name him; but we used to call him sometimes "The Rabbi," in compliment to his Orientalism generally, and sometimes "Waw," from a certain occult idea of the fitness of the name of one of the Hebrew letters, as pronounced by himself, to represent the total worth of his existence. How so fat-faced and placid a man, in such specklessly-clean linen and apparel, should have been so near an approach to Inutility personified, I do not know; but, to this day, when I think of the matter, it is one of the most baffling problems that have come across me personally, what reason there was, I will not say for the Rabbi's existence on earth, but for his existence in the position of Professor of Oriental Languages in the University of Edinburgh. He

had been appointed to the post as long ago as 1813, and I suppose there were then some authorities whose business it was to make such appointments. It was within our knowledge also that he was the widower of a lady who had been of some distinction as a novelist at a time when lady-novelists were rarer than they are now, that he cherished her memory in his old age with a fond and faithful affection, and that, in his own house, he was a kindly, innocent old gentleman, who had one or two pet cats and fed them at his breakfast-table. Moreover he had been a parish-clergyman-in which capacity, for aught I know, he may have been most exemplary and worthy of all respect. I speak of him only as Professor of Oriental Languages; and, in the conjoint names of Gesenius, Renan, and Max Müller, I will have my say about the Rabbi, dead though he is, in this capacity. For thirtyfive years he was the man upon whom the Kirk of Scotland depended, so far as the metropolitan university was concerned, for the teaching of Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Persic. I forget whether Arabic was included in his course, but it is all the same whether it was or was not. As for the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Persic, if the Syriac, Chaldee, and Persic alphabets had been written out on pieces of paper, and these pieces of paper had been steeped in a bucket of water, and each student of the Rabbi's had drunk a tumblerful of the water, that would have been about the metaphorical measure of the Syriac, the Chaldee, and the Persic that the Rabbi contrived to impart. But take the Hebrew, on which naturally would be laid the stress. We were, I can answer for it, a docile set of students, willing, and even eager, to learn anything that offered itself with a touch of human interest; and we were bound by rule to attend the Rabbi two years. Yet I undertake to say, with the most literal exactness, that, so far as it depended on attendance on the Rabbi during these two years, all that was acquired, or that it was possible to acquire, of Hebrew scholarship might

have been acquired by six evenings of sleepy inspection of the Hebrew grammar and the Hebrew Bible at home. What do I remember of the class? I remember the Rabbi in his chair, looking listless and placidly-peevish, as if he thought the whole thing a discomfort, and wanted to be home to his cats. I remember the insipidity of the Hebrew according to his wretched system of pronunciation, which neglected the points, stuck in an indefinite sound of the vowel e between every two consecutive consonants, and made the great unutterable name sound as a series of the feeblest human vowels, IEUE. I remember that, with one or two exceptions, easy to be accounted for apart from the Rabbi's influence, none of us, when called up to read to the Rabbi, could construe or translate three lines of Hebrew, unless he had a torn leaf of the English Bible clandestinely inserted in the Hebrew volume by way of help. I remember, in short, that it was a disgust and weariness to us all, and that from no fault of our own, but from a perfectly just estimate of the possibilities here afforded us by a great university, for fees which we had paid down, of learning what we were compelled at least to profess to learn within its walls. Perhaps my own most vivid recollections of the Rabbi's class-room are of letters to friends which I wrote in it, by way of an economy of time that would otherwise have been useless, and of a large course of reading, on the same principle, in books of witchcraft, which I took with me for the purpose, beginning with Defoe's "History of the Devil." In justice to myself, I must beg the reader to believe that, from mere respect for routine, I would have given the work of the class the preference, had I been able to see there was any. Now there would be no need for such behaviour. The opportunities of instruction in Hebrew and its cognates now furnished by the Scottish Universities are as good, I believe, as any in the kingdom; and in Edinburgh University there has been recently founded, in addition to the gene