tual fidelity, reticence, steadfastness, mild
stoicism, and other virtues far transcending your Greek accidence.
Nor can the unwisest "prescribed course of study" be considered quite
useless, if it have incited you to try nobly on all sides for a course
of your own. A singular condition of Schools and High-schools, which
have come down, in their strange old clothes and "courses of study,"
from the monkish ages into this highly unmonkish one;--tragical
condition, at which the intelligent observer makes deep pause!

One benefit, not to be dissevered from the most obsolete University
still frequented by young ingenuous living souls, is that of manifold
collision and communication with the said young souls; which, to every
one of these coevals, is undoubtedly the most important branch of
breeding for him. In this point, as the learned Huber has insisted, [6]
the two English Universities,--their studies otherwise being granted to
be nearly useless, and even ill done of their kind,--far excel all other
Universities: so valuable are the rules of human behavior which from of
old have tacitly established themselves there; so manful, with all its
sad drawbacks, is the style of English character, "frank, simple,
rugged and yet courteous," which has tacitly but imperatively got itself
sanctioned and prescribed there. Such, in full sight of Continental and
other Universities, is Huber's opinion. Alas, the question of University
Reform goes deep at present; deep as the world;--and the real University
of these new epochs is yet a great way from us! Another judge in whom
I have confidence declares further, That of these two Universities,
Cambridge is decidedly the more catholic (not Roman catholic, but Human
catholic) in its tendencies and habitudes; and that in fact, of all the
miserable Schools and High-schools in the England of these years, he,
if reduced to choose from them, would choose Cambridge as a place
of culture for the young idea. So that, in these bad circumstances,
Sterling had perhaps rather made a hit than otherwise?

Sterling at Cambridge had undoubtedly a wide and rather genial circle of
comrades; and could not fail to be regarded and beloved by many of them.
Their life seems to have been an ardently speculating and talking one;
by no means excessively restrained within limits; and, in the more
adventurous heads like Sterling's, decidedly tending towards the
latitudinarian in most things. They had among them a Debat