, after all, you only mean, amused, refreshed,
soothed, put into good spirits and good humour, or kept from vicious
excesses. I do not say that such amusements, such occupations of mind, are
not a great gain; but they are not education. You may as well call drawing
and fencing education, as a general knowledge of botany or conchology.
Stuffing birds or playing stringed instruments is an elegant pastime, and
a resource to the idle, but it is not education; it does not form or
cultivate the intellect. Education is a high word; it is the preparation
for knowledge, and it is the imparting of knowledge in proportion to that
preparation. We require intellectual eyes to know withal, as bodily eyes
for sight. We need both objects and organs intellectual; we cannot gain
them without setting about it; we cannot gain them in our sleep, or by
hap-hazard. The best telescope does not dispense with eyes; the printing
press or the lecture room will assist us greatly, but we must be true to
ourselves, we must be parties in the work. A University is, according to
the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not
a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.

9.

I protest to you, Gentlemen, that if I had to choose between a so-called
University, which dispensed with residence and tutorial superintendence,
and gave its degrees to any person who passed an examination in a wide
range of subjects, and a University which had no professors or
examinations at all, but merely brought a number of young men together for
three or four years, and then sent them away as the University of Oxford
is said to have done some sixty years since, if I were asked which of
these two methods was the better discipline of the intellect,--mind, I do
not say which is _morally_ the better, for it is plain that compulsory
study must be a good and idleness an intolerable mischief,--but if I must
determine which of the two courses was the more successful in training,
moulding, enlarging the mind, which sent out men the more fitted for their
secular duties, which produced better public men, men of the world, men
whose names would descend to posterity, I have no hesitation in giving the
preference to that University which did nothing, over that which exacted
of its members an acquaintance with every science under the sun. And,
paradox as this may seem, still if results be the test of systems, the
influence of the public schools and colleges of Engl