lend a romance to his life. He is said to have | and learners from every quarter. Many made one statue, and his powers as an arch- things are requisite to complete and satisfy itect are manifest from the fact that after the the idea embodied in this description, but death of Bramante he was chosen to carry such a university seems to be in its essence on the building of St. Peter's at Rome. a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse through a wide extent of country. Raphael died of a malarious fever caught while superintending some excavations at Rome. After accomplishing so much, the wonder is that he had attained the age of only thirty-seven years. The greatest of his paintings is doubtless "The Transfiguration." It taxed his utmost power to present that marvellous meeting of Christ with Moses and Elias and the resplendent glory of the mysterious change. He succeeded, and then dared the incongruity of placing another group below the figures on the mountthe demoniac child and the power of the transfigured Christ to cure him when the disciples failed. We present in the fine engraving of Mr. Lightfoot one of his most living and moving Madonnas. UNIVERSITY EDUCATION. WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY? FI 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 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 and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers There is nothing far-fetched or unreasonable in the idea thus presented to us; and if this be a university, then a university does but contemplate a necessity of our nature, and is but one specimen in a particular department, out of many which might be adduced in others, of a provision for that necessity. Mutual education, in a large sense of the word, 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 littera scripta-are one special instrument. It is true, and emphatically so in this 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 serious, and light literature, we must allow there 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 and diversified and persevering a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sybil wrote her proph age. ecies upon the leaves of the forest and wasted 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 and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained ancients an immortality issue forth every morning and are projected onward to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of 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 largely informing us where we can at once cheaply purchase it. gether or to constitute what is called "a world." It holds in the political world and in the high world and in the religious world, and it holds also in the literary and scientific world. 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 littera scripta is that of 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 subject of teaching which is diversified and complicated we must consult the living man and listen to his living voice. I am not bound to investigate the cause of this, and anything I may say will, I am conscious, be short of its full analysis. Perhaps Perhaps we may suggest that no books can get through the number of minute questions which it is possible to ask on any extended subject, or hit upon the very difficulties which are respectively felt by each precise, some-reader in succession; or, again, that 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 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 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. I allow all this, and much more; such, certainly, is the popular education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, when men are really serious about getting what, in the language of trade, is called "a good article," when they aim at at something 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 communication between man and man, of teachers instead of teaching, of the personal influence of a master and in the humble initiation of a disciple, and, in consequence, of great centres of pilgrimage and throng which such a method of education necessarily involves. This, I think, will be found good in all those departments or aspects of society which possess an interest sufficient to bind men to You must imitate the student in French 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 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 produces the sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom; we must repair to the fountain and drink there. Portions may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books, but the fulness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of 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 so ready, that I should think it tiresome to proceed with the subject, except that one or two illustrations may serve to explain my own language about it, which may not have been as clear as the subject on which it has been employed. For instance, the polished manners and high-bred behavior which are so difficult of attainment and so strictly personal when attained, which are so much admired in society, from society are obtained. All that goes to constitute a gentleman the carriage, gait, address, gestures, voice; the ease, the selfpossession, the courtesy, the power of conversing, the success in not offending; the lofty principle, the delicacy of thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the 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 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 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 besetting deformity, till you serve your time in some school of manners. THE STUDENT AT ATHENS. Learned writers assure us distinctly that the houses of Athens were for 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 outward obstructed it—a remarkable coincidence of 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 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 intellectual and beautiful, not of low mechanical contrivances and material organiza |