III. UNIVERSITIES

What is a University?

If I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or "School of Universal Learning." This description implies{5} the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot—from all parts; else, how will you find professors and students for every department of knowledge? and in one spot; else, how can there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple{10} and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this description; but such as this a University seems{15} to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.

Mutual education, in a large sense of the word,{20} is one of the great and incessant occupations of human society, carried on partly with set purpose, and partly not. One generation forms another; and the existing generation is ever acting and reacting upon itself in the persons of its individual members. Now, in this process, books, I need scarcely say, that is, the litera scripta, are one special instrument. It is true; and{5} emphatically so in this age. Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there{10} never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant{15} and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted{20} them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We have sermons in stones,{25} and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of{30} miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.

I allow all this, and much more; such{5} certainly is our popular education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, whenever men are really serious about getting what, in the language of trade, is called "a good article," when they aim at something{10} precise, something refined, something really luminous, something really large, something choice, they go to another market; they avail themselves, in some shape or other, of the rival method, the ancient method, of oral instruction, of present{15} communication between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple, and, in consequence, of great centers of pilgrimage and throng, which such a method of {20} education necessarily involves.

If the actions of men may be taken as any test of their convictions, then we have reason for saying this, viz.: that the province and the inestimable benefit of the litera scripta is that of{25} being a record of truth, and an authority of appeal, and an instrument of teaching in the hands of a teacher; but that, if we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult {30} the living man and listen to his living voice.... No book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions{5} thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation. But I am already dwelling too long on what is but an incidental portion of my main subject. Whatever be the cause, the fact is undeniable. The general{10} principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the color, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French{15} or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some{20} intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely, as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom{25} to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fullness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of{30} intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at least originated.

The principle on which I have been insisting is so obvious, and instances in point are so ready, that I should think it tiresome to proceed with{5} the subject, except that one or two illustrations may serve to explain my own language about it, which may not have done justice to the doctrine which it has been intended to enforce.

For instance, the polished manners and{10} high-bred bearing which are so difficult of attainment, and so strictly personal when attained,—which are so much admired in society, from society are acquired. All that goes to constitute a gentleman,—the carriage, gait, address, gestures,{15} voice; the ease, the self-possession, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the talent of not offending; the lofty principle, the delicacy of thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the{20} candor and consideration, the openness of hand—these qualities, some of them come by nature, some of them may be found in any rank, some of them are a direct precept of Christianity; but the full assemblage of them, bound up in the{25} unity of an individual character, do we expect they can be learned from books? are they not necessarily acquired, where they are to be found, in high society? The very nature of the case leads us to say so; you cannot fence without an{30} antagonist, nor challenge all comers in disputation before you have supported a thesis; and in like manner, it stands to reason, you cannot learn to converse till you have the world to converse with; you cannot unlearn your natural bashfulness, or awkwardness, or stiffness, or other{5} besetting deformity, till you serve your time in some school of manners. Well, and is it not so in matter of fact? The metropolis, the court, the great houses of the land, are the centers to which at stated times the country comes up, as to{10} shrines of refinement and good taste; and then in due time the country goes back again home, enriched with a portion of the social accomplishments, which those very visits serve to call out and heighten in the gracious dispensers of them.{15} We are unable to conceive how the "gentleman-like" can otherwise be maintained; and maintained in this way it is....

Religious teaching itself affords us an illustration of our subject to a certain point. It{20} does not indeed seat itself merely in centers of the world; this is impossible from the nature of the case. It is intended for the many not the few; its subject-matter is truth necessary for us, not truth recondite and rare; but it concurs in{25} the principle of a University so far as this, that its great instrument, or rather organ, has ever been that which nature prescribes in all education, the personal presence of a teacher, or, in theological language, Oral Tradition. It is the living{30} voice, the breathing form, the expressive countenance, which preaches, which catechises. Truth, a subtle, invisible, manifold spirit, is poured into the mind of the scholar by his eyes and ears, through his affections, imagination, and reason; it is poured into his mind and is sealed up there{5} in perpetuity, by propounding and repeating it, by questioning and requestioning, by correcting and explaining, by progressing and then recurring to first principles, by all those ways which are implied in the word "catechising." In the first{10} ages, it was a work of long time; months, sometimes years, were devoted to the arduous task of disabusing the mind of the incipient Christian of its pagan errors, and of molding it upon the Christian faith. The Scriptures indeed were at{15} hand for the study of those who could avail themselves of them; but St. Irenæus does not hesitate to speak of whole races, who had been converted to Christianity, without being able to read them. To be unable to read or write was in{20} those times no evidence of want of learning: the hermits of the deserts were, in this sense of the word, illiterate; yet the great St. Anthony, though he knew not letters, was a match in disputation for the learned philosophers who came{25} to try him. Didymus again, the great Alexandrian theologian, was blind. The ancient discipline, called the Disciplina Arcani, involved the same principle. The more sacred doctrines of Revelation were not committed to books but{30} passed on by successive tradition. The teaching on the Blessed Trinity, and the Eucharist appears to have been so handed down for some hundred years; and when at length reduced to writing, it has filled many folios, yet has not been exhausted.{5}

But I have said more than enough in illustration; end as I began—a University is a place of concourse, whither students come from every quarter for every kind of knowledge. You cannot have the best of every kind everywhere; you{10} must go to some great city or emporium for it. There you have all the choicest productions of nature and art all together, which you find each in its own separate place elsewhere. All the riches of the land, and of the earth, are{15} carried up thither; there are the best markets, and there the best workmen. It is the center of trade, the supreme court of fashion, the umpire of rival talents, and the standard of things rare and precious. It is the place for seeing galleries{20} of first-rate pictures, and for hearing wonderful voices and performers of transcendent skill. It is the place for great preachers, great orators, great nobles, great statesmen. In the nature of things, greatness and unity go together;{25} excellence implies a center. And such, for the third or fourth time, is a University; I hope I do not weary out the reader by repeating it. It is the place to which a thousand schools make contributions; in which the intellect may safely{30} range and speculate, sure to find its equal in some antagonist activity, and its judge in the tribunal of truth. It is a place where inquiry is pushed forward, and discoveries verified and perfected, and rashness rendered innocuous, and error exposed, by the collision of mind with mind,{5} and knowledge with knowledge. It is the place where the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and{10} lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers. It is the place where the catechist makes good his ground as he goes, treading in the truth day by day into the ready memory, and wedging and tightening it into the expanding{15} reason. It is a place which wins the admiration of the young by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by its beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of{20} the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation. It is this and a great deal more, and demands a somewhat better head and hand than mine to describe it well.

University Life: Athens

It has been my desire, were I able, to bring{25} before the reader what Athens may have been, viewed as what we have since called a University; and to do this, not with any purpose of writing a panegyric on a heathen city, or of denying its many deformities, or of concealing what was morally base in what was intellectually great, but just the contrary, of representing as they really{5} were; so far, that is, as to enable him to see what a University is, in the very constitution of society and in its own idea, what is its nature and object, and what its needs of aid and support external to itself to complete that nature and to secure that{10} object.

So now let us fancy our Scythian, or Armenian, or African, or Italian, or Gallic student, after tossing on the Saronic waves, which would be his more ordinary course to Athens, at last casting{15} anchor at Piræus. He is of any condition or rank of life you please, and may be made to order, from a prince to a peasant. Perhaps he is some Cleanthes, who has been a boxer in the public games. How did it ever cross his brain to betake{20} himself to Athens in search of wisdom? or, if he came thither by accident, how did the love of it ever touch his heart? But so it was, to Athens he came with three drachms in his girdle, and he got his livelihood by drawing water, carrying loads,{25} and the like servile occupations. He attached himself, of all philosophers, to Zeno the Stoic,—to Zeno, the most high-minded, the most haughty of speculators; and out of his daily earnings the poor scholar brought his master the daily sum of{30} an obolus, in payment for attending his lectures. Such progress did he make, that on Zeno's death he actually was his successor in his school; and, if my memory does not play me false, he is the author of a hymn to the Supreme Being, which is one of the noblest effusions of the kind in classical{5} poetry. Yet, even when he was the head of a school, he continued in his illiberal toil as if he had been a monk; and, it is said, that once, when the wind took his pallium, and blew it aside, he was discovered to have no other garment at{10} all—something like the German student who came up to Heidelberg with nothing upon him but a great coat and a pair of pistols.

Or it is another disciple of the Porch—Stoic by nature, earlier than by profession—who is{15} entering the city; but in what different fashion he comes! It is no other than Marcus, Emperor of Rome and philosopher. Professors long since were summoned from Athens for his service, when he was a youth, and now he comes, after his {20} victories in the battlefield, to make his acknowledgments at the end of life, to the city of wisdom, and to submit himself to an initiation into the Eleusinian mysteries.

Or it is a young man of great promise as an{25} orator, were it not for his weakness of chest, which renders it necessary that he should acquire the art of speaking without over-exertion, and should adopt a delivery sufficient for the display of his rhetorical talents on the one hand, yet merciful{30} to his physical resources on the other. He is called Cicero; he will stop but a short time, and will pass over to Asia Minor and its cities, before he returns to continue a career which will render his name immortal; and he will like his short sojourn at Athens so well, that he will take good{5} care to send his son thither at an earlier age than he visited it himself.

But see where comes from Alexandria (for we need not be very solicitous about anachronisms), a young man from twenty to twenty-two, who{10} has narrowly escaped drowning on his voyage, and is to remain at Athens as many as eight or ten years, yet in the course of that time will not learn a line of Latin, thinking it enough to become accomplished in Greek composition, and in{15} that he will succeed. He is a grave person, and difficult to make out; some say he is a Christian, something or other in the Christian line his father is for certain. His name is Gregory, he is by country a Cappadocian, and will in time become{20} preëminently a theologian, and one of the principal Doctors of the Greek Church.

Or it is one Horace, a youth of low stature and black hair, whose father has given him an education at Rome above his rank in life, and now is{25} sending him to finish it at Athens; he is said to have a turn for poetry: a hero he is not, and it were well if he knew it; but he is caught by the enthusiasm of the hour, and goes off campaigning with Brutus and Cassius, and will leave his shield{30} behind him on the field of Philippi.

Or it is a mere boy of fifteen: his name Eunapius; though the voyage was not long, sea sickness, or confinement, or bad living on board the vessel, threw him into a fever, and, when the passengers landed in the evening at Piræus, he{5} could not stand. His countrymen who accompanied him, took him up among them and carried him to the house of the great teacher of the day, Proæresius, who was a friend of the captain's, and whose fame it was which drew the{10} enthusiastic youth to Athens. His companions understand the sort of place they are in, and, with the license of academic students, they break into the philosopher's house, though he appears to have retired for the night, and proceed to make {15} themselves free of it, with an absence of ceremony, which is only not impudence, because Proæresius takes it so easily. Strange introduction for our stranger to a seat of learning, but not out of keeping with Athens; for what could you expect of a{20} place where there was a mob of youths and not even the pretense of control; where the poorer lived any how, and got on as they could, and the teachers themselves had no protection from the humors and caprices of the students who filled{25} their lecture halls? However, as to this Eunapius, Proæresius took a fancy to the boy, and told him curious stories about Athenian life. He himself had come up to the University with one Hephæstion, and they were even worse off than{30} Cleanthes the Stoic; for they had only one cloak between them, and nothing whatever besides, except some old bedding; so when Proæresius went abroad, Hephæstion lay in bed, and practiced himself in oratory; and then Hephæstion put on the cloak, and Proæresius crept under the{5} coverlet. At another time there was so fierce a feud between what would be called "town and gown" in an English University, that the Professors did not dare lecture in public, for fear of ill treatment.{10}

But a freshman like Eunapius soon got experience for himself of the ways and manners prevalent in Athens. Such a one as he had hardly entered the city, when he was caught hold of by a party of the academic youth, who proceeded to{15} practice on his awkwardness and his ignorance. At first sight one wonders at their childishness; but the like conduct obtained in the mediæval Universities; and not many months have passed away since the journals have told us of sober{20} Englishmen, given to matter-of-fact calculations, and to the anxieties of money making, pelting each other with snowballs on their own sacred territory, and defying the magistracy, when they would interfere with their privileges of{25} becoming boys. So I suppose we must attribute it to something or other in human nature. Meanwhile, there stands the newcomer, surrounded by a circle of his new associates, who forthwith proceed to frighten, and to banter, and to make a fool of him,{30} to the extent of their wit. Some address him with mock politeness, others with fierceness; and so they conduct him in solemn procession across the Agora to the Baths; and as they approach, they dance about him like madmen. But this was to be the end of his trial, for the Bath was a sort of{5} initiation; he thereupon received the pallium, or University gown, and was suffered by his tormentors to depart in peace. One alone is recorded as having been exempted from this persecution; it was a youth graver and loftier than{10} even St. Gregory himself: but it was not from his force of character, but at the instance of Gregory, that he escaped. Gregory was his bosom friend, and was ready in Athens to shelter him when he came. It was another Saint and Doctor; the{15} great Basil, then, (it would appear,) as Gregory, but a catechumen of the Church.

But to return to our freshman. His troubles are not at an end, though he has got his gown upon him. Where is he to lodge? whom is he{20} to attend? He finds himself seized, before he well knows where he is, by another party of men or three or four parties at once, like foreign porters at a landing, who seize on the baggage of the perplexed stranger, and thrust half a dozen cards{25} into his unwilling hands. Our youth is plied by the hangers-on of professor this, or sophist that, each of whom wishes the fame or the profit of having a houseful. We will say that he escapes from their hands,—but then he will have to{30} choose for himself where he will put up; and, to tell the truth, with all the praise I have already given, and the praise I shall have to give, to the city of mind, nevertheless, between ourselves, the brick and wood which formed it, the actual tenements, where flesh and blood had to lodge{5} (always excepting the mansions of great men of the place), do not seem to have been much better than those of Greek or Turkish towns, which are at this moment a topic of interest and ridicule in the public prints. A lively picture has lately{10} been set before us of Gallipoli. Take, says the writer,[41] a multitude of the dilapidated outhouses found in farm-yards in England, of the rickety old wooden tenements, the cracked, shutterless structures of planks and tiles, the sheds and stalls,{15} which our bye lanes, or fish-markets, or river-sides can supply; tumble them down on the declivity of a bare bald hill; let the spaces between house and house, thus accidentally determined, be understood to form streets, winding of{20} course for no reason, and with no meaning, up and down the town; the roadway always narrow, the breadth never uniform, the separate houses bulging or retiring below, as circumstances may have determined, and leaning forward till they meet{25} overhead—and you have a good idea of Gallipoli. I question whether this picture would not nearly correspond to the special seat of the Muses in ancient times. Learned writers assure us distinctly that the houses of Athens were for{30} the most part small and mean; that the streets were crooked and narrow; that the upper stories projected over the roadway; and that staircases, balustrades, and doors that opened outwards obstructed it—a remarkable coincidence of{5} description. I do not doubt at all, though history is silent, that that roadway was jolting to carriages, and all but impassable; and that it was traversed by drains, as freely as any Turkish town now. Athens seems in these respects to{10} have been below the average cities of its time. "A stranger," says an ancient, "might doubt, on the sudden view, if really he saw Athens."

I grant all this, and much more, if you will; but, recollect, Athens was the home of the {15} intellectual and beautiful; not of low mechanical contrivances and material organization. Why stop within your lodgings counting the rents in your wall or the holes in your tiling, when nature and art call you away? You must put up with{20} such a chamber, and a table, and a stool, and a sleeping board, anywhere else in the three continents; one place does not differ from another indoors; your magalia in Africa, or your grottoes in Syria are not perfection. I suppose you did {25} not come to Athens to swarm up a ladder, or to grope about a closet: you came to see and to hear, what hear and see you could not elsewhere. What food for the intellect is it possible to procure indoors, that you stay there looking about{30} you? do you think to read there? where are your books? do you expect to purchase books at Athens—you are much out in your calculations. True it is, we at this day, who live in the nineteenth century, have the books of Greece as a perpetual memorial; and copies there have been,{5} since the time that they were written; but you need not go to Athens to procure them, nor would you find them in Athens. Strange to say, strange to the nineteenth century, that in the age of Plato and Thucydides, there was not, it is said, a{10} bookshop in the whole place: nor was the book trade in existence till the very time of Augustus. Libraries, I suspect, were the bright invention of Attalus or the Ptolemies;[42] I doubt whether Athens had a library till the reign of Hadrian.{15} It was what the student gazed on, what he heard, what he caught by the magic of sympathy, not what he read, which was the education furnished by Athens.

He leaves his narrow lodging early in the{20} morning; and not till night, if even then, will he return. It is but a crib or kennel, in which he sleeps when the weather is inclement or the ground damp; in no respect a home. And he goes out of doors, not to read the day's{25} newspaper, or to buy the gay shilling volume, but to imbibe the invisible atmosphere of genius, and to learn by heart the oral traditions of taste. Out he goes; and, leaving the tumble-down town behind him, he mounts the Acropolis to the right, or he turns to the Areopagus on the left. He goes to the Parthenon to study the sculptures {5} of Phidias; to the temple of the Dioscuri to see the paintings of Polygnotus. We indeed take our Sophocles or Æschylus out of our coat pocket; but, if our sojourner at Athens would understand how a tragic poet can write, he must betake{10} himself to the theater on the south, and see and hear the drama literally in action. Or let him go westward to the Agora, and there he will hear Lysias or Andocides pleading, or Demosthenes haranguing. He goes farther west still, along the{15} shade of those noble planes, which Cimon has planted there; and he looks around him at the statues and porticoes and vestibules, each by itself a work of genius and skill, enough to be the making of another city. He passes through the{20} city gate, and then he is at the famous Ceramicus; here are the tombs of the mighty dead; and here, we will suppose, is Pericles himself, the most elevated, the most thrilling of orators, converting a funeral oration over the slain into a philosophical{25} panegyric of the living.

Onwards he proceeds still; and now he has come to that still more celebrated Academe, which has bestowed its own name on Universities down to this day; and there he sees a sight which{30} will be graven on his memory till he dies. Many are the beauties of the place, the groves, and the statues, and the temple, and the stream of the Cephissus flowing by; many are the lessons which will be taught him day after day by teacher or by companion; but his eye is just now arrested{5} by one object; it is the very presence of Plato. He does not hear a word that he says; he does not care to hear; he asks neither for discourse nor disputation; what he sees is a whole, complete in itself, not to be increased by addition, and{10} greater than anything else. It will be a point in the history of his life; a stay for his memory to rest on, a burning thought in his heart, a bond of union with men of like mind, ever afterwards. Such is the spell which the living man exerts on{15} his fellows, for good or for evil. How nature impels us to lean upon others, making virtue, or genius, or name, the qualification for our doing so! A Spaniard is said to have traveled to Italy, simply to see Livy; he had his fill of gazing, and{20} then went back again home. Had our young stranger got nothing by his voyage but the sight of the breathing and moving Plato, had he entered no lecture room to hear, no gymnasium to converse, he had got some measure of education,{25} and something to tell of to his grandchildren.

But Plato is not the only sage, nor the sight of him the only lesson to be learned in this wonderful suburb. It is the region and the realm of philosophy. Colleges were the inventions of{30} many centuries later; and they imply a sort of cloistered life, or at least a life of rule, scarcely natural to an Athenian. It was the boast of the philosophic statesman of Athens, that his countrymen achieved by the mere force of nature and the love of the noble and the great, what other{5} people aimed at by laborious discipline; and all who came among them were submitted to the same method of education. We have traced our student on his wanderings from the Acropolis to the Sacred Way; and now he is in the region of{10} the schools. No awful arch, no window of many-colored lights marks the seats of learning there or elsewhere; philosophy lives out of doors. No close atmosphere oppresses the brain or inflames the eyelid; no long session stiffens the limbs.{15} Epicurus is reclining in his garden; Zeno looks like a divinity in his porch; the restless Aristotle, on the other side of the city, as if in antagonism to Plato, is walking his pupils off their legs in his Lyceum by the Ilyssus. Our student has{20} determined on entering himself as a disciple of Theophrastus, a teacher of marvelous popularity, who has brought together two thousand pupils from all parts of the world. He himself is of Lesbos; for masters, as well as students, come hither from{25} all regions of the earth—as befits a University. How could Athens have collected hearers in such numbers, unless she had selected teachers of such power? it was the range of territory, which the notion of a University implies, which furnished{30} both the quantity of the one and the quality of the other. Anaxagoras was from Ionia, Carneades from Africa, Zeno from Cyprus, Protagoras from Thrace, and Gorgias from Sicily. Andromachus was a Syrian, Proæresius an Armenian, Hilarius a Bithynian, Philiscus a Thessalian, Hadrian a{5} Syrian. Rome is celebrated for her liberality in civil matters; Athens was as liberal in intellectual. There was no narrow jealousy, directed against a Professor, because he was not an Athenian; genius and talent were the qualifications;{10} and to bring them to Athens, was to do homage to it as a University. There was a brotherhood and a citizenship of mind.

Mind came first, and was the foundation of the academical polity; but it soon brought along with{15} it, and gathered round itself, the gifts of fortune and the prizes of life. As time went on, wisdom was not always sentenced to the bare cloak of Cleanthes; but, beginning in rags, it ended in fine linen. The Professors became honorable{20} and rich; and the students ranged themselves under their names, and were proud of calling themselves their countrymen. The University was divided into four great nations, as the mediæval antiquarian would style them; and in the{25} middle of the fourth century, Proæresius was the leader or proctor of the Attic, Hephæstion of the Oriental, Epiphanius of the Arabic, and Diophantus of the Pontic. Thus the Professors were both patrons of clients, and hosts and{30} proxeni of strangers and visitors, as well as masters of the schools: and the Cappadocian, Syrian, or Sicilian youth who came to one or other of them, would be encouraged to study by his protection, and to aspire by his example.

Even Plato, when the schools of Athens were{5} not a hundred years old, was in circumstances to enjoy the otium cum dignitate. He had a villa out at Heraclea; and he left his patrimony to his school, in whose hands it remained, not only safe, but fructifying, a marvelous phenomenon in{10} tumultuous Greece, for the long space of eight hundred years. Epicurus too had the property of the Gardens where he lectured; and these too became the property of his sect. But in Roman times the chairs of grammar, rhetoric, politics,{15} and the four philosophies were handsomely endowed by the State; some of the Professors were themselves statesmen or high functionaries, and brought to their favorite study senatorial rank or Asiatic opulence.{20}

Patrons such as these can compensate to the freshman, in whom we have interested ourselves, for the poorness of his lodging and the turbulence of his companions. In everything there is a better side and a worse; in every place a{25} disreputable set and a respectable, and the one is hardly known at all to the other. Men come away from the same University at this day, with contradictory impressions and contradictory statements, according to the society they have found{30} there; if you believe the one, nothing goes on there as it should be: if you believe the other, nothing goes on as it should not. Virtue, however, and decency are at least in the minority everywhere, and under some sort of a cloud or disadvantage; and this being the case, it is so{5} much gain whenever an Herodes Atticus is found, to throw the influence of wealth and station on the side even of a decorous philosophy. A consular man, and the heir of an ample fortune, this Herod was content to devote his life to a{10} professorship, and his fortune to the patronage of literature. He gave the sophist Polemo about eight thousand pounds, as the sum is calculated, for three declamations. He built at Athens a stadium six hundred feet long, entirely of white{15} marble, and capable of admitting the whole population. His theater, erected to the memory of his wife, was made of cedar wood curiously carved. He had two villas, one at Marathon, the place of his birth, about ten miles from Athens, the other{20} at Cephissia, at the distance of six; and thither he drew to him the èlite, and at times the whole body of the students. Long arcades, groves of trees, clear pools for the bath, delighted and recruited the summer visitor. Never was so{25} brilliant a lecture room as his evening banqueting hall; highly connected students from Rome mixed with the sharp-witted provincial of Greece or Asia Minor; and the flippant sciolist, and the nondescript visitor, half philosopher, half tramp,{30} met with a reception, courteous always, but suitable to his deserts. Herod was noted for his repartees; and we have instances on record of his setting down, according to the emergency, both the one and the other.

A higher line, though a rarer one, was that{5} allotted to the youthful Basil. He was one of those men who seem by a sort of fascination to draw others around them even without wishing it. One might have deemed that his gravity and his reserve would have kept them at a distance;{10} but, almost in spite of himself, he was the center of a knot of youths, who, pagans as most of them were, used Athens honestly for the purpose for which they professed to seek it; and, disappointed and displeased with the place himself, he seems{15} nevertheless to have been the means of their profiting by its advantages. One of these was Sophronius, who afterwards held a high office in the State: Eusebius was another, at that time the bosom friend of Sophronius, and afterwards{20} a Bishop. Celsus too is named, who afterwards was raised to the government of Cilicia by the Emperor Julian. Julian himself, in the sequel of unhappy memory, was then at Athens, and known at least to St. Gregory. Another Julian is also{25} mentioned, who was afterwards commissioner of the land tax. Here we have a glimpse of the better kind of society among the students of Athens; and it is to the credit of the parties composing it, that such young men as Gregory and Basil, men{30} as intimately connected with Christianity, as they were well known in the world, should hold so high a place in their esteem and love. When the two saints were departing, their companions came around them with the hope of changing their purpose. Basil persevered; but Gregory relented,{5} and turned back to Athens for a season.

Supply and Demand

THE SCHOOLMEN

It is most interesting to observe how the foundations of the present intellectual greatness of Europe were laid, and most wonderful to think that they were ever laid at all. Let us consider{10} how wide and how high is the platform of our knowledge at this day, and what openings in every direction are in progress—openings of such promise, that, unless some convulsion of society takes place, even what we have attained,{15} will in future times be nothing better than a poor beginning; and then on the other hand, let us recollect that, seven centuries ago, putting aside revealed truths, Europe had little more than that poor knowledge, partial and uncertain, and at{20} best only practical, which is conveyed to us by the senses. Even our first principles now are beyond the most daring conjectures then; and what has been said so touchingly of Christian ideas as compared with pagan, is true in its way and degree{25} of the progress of secular knowledge also in the seven centuries I have named.

"What sages would have died to learn, [Is] taught by cottage dames."

Nor is this the only point in which the revelations of science may be compared to the supernatural revelations of Christianity. Though{5} sacred truth was delivered once for all, and scientific discoveries are progressive, yet there is a great resemblance in the respective histories of Christianity and of Science. We are accustomed to point to the rise and spread of Christianity as{10} a miraculous fact, and rightly so, on account of the weakness of its instruments, and the appalling weight and multiplicity of the obstacles which confronted it. To clear away those obstacles was to move mountains; yet this was done by{15} a few poor, obscure, unbefriended men, and their poor, obscure, unbefriended followers. No social movement can come up to this marvel, which is singular and archetypical, certainly; it is a Divine work, and we soon cease to admire{20} it in order to adore. But there is more in it than its own greatness to contemplate; it is so great as to be prolific of greatness. Those whom it has created, its children who have become such by a supernatural power, have imitated, in their{25} own acts, the dispensation which made them what they were; and, though they have not carried out works simply miraculous, yet they have done exploits sufficient to bespeak their own unearthly origin, and the new powers which had{30} come into the world. The revival of letters by the energy of Christian ecclesiastics and laymen, when everything had to be done, reminds us of the birth of Christianity itself, as far as a work of man can resemble a work of God.

Two characteristics, as I have already had{5} occasion to say, are generally found to attend the history of Science: first, its instruments have an innate force, and can dispense with foreign assistance in their work; and secondly, these instruments must exist and must begin to act,{10} before subjects are found who are to profit by their action. In plainer language, the teacher is strong, not in the patronage of great men, but in the intrinsic value and attraction of what he has to communicate; and next, he must come{15} forward and advertise himself, before he can gain hearers. This I have expressed before, in saying that a great school of learning lived in demand and supply, and that the supply must be before the demand. Now, what is this but the very history{20} of the preaching of the Gospel? who but the Apostles and Evangelists went out to the ends of the earth without patron, or friend, or other external advantage which could insure their success? and again, who among the multitude they{25} enlightened would have called for their aid unless they had gone to that multitude first, and offered to it blessings which up to that moment it had not heard of? They had no commission, they had no invitation, from man; their strength lay{30} neither in their being sent, nor in their being sent for; but in the circumstances that they had that with them, a Divine message, which they knew would at once, when it was uttered, thrill through the hearts of those to whom they spoke, and make for themselves friends in any place,{5} strangers and outcasts as they were when they first came. They appealed to the secret wants and aspirations of human nature, to its laden conscience, its weariness, its desolateness, and its sense of the true and the Divine; nor did they{10} long wait for listeners and disciples, when they announced the remedy of evils which were so real.

Something like this were the first stages of the process by which in mediæval Christendom the structure of our present intellectual elevation{15} was carried forward. From Rome as from a center, as the Apostles from Jerusalem, went forth the missionaries of knowledge, passing to and fro all over Europe; and, as Metropolitan sees were the record of the presence of Apostles,{20} so did Paris, Pavia, and Bologna, and Padua, and Ferrara, Pisa and Naples, Vienna, Louvain, and Oxford, rise into Universities at the voice of the theologian or the philosopher. Moreover, as the Apostles went through labors untold, by{25} sea and land, in their charity to souls; so, if robbers, shipwrecks, bad lodging, and scanty fare are trials of zeal, such trials were encountered without hesitation by the martyrs and confessors of science. And as Evangelists had grounded{30} their teaching upon the longing for happiness natural to man, so did these securely rest their cause on the natural thirst for knowledge: and again as the preachers of Gospel peace had often to bewail the ruin which persecution or dissension had brought upon their nourishing colonies,{5} so also did the professors of science often find or flee the ravages of sword or pestilence in those places, which they themselves perhaps in former times had made the seats of religious, honorable, and useful learning. And lastly, as kings and{10} nobles have fortified and advanced the interests of the Christian faith without being necessary to it, so in like manner we may enumerate with honor Charlemagne, Alfred, Henry the First of England, Joan of Navarre, and many others, as{15} patrons of the schools of learning, without being obliged to allow that those schools could not have progressed without such countenance.

These are some of the points of resemblance between the propagation of Christian truth and{20} the revival of letters; and, to return to the two points, to which I have particularly drawn attention, the University Professor's confidence in his own powers, and his taking the initiative in the exercise of them, I find both these distinctly{25} recognized by Mr. Hallam in his history of Literature. As to the latter point, he says, "The schools of Charlemagne were designed to lay the basis of a learned education, for which there was at that time no sufficient desire"—that is, the supply was{30} prior to the demand. As to the former: "In the twelfth century," he says, "the impetuosity with which men rushed to that source of what they deemed wisdom, the great University of Paris, did not depend upon academical privileges or eleemosynary stipends, though these were{5} undoubtedly very effectual in keeping it up. The University created patrons, and was not created by them"—that is, demand and supply were all in all....

Bec, a poor monastery of Normandy, set up in {10} the eleventh century by an illiterate soldier, who sought the cloister, soon attracted scholars to its dreary clime from Italy, and transmitted them to England. Lanfranc, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, was one of these, and he found the{15} simple monks so necessitous, that he opened a school of logic to all comers, in order, says William of Malmesbury, "that he might support his needy monastery by the pay of the students." The same author adds, that "his reputation went into{20} the most remote parts of the Latin world, and Bec became a great and famous Academy of letters." Here is an instance of a commencement without support, without scholars, in order to attract scholars, and in them to find support.{25} William of Jumièges, too, bears witness to the effect, powerful, sudden, wide spreading, and various, of Lanfranc's advertisement of himself. The fame of Bec and Lanfranc, he says, quickly penetrated through the whole world; and "clerks,{30} the sons of dukes, the most esteemed masters of the Latin schools, powerful laymen, high nobles, flocked to him." What words can more strikingly attest the enthusiastic character of the movement which he began, than to say that it carried away with it all classes; rich as well as poor, laymen as{5} well as ecclesiastics, those who were in that day in the habit of despising letters, as well as those who might wish to live by them?...

The Strength and Weakness of Universities

ABELARD

We can have few more apposite illustrations of at once the strength and weakness of what{10} may be called the University principle, of what it can do and what it cannot, of its power to collect students, and its impotence to preserve and edify them, than the history of the celebrated Abelard. His name is closely associated with{15} the commencement of the University of Paris; and in his popularity and in his reverses, in the criticisms of John of Salisbury on his method, and the protest of St. Bernard against his teaching, we read, as in a pattern specimen, what a{20} University professes in its essence, and what it needs for its "integrity." It is not to be supposed, that I am prepared to show this here, as fully as it might be shown; but it is a subject so pertinent to the general object of these Essays, that it{25} may be useful to devote even a few pages to it.

The oracles of Divine Truth, as time goes on, do but repeat the one message from above which they have ever uttered, since the tongues of fire attested the coming of the Paraclete; still, as time goes on, they utter it with greater force and{5} precision, under diverse forms, with fuller luminousness, and a richer ministration of thought statement, and argument. They meet the varying wants, and encounter the special resistance of each successive age; and, though prescient of{10} coming errors and their remedy long before, they cautiously reserve their new enunciation of the old Truth, till it is imperatively demanded. And, as it happens in kings' cabinets, that surmises arise, and rumors spread, of what is said in{15} council, and is in course of preparation, and secrets perhaps get wind, true in substance or in direction, though distorted in detail; so too, before the Church speaks, one or other of her forward children speaks for her, and, while he does anticipate{20} to a certain point what she is about to say or enjoin, he states it incorrectly, makes it error instead of truth, and risks his own faith in the process. Indeed, this is actually one source, or rather concomitant, of heresy, the presence of{25} some misshapen, huge, and grotesque foreshadow of true statements which are to come. Speaking under correction, I would apply this remark to the heresy of Tertullian or of Sabellius, which may be considered a reaction from existing errors, and{30} an attempt, presumptuous, and therefore unsuccessful, to meet them with those divinely appointed correctives which the Church alone can apply, and which she will actually apply, when the proper moment comes. The Gnostics boasted of their intellectual proficiency before the time{5} of St. Irenæus, St. Athanasius, and St. Augustine; yet, when these doctors made their appearance, I suppose they were examples of that knowledge, true and deep, which the Gnostics professed. Apollinaris anticipated the work of{10} St. Cyril and the Ephesine Council, and became a heresiarch in consequence; and, to come down to the present times, we may conceive that writers, who have impatiently fallen away from the Church, because she would not adopt their{15} views, would have found, had they but trusted her, and waited, that she knew how to profit by them, though she never could have need to borrow her enunciations from them; for their writings contained, so to speak, truth in the ore, truth{20} which they themselves had not the gift to disengage from its foreign concomitants, and safely use, which she alone could use, which she would use in her destined hour, and which became their stone of stumbling simply because she did not{25} use it faster. Now, applying this principle to the subject before us, I observe, that, supposing Abelard to be the first master of scholastic philosophy, as many seem to hold, we shall have still no difficulty in condemning the author, while we{30} honor the work. To him is only the glory of spoiling by his own self-will what would have been done well and surely under the teaching and guidance of Infallible Authority.

Nothing is more certain than that some ideas are consistent with one another, and others{5} inconsistent; and, again, that every truth must be consistent with every other truth—hence, that all truths of whatever kind form into one large body of Truth, by virtue of the consistency between one truth and another, which is a{10} connecting link running through them all. The science which discovers this connection is logic; and, as it discovers the connection when the truths are given, so, having one truth given and the connecting principle, it is able to go on to ascertain{15} the other. Though all this is obvious, it was realized and acted on in the middle age with a distinctness unknown before; all subjects of knowledge were viewed as parts of one vast system, each with its own place in it, and from{20} knowing one, another was inferred. Not indeed always rightly inferred, because the art might be less perfect than the science, the instrument than the theory and aim; but I am speaking of the principle of the scholastic method, of which{25} Saints and Doctors were the teachers—such I conceive it to be, and Abelard was the ill-fated logician who had a principal share in bringing it into operation.

Others will consider the great St. Anselm and{30} the school of Bec, as the proper source of Scholasticism; I am not going to discuss the question; anyhow, Abelard, and not St. Anselm, was the Professor at the University of Paris, and it is of Universities that I am speaking; anyhow, Abelard illustrates the strength and the{5} weakness of the principle of advertising and communicating knowledge for its own sake, which I have called the University principle, whether he is, or is not, the first of scholastic philosophers or scholastic theologians. And, though I could not{10} speak of him at all without mentioning the subject of his teaching, yet, after all, it is of him and of his teaching itself, that I am going to speak, whatever that might be which he actually taught.

Since Charlemagne's time the schools of Paris{15} had continued, with various fortunes, faithful, as far as the age admitted, to the old learning, as other schools elsewhere, when, in the eleventh century, the famous school of Bec began to develop the powers of logic in forming a new{20} philosophy. As the inductive method rose in Bacon, so did the logical in the mediæval schoolmen; and Aristotle, the most comprehensive intellect of Antiquity, as the one who had conceived the sublime idea of mapping the whole{25} field of knowledge, and subjecting all things to one profound analysis, became the presiding master in their lecture halls. It was at the end of the eleventh century that William of Champeaux founded the celebrated Abbey of St.{30} Victor under the shadow of St, Geneviève, and by the dialectic methods which he introduced into his teaching, has a claim to have commenced the work of forming the University out of the Schools of Paris. For one at least, out of the two characteristics of a University, he prepared the way;{5} for, though the schools were not public till after his day, so as to admit laymen as well as clerks, and foreigners as well as natives of the place, yet the logical principle of constructing all sciences into one system, implied of course a recognition{10} of all the sciences that are comprehended in it. Of this William of Champeaux, or de Campellis, Abelard was the pupil; he had studied the dialectic art elsewhere, before he offered himself for his instructions; and, in the course of two years,{15} when as yet he had only reached the age of twenty-two, he made such progress, as to be capable of quarreling with his master, and setting up a school for himself.

This school of Abelard was first situated in{20} the royal castle of Melun; then at Corbeil, which was nearer to Paris, and where he attracted to himself a considerable number of hearers. His labors had an injurious effect upon his health; and at length he withdrew for two years to his{25} native Britanny. Whether other causes coöperated in this withdrawal, I think, is not known; but, at the end of the two years, we find him returning to Paris, and renewing his attendance on the lectures of William, who was by this time{30} a monk. Rhetoric was the subject of the lectures he now heard; and after a while the pupil repeated with greater force and success his former treatment of his teacher. He held a public disputation with him, got the victory, and reduced him to silence. The school of{5} William was deserted, and its master himself became an instance of the vicissitudes incident to that gladiatorial wisdom (as I may style it) which was then eclipsing the old Benedictine method of the Seven Arts. After a time, Abelard found his{10} reputation sufficient to warrant him in setting up a school himself on Mount St. Geneviève; whence he waged incessant war against the unwearied logician, who by this time had rallied his forces to repel the young and ungrateful{15} adventurer who had raised his hand against him.

Great things are done by devotion to one idea; there is one class of geniuses, who would never be what they are, could they grasp a second. The calm philosophical mind, which{20} contemplates parts without denying the whole, and the whole without confusing the parts, is notoriously indisposed to action; whereas single and simple views arrest the mind, and hurry it on to carry them out. Thus, men of one idea and nothing{25} more, whatever their merit, must be to a certain extent narrow-minded; and it is not wonderful that Abelard's devotion to the new philosophy made him undervalue the Seven Arts out of which it had grown. He felt it impossible so to honor{30} what was now to be added, as not to dishonor what existed before. He would not suffer the Arts to have their own use, since he had found a new instrument for a new purpose. So he opposed the reading of the Classics. The monks had opposed them before him; but this is little{5} to our present purpose; it was the duty of men, who abjured the gifts of this world on the principle of mortification, to deny themselves literature just as they would deny themselves particular friendships or figured music. The doctrine{10} which Abelard introduced and represents was founded on a different basis. He did not recognize in the poets of antiquity any other merit than that of furnishing an assemblage of elegant phrases and figures; and accordingly he asks{15} why they should not be banished from the city of God, since Plato banished them from his own commonwealth. The animus of this language is clear, when we turn to the pages of John of Salisbury and Peter of Blois, who were champions of{20} the ancient learning. We find them complaining that the careful "getting up," as we now call it, "of books," was growing out of fashion. Youths once studied critically the text of poets or philosophers; they got them by heart; they analyzed{25} their arguments; they noted down their fallacies; they were closely examined in the matters which had been brought before them in lecture; they composed. But now, another teaching was coming in; students were promised truth in a{30} nutshell; they intended to get possession of the sum-total of philosophy in less than two or three years; and facts were apprehended, not in their substance and details, by means of living and, as it were, personal documents, but in dead abstracts and tables. Such were the{5} reclamations to which the new Logic gave occasion.

These, however, are lesser matters; we have a graver quarrel with Abelard than that of his undervaluing the Classics. As I have said, my main object here is not what he taught, but why{10} and how, and how he lived. Now it is certain his activity was stimulated by nothing very high, but something very earthly and sordid. I grant there is nothing morally wrong in the mere desire to rise in the world, though Ambition and it are{15} twin sisters. I should not blame Abelard merely for wishing to distinguish himself at the University; but when he makes the ecclesiastical state the instrument of his ambition, mixes up spiritual matters with temporal, and aims at a{20} bishopric through the medium of his logic, he joins together things incompatible, and cannot complain of being censured. It is he himself, who tells us, unless my memory plays me false, that the circumstance of William of Champeaux{25} being promoted to the see of Chalons, was an incentive to him to pursue the same path with an eye to the same reward. Accordingly, we next hear of his attending the theological lectures of a certain master of William's, named Anselm, an{30} old man, whose school was situated at Laon. This person had a great reputation in his day; John of Salisbury, speaking of him in the next generation, calls him the doctor of doctors; he had been attended by students from Italy and Germany; but the age had advanced since he was in his{5} prime, and Abelard was disappointed in a teacher, who had been good enough for William. He left Anselm, and began to lecture on the prophet Ezekiel on his own resources.

Now came the time of his great popularity,{10} which was more than his head could bear; which dizzied him, took him off his legs, and whirled him to his destruction. I spoke in my foregoing Chapter of those three qualities of true wisdom, which a University, absolutely and nakedly{15} considered, apart from the safeguards which constitute its integrity, is sure to compromise. Wisdom, says the inspired writer, is desursum, is pudica, is pacifica, "from above, chaste, peaceable." We have already seen enough of Abelard's{20} career to understand that his wisdom, instead of being "pacifica," was ambitious and contentious. An Apostle speaks of the tongue both as a blessing and as a curse. It may be the beginning of a fire, he says, a "Universitas iniquitatis"; and alas!{25} such did it become in the mouth of the gifted Abelard. His eloquence was wonderful; he dazzled his contemporaries, says Fulco, "by the brilliancy of his genius, the sweetness of his eloquence, the ready flow of his language, and the{30} subtlety of his knowledge." People came to him from all quarters—from Rome, in spite of mountains and robbers; from England, in spite of the sea; from Flanders and Germany; from Normandy, and the remote districts of France; from Angers and Poitiers; from Navarre by the{5} Pyrenees, and from Spain, besides the students of Paris itself; and among those, who sought his instructions now or afterwards, were the great luminaries of the schools in the next generation. Such were Peter of Poitiers, Peter Lombard, John{10} of Salisbury, Arnold of Brescia, Ivo, and Geoffrey of Auxerre. It was too much for a weak head and heart, weak in spite of intellectual power; for vanity will possess the head, and worldliness the heart, of the man, however gifted, whose{15} wisdom is not an effluence of the Eternal Light.

True wisdom is not only "pacifica," it is "pudica"; chaste as well as peaceable. Alas for Abelard! a second disgrace, deeper than ambition, is his portion now. The strong man—the{20} Samson of the schools in the wildness of his course, the Solomon in the fascination of his genius—shivers and falls before the temptation which overcame that mighty pair, the most excelling in body and in mind.{25}

In a time when Colleges were unknown, and the young scholar was commonly thrown upon the dubious hospitality of a great city, Abelard might even be thought careful of his honor, that he went to lodge with an old ecclesiastic, had not{30} his host's niece Eloisa lived with him. A more subtle snare was laid for him than beset the heroic champion or the all-accomplished monarch of Israel; for sensuality came upon him under the guise of intellect, and it was the high mental endowments of Eloisa, who became his pupil,{5} speaking in her eyes, and thrilling on her tongue, which were the intoxication and the delirium of Abelard....

He is judged, he is punished; but he is not reclaimed. True wisdom is not only "pacifica,"{10} not only "pudica;" it is "desursum" too. It is a revelation from above; it knows heresy as little as it knows strife or license. But Abelard, who had run the career of earthly wisdom in two of its phases, now is destined to represent its{15} third.

It is at the famous Abbey of St. Denis that we find him languidly rising from his dream of sin, and the suffering that followed. The bad dream is cleared away; clerks come to him, and the{20} Abbot begging him to lecture still, for love now, as for gain before. Once more his school is thronged by the curious and the studious; but at length a rumor spreads, that Abelard is exploring the way to some novel view on the{25} subject of the Most Holy Trinity. Wherefore is hardly clear, but about the same time the monks drive him away from the place of refuge he had gained. He betakes himself to a cell, and thither his pupils follow him. "I betook myself to a{30} certain cell," he says, "wishing to give myself to the schools, as was my custom. Thither so great a multitude of scholars flocked, that there was neither room to house them, nor fruits of the earth to feed them," such was the enthusiasm of the student, such the attraction of the teacher,{5} when knowledge was advertised freely, and its market opened.

Next he is in Champagne, in a delightful solitude near Nogent in the diocese of Troyes. Here the same phenomenon presents itself, which is{10} so frequent in his history. "When the scholars knew it," he says, "they began to crowd thither from all parts; and, leaving other cities and strongholds, they were content to dwell in the wilderness. For spacious houses they framed for{15} themselves small tabernacles, and for delicate food they put up with wild herbs. Secretly did they whisper among themselves: 'Behold, the whole world is gone out after him!' When, however, my Oratory could not hold even a moderate{20} portion of them, then they were forced to enlarge it, and to build it up with wood and stone." He called the place his Paraclete, because it had been his consolation.

I do not know why I need follow his life further.{25} I have said enough to illustrate the course of one, who may be called the founder, or at least the first great name, of the Parisian Schools. After the events I have mentioned he is found in Lower Britanny; then, being about forty-eight years of{30} age, in the Abbey of St. Gildas; then with St. Geneviève again. He had to sustain the fiery eloquence of a Saint, directed against his novelties; he had to present himself before two Councils; he had to burn the book which had given offense to pious ears. His last two years were spent at{5} Clugni on his way to Rome. The home of the weary, the hospital of the sick, the school of the erring, the tribunal of the penitent, is the city of St. Peter. He did not reach it; but he is said to have retracted what had given scandal in{10} his writings, and to have made an edifying end. He died at the age of sixty-two, in the year of grace 1142.

In reviewing his career, the career of so great an intellect so miserably thrown away, we are{15} reminded of the famous words of the dying scholar and jurist, which are a lesson to us all, "Heu, vitam perdidi, operosè nihil agendo." A happier lot be ours!