London. The whole nomenclature of the subject has become hopelessly confused; but in none of these colleges is there that living together of the students which is the proper mark of a college.

The scheme, therefore, of creating a University for Manchester has very properly resolved itself into a scheme for enlarging Owens College.

The literary and scientific institutes which exist in so many of our large towns might, I believe, be raised by a gradual pro cess into universities. They begin with a library, and sometimes a museum; next they add popular lectures: now they have only to take one step further to become universities. Let them open regular classes, and instead of detached popular lectures by strangers on scientific or literary subjects, let them have permanent resident lecturers to expound some of the sciences continuously and methodically. If really able men were chosen, they would in great part support themselves by fees; if not altogether, small endowments might be provided for them; the money would certainly be forthcoming out of the stores of local philanthropy.*

But it will be asked, what good results are to be expected from this extension of the university system? The results are, the increase of the class of savants, and the dispersion of it over the country.

A high national cultivation requires that the class of savants should be increased. What depresses original research in England most is, that it is scarcely possible to get a livelihood by it. Year by year, the men formed by nature to make discoveries and extend the bounds of knowledge, abandon their true vocation for one by which they can live. The youth who was the admiration of his university, and who seemed born that the world at last might know something-where do you find him twenty years after? An overworked barrister, making a fortune for himself, but doing no more for the world than others, or perhaps an overworked schoolmaster. The nation should learn to prize genius more than it does, should make more room for it, and save it from the danger to which in this country it is always exposed, of standing idle in the market-place, because no man has hired it. This, however, it may be said, might be done without founding new universities, by extending and reforming the old. But there is an evil in centralizing learning too much. If you draw away to one or two centres

* See an admirable pamphlet by Mr. R. S. Watson, of Newcastle, entitled, " A Plan for making the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle more extensively useful as an Educational Institution."

all the ability which shows itself anywhere in the country, you deprive the provinces of the culture they had a fair right to you condemn them to be provincial for ever. At present, if a man of genius shows himself anywhere, his native district or town derives no benefit from him; he is appropriated for life by London, or by Oxford or Cambridge. Some compensation ought to be given to the provinces for the heavy tax thus levied upon them. At least, every great centre of population ought to have a few resident savants regularly delivering lectures, so that something like a university education might be everywhere easily procurable; and the means of improving their knowledge might be afforded to men in business. "For the want of this at present," says Mr. Arnold, Liverpool and Leeds are mere overgrown provincial towns, while Strasburg and Lyons are European cities."

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So much, then, in favour of founding new universities. There are, of course, the same reasons for making the most of those which already exist. Let me apply what has been said of the nature and objects of a university to London. If, as I have said, the British Museum is a university; if every hospital is a medical university; if the Royal Academy is a university of Art; if besides these there exist in London a number of socalled colleges, in which the fundamental condition of the university system is fulfilled-namely, that the teacher is not absorbed in teaching, but has leisure for study and research; lastly, if London is the head-quarters of all those learned societies-which are universities in the purest rudimentary form-may we not justly say that London contains the chaos of the vastest university in the world, and that little more than a word is wanting to call that university into being? These multitudinous institutions have but to unite-nay, they have but to will to unite, and the thing is done. If I may use a bold figure, London, the head of the empire, conceals behind its capacious forehead an intricate network of nerves, in the convolutions of which go on thought, observation, speculation, but no one has thought of giving a name to the mass. Let us once learn to think of it as a whole, and we shall see that it is the brain of the country.

Let us contemplate for a little this new "Grand Etre." Let us think of its merits, and then of its defects. We shall find, I think, that the former are fundamental, and the latter, though serious, superficial and remediable.

First, then, it is a true seat of learning. It will hardly be denied that London, as the necessary consequence of its metropolitan character, contains by far the largest number of learned men of any town in England. In London more than anywhere

else scientific research is organized. London saw in the establishment of the Royal Society the first great English scientific movement-the spirit of Bacon taking flesh again. This movement has ever since gone on increasing in the metropolis. Scarcely an evening passes over London that does not see in some part of it the leading savants of some special department of science sitting in council, intent upon nothing but the discovery of truth, assisting and criticising each other's studies.

Secondly, London alone is not only a seat of learning, but at seat of all learning. In Cambridge, mathematics and classical philology are at home; in Oxford, ancient philosophy and history: but in London, it cannot be said that any one subject is sacrificed to any other. Law and medicine this university almost monopolizes. It places modern literatures, histories, and philosophies by the side of ancient. It pursues the study of Nature with minute division of labour, with a large staff of investigators, and a large number of eager students. It comprises the only English school of the Fine Arts. It was here that Reynolds inaugurated among Englishmen the cultus of beauty; and the one great artistic movement that England has yet witnessed-the pre-Raphaelite movement-could only have arisen among London students.

Thirdly, it is a university for all classes and creeds. It has remedied the great injustice of our history, by which dissenters from the prevailing religion were punished with ignorance and want of education for themselves and for their children to the fourth generation. Its schools being for the most part cheap, and such as could be attended for short or long periods at pleasure and, by Londoners at least, without leaving home, it has been a serviceable Middle Class University; and if it has not been practically much used by the aristocracy, and has thus lost the beneficial influence of their refinement, it has been saved, at the same time, from the infection of their idleness. One result of the excitement of '48, was the establishment in London of a College for Working Men, in which every one who is acquainted with it will acknowledge the existence of a real intellectual life, and from which has since sprung another, founded on the same principles, for the south side of London.

Lastly, it is a university for both sexes. As London is the most advantageous place for all new movements, the leaders of the insurrection of women have made it their chief stronghold; London early recognised them as belligerents. It has two colleges for ladies, and a college for working women. In admitting women to examinations, London has been somewhat outstripped by Cambridge, but it is making up for lost time.

Let us now look for a moment to the other side of the

picture. Those who have studied the history of Oxford and Cambridge, know that the great disease to which they have been subject has been the tendency of the colleges to become independent units, isolating themselves from each other, and weakening the original and far more important unity of the university. A system of college exclusiveness has tended to lower the tone of the teaching and the standard of attainment. Still, the great unity of the university was too conspicuous to be ever utterly lost sight of. Every Oxford or Cambridge man thinks of his university before he thinks of his college, and he does so because at those universities the members of different colleges are brought together to some extent, though not so much as they ought to be, in their studies, and to a very great extent in social intercourse. Now, if at Oxford and Cambridge the unity of the university has been partially obscured, in London it has never existed. For in London the colleges came into existence before the university. They stole into existence at different times, isolated, narrow, and often insignificant institutions. And when the university was legally created, it was not what London principally wanted, a fusion of these small units into a great and magnificent whole, but it was an organization tending partially and slowly to this result as one among many, and aiming rather to be an educational incorporation for the empire than for the metropolis. "However, then commenced the dawn." Before, there had been no unity at all in London education; since, there have been the beginnings of unity. It is something that in the examination lists at Burlington House King's men and University men appear together; the two colleges cannot fail to be drawn towards each other by this bond, even though in the same list there appear Cambridge men, and Stoneyhurst men, and men from no institution at all. And the mere fact that of the members of the Convocation of the London University a large number of the most distinguished are likely to be always men settled in London, and a considerable number attached as teachers or as old students to the London colleges, will no doubt make this organization, though not confined to London, yet a powerful agent in giving unity to London education. The London University is not really so pseudonymous as it seems to be.

Still, it ought to be recognised that we have here only the beginning of a unity which must receive an infinitely greater development. The isolation of London colleges is no abuse, for they did not break away from a larger unity, but to continue it in deliberate preference to union would be an abuse. For union means increase of power and efficiency in every way. It means, in the first place, what the Germans call

lernfreiheit, that is, the liberty of each student to get in every subject the best instruction he can. In an isolated college the student gets on every subject just such instruction as the college happens to furnish, but let the college be merged in a vast university, and he will have the command of the best instruction in the university. He will then attend such lectures in his own college as are good, and he will go to some other college for instruction in subjects where his own college is deficient. Every one who knows the state of education in London will understand how great would be the effect of introducing this lernfreiheit.

I have opened a vast subject at the end of an article. For want of space I must leave the reader to discover for himself many of the inestimable advantages of union. But there is one to which I must call attention in closing.

Most Oxford and Cambridge men look back to their university life with a pleasure which the man educated in London, however warm a partisan he may be of the new universities, however contemptuous of the old ones, can only envy. He cannot pretend to have enjoyed his student course as much as he may have profited by it. The reason is that Oxford and Cambridge, besides being seats of learning and places of education, are, unrivalled young men's clubs. That is, all the colleges taken together form one whole, and the man who joins a college is introduced not merely to the fifty or hundred men who form the college, but to the thousand men who form the university. The world he feels himself to belong to is the university, not the college, the topics of conversation are common to all the colleges, jokes and stories circulate through them all, the whole university muster not merely in the Senate House or Schools, but at the boats, on the cricket-ground, and in the Union. It is the largeness and variety of intercourse, the abundance of congenial society, which makes the special charm and exhilaration of university life.

In London this charm as yet is almost totally wanting. If the teaching class are too little united, the students are united still less. To be a London student, has not hitherto meant to be a member of a vast student world. Membership at one London college has not been a passport to the society of the other colleges. The London students never assemble except for examination. They have not the habit of co-operating for any purposes of society or recreation. The consequence of this is not only the want of the distinguishing charm of student-life, but also a great want of sociability-so far at least as I am able to judge-within the colleges themselves. The colleges separately are too small to form the basis of prosperous common