student's duels--though a secret performance
of the kind is mentioned as a probability in the chronicles--or go
about looking for trouble generally as the swashbuckling Junker,
Bismarck, did; for in the first place his royal rank would not allow
of his taking part in the bloody amusement of the _Mensur_, and his
natural disposition, if it was quick and lively, was not choleric
enough to involve him in serious quarrel. His studies were to some
extent interrupted by military calls to Berlin, for after being
appointed second lieutenant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards at
Potsdam on his tenth birthday, the Hohenzollern age for entering the
army, he was promoted to first lieutenant in the same regiment on
leaving Cassel.

For the most part the university lectures he attended were the courses
in law and philosophy, and he is not reported to have shown any
particular enthusiasm for either subject. The differences between an
English and a German university are of a fundamental kind, perhaps the
greatest being that the German university does not aim at influencing
conduct and character in the same measure as the English, but is
rather for the supply of knowledge of all sorts, as a monster
warehouse is for the supply of miscellaneous goods. Again, the German
university, which, like all American universities except Princetown,
has more resemblance to the Scottish universities than to those at
Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, is not residential nor divided into
colleges, but is departmentalized into "faculties," each with its own
professors and _privat docentes_, or official lecturers, mostly young
savants, who have not the rank or title of professor, but have
obtained only the _venia legendi_ from the university. The lectures,
as a rule of admirable learning and thoroughness, invariably laying
great and prosy stress on "development," are delivered in large halls
and may be subscribed for in as many faculties as the student chooses,
the cost being about thirty shillings or there-abouts per term for
each lecture "heard." Outside the university the student enjoys
complete independence, which is a privilege highly (and sometimes
violently) cherished, especially by non-studious undergraduates, under
the name "academic freedom." The German preparing for one or other of
the learned professions will probably spend a year or two at each of
three, or maybe four, universities, according to the special faculty
he adopts and for which the un