usiasm. The election is now matter of necessity and not of
choice. Knowledge is now too broad a field for your Jack-of-all-Trades;
and, from beautifully utilitarian reasons, he makes his choice, draws
his pen through a dozen branches of study, and behold--John the
Specialist. That this is the way to be wealthy we shall not deny; but we
hold that it is _not_ the way to be healthy or wise. The whole mind
becomes narrowed and circumscribed to one "punctual spot" of knowledge.
A rank unhealthy soil breeds a harvest of prejudices. Feeling himself
above others in his one little branch--in the classification of
toadstools, or Carthaginian history--he waxes great in his own eyes and
looks down on others. Having all his sympathies educated in one way,
they die out in every other; and he is apt to remain a peevish, narrow,
and intolerant bigot. Dilettante is now a term of reproach; but there is
a certain form of dilettantism to which no one can object. It is this
that we want among our students. We wish them to abandon no subject
until they have seen and felt its merit--to act under a general interest
in all branches of knowledge, not a commercial eagerness to excel in
one.

In both these directions our sympathies are constipated. We are apostles
of our own caste and our own subject of study, instead of being, as we
should, true men and _loving_ students. Of course both of these could be
corrected by the students themselves; but this is nothing to the
purpose: it is more important to ask whether the Senatus or the body of
alumni could do nothing towards the growth of better feeling and wider
sentiments. Perhaps in another paper we may say something upon this
head.

One other word, however, before we have done. What shall we be when we
grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to lay on restrictions and
acquire new deadweight of mournful experience with every year, till he
looked back on his youth as the very summer of impulse and freedom. We
please ourselves with thinking that it cannot be so with us. We would
fain hope that, as we have begun in one way, we may end in another; and
that when we _are_ in fact the octogenarians that we _seem_ at present,
there shall be no merrier men on earth. It is pleasant to picture us,
sunning ourselves in Princes Street of a morning, or chirping over our
evening cups, with all the merriment that we wanted in youth.

III

DEBATING SOCIETIES

A debating society is at first somewha