there is scarcely any subject on which they cannot attend good lectures, if the names I have mentioned are not inferior to those of the professors at Oxford and Cambridge, it may still be an evil, but it is a very minor evil, that the courses of lectures stand in no connexion with the institution which goes by the name of the London University. For all practical purposes, we have in London a teaching University: the task before us is nothing so difficult as that of creating such an institution from the beginning.

What then is it which in London we still want, if it is not a teaching body nor teaching power? We want first, what we can only hope gradually to acquire, the confidence of the public. If teaching is to be had in London as good as anywhere else, sooner or later this will become known, but it is not admitted at present. In some departments indeed, for example, natural science, it is acknowledged ; but in the old traditional subjects of education, classics and mathematics, the common opinion is that London instruction is a make-shift for those who cannot take the Oxford or Cambridge course, or else a tolerable preparation for it. An opinion like this is not to be combated by any changes in arrangement or organization; it lies with the teachers themselves to root it out by patient work. But secondly, we want student-life, its sociability and healthy enjoyments. Mr. Bagehot was not called upon to notice this, as Mr. Arnold had not referred to it; and indeed the London University may fairly consider such a matter beyond its province. But individual members of it, and persons interested in it, should not neglect the subject. They should consider, not indeed how student-life may be created, for even London science cannot yet create life, but how the hindrances which prevent it from springing up may be removed. The isolation of London students, the savage independence in which every London college continues with respect to every other college, these are very real evils. When you bring, for any purpose, a large number of men together, their comfort ought surely to be earnestly considered. This may not be in the province of the London University, but I hope it is in somebody's province. It is the first merit of an army to be efficient and to defeat the enemy; but an army should also be well fed and as comfortable as possible. Let a University by all means be in the first place studious, but if it wishes to secure the love of its students, and to be permanently prosperous, it will also take some pains to provide that they may not pine in isolation and ennui.

But now I come to the third great point of difference between London and other Universities, in which it is disputed between Mr. Bagehot and Mr. Arnold whether London has the inferior

or the superior system. In Mr. Bagehot's language, it is that the London University has nothing to do with tuition; in language practically more correct, it is that in London there is a class of teachers and a class of examiners, but the teachers do not examine, and the examiners do not teach. Now I confess I am surprised at Mr. Bagehot's admiration for this system, at least, at the reason he gives for his admiration. He regards it as the only contrivance by which examinations can be raised above suspicion of partiality. I wish he had been more explicit, and feel that I may misunderstand him. His words are these, "If you want a University which is trusted without suspicion to decide on the results of tuition, because it has no share in tuition, you must not let it begin to interfere in tuition." Again, he speaks of "a University without tuition, and therefore conferring degrees without favour and without the suspicion of favour," as "an English creation of the first magnitude.'

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There is an important ambiguity in the word "favour." It may be called favour when an examiner lowers the standard for all the candidates, and so makes the degree a thing easily won for all people alike. Or, again, it is favour when an examiner favours some candidates more than others. Which kind of favour Mr. Bagehot supposes to be caused by combining the functions of tutor and examiner, I cannot feel certain. He may mean that the tutor-examiner will lower the standard generally, in order to tempt people to come to the University and so increase the numbers of his own college among others, or that he will endeavour to aggrandize his own College at the expense of the others by passing his own pupils on easier terms. The word favour suits, I think, the latter sort of corruption best; the former should rather be called laxity.

Now if it is laxity that Mr. Bagehot means, I think it is true that the London University has avoided this evil in part-examinations more completely than the older Universities. The standard for the Ordinary Degree at Cambridge was, till the recent reform, contemptibly low, and probably this laxity was caused in a great measure by the influence of the Colleges in the University Examinations. It was a wish to keep their lists full that College tutors concealed, under the plausible pretext, that it was desirable that the rich idlers of the country should have a University education. But then, such laxity can only be practised in a long-established University, of which the degrees have already acquired a traditional value. If the London University had given its degrees from the beginning with laxity, they would never have acquired any value. It was absolutely necessary to make them respectable by strictness; it has

been as much the interest of the London University to be strict as it has been the interest of Cambridge and Oxford to be lax. I grant, however, to Mr. Bagehot that after the London degrees had once acquired a value, there might be a temptation, if the examiners were chosen from the tutors of certain Colleges who exclusively furnished the examiners, gradually to lower the standard.

But if Mr. Bagehot means by favour a partiality to some candidates in preference to others, I deny altogether that the London University either has or deserves to have a higher character in this respect than Oxford or Cambridge. A higher character it cannot have, for Cambridge, and I should think Oxford also, is not open to any suspicion whatever of this kind of partiality. It is scarcely ever, if ever, even whispered by scandal at Cambridge that an examiner has shown partiality to his own pupils. Nor is the peculiar system adopted in London at all better calculated to prevent injustices of this sort than the ordinary one. For in London, though the examiners are not chosen out of the tutors, yet a tutor is not ineligible to an examinership; on the contrary, many tutors are also examiners, and they might be guilty of partiality with much more security than at Cambridge, where every examination is watched by a multitude of jealous and critical eyes.

Whichever way Mr. Bagehot is to be understood, his principle requires, if it is to be fully carried out, the absolute ineligibility to examinerships of all persons engaged in tuition. For once allow the tutorial element to creep in, and it may not only bring with it the partiality, or at least, the suspicion of partiality, which it is the first object of the system to exclude, but also it may obviously in the end bring with it general laxity. For the majority of men competent to be examiners, are actually engaged in tuition, and therefore, the tutorial interest, if not rigidly excluded, will always tend to become predominant.

The advantages then of this differentiation of tutor and examiner are very questionable. Let us now glance at the disadvantages. Examination is a difficult art, and I should lay it down as a general rule, that no one can examine well who has never been, nor long after he has ceased to be, a teacher. Profound knowledge of a subject does not qualify a man to examine in

it; the main thing wanted is a clear conception of the different stages of proficiency in it, that is, an accurate notion of the amount of knowledge of it that can be acquired in a given time. And this a man rapidly loses when he becomes master of his subject; for his own knowledge does not remain within his mind in the same order in which it entered it, but rearranges

itself on an entirely different principle. Only by watching other minds in the process of acquiring the subject, that is to say, only by teaching, can he retain or recover that perfection of stages or gradations which is the special qualification of an examiner. Any arrangements, therefore, which tend to place the function of examination in the hands of men who are not teachers, tend to injure the examination. And this it is evident that the London University feels. As a matter of fact, most of its examiners are teachers. And then what becomes of Mr. Bagehot's boast of impartiality? At the London University, just as much as at Cambridge, teachers examine their own pupils.

Again, is it a good thing that there should be a total want of rapport between the teaching class and the examining body? For my part, though I see some evils, I see many advantages in the Cambridge and Oxford system, by which the same body of men are at different times tutors and examiners. This is not collusion, as a suspicious public may think, but simply a harmony between the two parts of a system. It is a provision that the tutors may really know what it is their business to teach, and the students what they are expected to study. If there is no understanding between examiners and teachers the greatest injustice may be done, and the greatest confusion may be produced. The examiner may use one text-book of the subject and the candidates another; the examiner may hold some peculiar view, or may have specially studied some particular subdivision of the subject in which he examines, and pluck ruthlessly all, who without any fault of theirs, may not have given their attention to the same points. It is not good for examiners more than for any other class of men to be despotic; at Cambridge they are controlled by a watchful public opinion of teachers, and though I find fault with many of the Cambridge arrangements, I have never observed that this particular one works ill.

Examination reacts powerfully upon teaching. An examiner who is not under some external control, has not merely a judicial but a sort of legislative power in education. He does not merely pronounce upon the soundness or accuracy of teaching, but he prescribes more or less the methods that are to be used, and even in some cases the doctrines that are to be taught. And even when the single examiner has not so much power, yet the examining body as a whole possesses it. I can illustrate this from my own experience. I am a teacher of Latin, and my pupils annually go to be examined at Burlington House. Now the London University sets papers only in certain fixed Latin authors, or parts of Latin authors. This may be a good plan, and the selection may have been made judiciously. But whether VOL. I.

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it is so or not, by adopting this plan the London University practically commands me to lecture on certain books, and forbids me to lecture on others. I may of course, and sometimes do, resist this law, but when I do so I have to submit to punishment. The question how Latin may best be taught is in a great degree taken out of my hands.

Of course the same is true of all other teachers, and it is not in itself a legitimate grievance, because it is unavoidable. When I was a teacher at Cambridge, I was under precisely similar restraints. But then at Cambridge the restraints were not imposed by an alien body. I myself belonged to the class by which the examination was conducted. Now I am governed by persons whom I never see, and of whom I know nothing. This is the actual working of that sundering of examination and tuition of which Mr. Bagehot boasts. It makes the teacher feel the examiner a tyrant.

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Some of the restraints the University imposes I feel very irkIf they could see how injuriously their Matriculation Examination affects my junior class, they would understand my feelings. But by the operation of Mr. Bagehot's law, I know nothing of them and they know nothing of me, and the students suffer for it.

Still whatever may be the disadvantages of the system, if it is absolutely necessary to prevent laxity in pass-examinations, I shall admit that much may be said for it. And I know that the tendency of pass-examinations to laxity is not easy to counteract. But I ask, is it absolutely necessary, in order that the examiners may not be tempted to give degrees too easily, that not merely the examiners but the examining institution itself should be entirely insulated, and that there should exist no recognised channel of intercommunication between it and the teaching bodies who cannot throw off its yoke?

Meanwhile we may be glad that the London University has been discussed by one who understands it so familiarly, and is so well able to make others understand what he understands himself as Mr. Bagehot. Under such able instruction the public may perhaps at last find out what this paradoxical institution is. I wonder whether, had the House of Commons clearly known what the London University is and does, and what, according to Mr. Bagehot, it must always continue to be and to do, they would have given it a member. Did they know that they were giving a member to an examination? Never surely was such a curious experiment in representation made! The constituencies of Oxford and Cambridge are sufficiently nondescript, including as they do men who have forgotten their University, who never spent more than three years at it, and who have only paid flying