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reach of those haunting moral and spiritual in which the king, who would have been most lights and shadows, which sometimes strained Mr. Roscoe's imagination beyond a healthy temper."

Mr. Roscoe's skill in verse-and the first volume of his Remains consists entirely of two tragedies and many poems-is illustrated, together with much of his character, in these lines:

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fitly, as well as most justly, crushed at once as a monster of guilt, is put on his trial, and pronounced by the judges beyond their jurisdiction. Not till then will Ethel consent to take it on his cous crime which had wrecked his own life. No own responsibility solemnly to avenge the hiddoubt the purpose of the dramatist was to bring out very strongly the scrupulous self-distrust which makes Ethel's tardy and diffident spirit' fear lest personal revenge should enter into his

TO LITTLE A. C., IN THE GARDEN AT EAST-motives. The author was responsible, as ho

BURY.

"Come my beauty, come my bird;

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We two will wander, and no third
Shall mar that sweetest solitude
Of a garden and a child,

When the fresh clms are first in bud,

And western winds blow mild.

Clasp that short-reaching arm about a neck Stript of a deeper love's more close embrace,

And with the softness of thy baby-cheek

Press roses on a care-distained face. "What? set thee down, because the air Ruffles too boldly thy brown hair? Walk then, and as thy tiny boot Presses the greenness of the sod, Teach me to see that tottering foot Uplifted and set down by God;

"Teach me a stronger, tenderer hand than mine

Sways every motion of thy infant frame; Bid me take hold, like thee, and not repine, Weak with my errors and deserved shame. "How? home again? ah, that soft laughter Tells me what voice thou hankerest after. Run, run, with that bright shining face, And little hands stretched forth apart, Into a mother's fond embrace, Close, closer to her heart.

"I too will turn, for I discern a voice Which whispers me that I am far from home;

Bids me repent, and led by holier choice

Back to a Father's open bosom come." In relation also to the best of his two plays, Violenzia, which contains many a fine touch of natural emotion, Mr. Hutton illustrates another of the points in his friend's character.

"Of the profound, and perhaps exaggerated respect which Mr. Roscoe cherished for strict constitutional forms, as the signs of habitual self control in a political society, there is a curious example in his tragedy of Violenzia. Almost all his friends joked him about the trial scene,

says, for the dénouement as a poet only,' not as a moralist. But there was something more than this, I believe, in the tenacity with which Mr. Roscoe clung to this turn in the plot. He had so deep-rooted a reverence for duc forms and conventions as the bulwarks of political and social order, that though one of his friends remarked on the unsatisfactoriness of a result which insured to the king 'his costs,' and all, I think, regarded this extreme legality as a great blot on the play, he never wavered in his adherence to it.

"And the same characteristic came out in

many other ways. He not only disliked but despised any conventionalism which seemed to represent false ideas, and was often extremely bold in setting it at defiance. But I think he disliked still more any thing spasmodic that indicated a want of self-regulating power. 'What do you mean,' he once wrote to his sister, 'by raving about the shackles of society in that Carlylian fashion? We're too methodical, are boots on our heads, or sleep in coal-scuttles? we? What would you have us do? Wear our Eat our dinner off wheelbarrows, or always use superlatives? Should we then be "Realities in the age of Shams?""

Thoroughly real himself, Mr. Roscoe attacked affectation in all forms, and not with least relish when it took the form of scorn for the accepted usages of life. Of all shams there was none that seemed to anger apart from the living truth of individual exhim more than the sham of eccentricity, pression. The Essays gathered from the National and other Reviews which occupy the second volume of the Remains abound in genuine expression of a mind that labored unobtrusively to penetrate to the essential truth of what it studied. Even where his decision as a critic is most open to exception, he sets wholesome independent thought before his readers, and excites them to the exercise of their own faculties. A body of consistent reasoning and feeling may be said even to bind his essays upon modern poets into an instructive study of their art.

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INAUGURAL ADDRESS

Delivered before the University of Edinburgh, 16th April, 1860, by the Rt. Hon. W. E. Gladstone, D.C.L., LL.D., Rector of the University of Edinburgh, and M.P. for the University of Oxford.

Principal, Professors, and Students of the University of Edinburgh.

I cannot estimate lightly the occasion on which I meet you, especially as it regards the younger and the larger part of my academical audience. The franchise which you have exercised in my favor is itself of a nature to draw attention; for the legislature of our own day has, by a new deliberative act invested you, the youngest members of the university, with a definite and not inconsiderable influence in the formation of that court, which is to exercise, upon appeal, the highest control over its proceedings. This is a measure which would hardly have been adopted in any other land than our own. Yet it is also one, in the best sense, agreeable to the spirit of our country and of its institutions; for we think it eminently British to admit the voice of the governed in the choice of governors to seek, through diversity of elements, for harmony and unity of result, and to train men for the discharge of manly duties by letting them begin their exercise betimes.

You have chosen, gentlemen, as your own representative in the University Court, one widely enough separated from you in the scale of years; one to whom much of that is past, which to you is as yet future. It is fitting, then, that he should speak to you on such an occasion as that which unites us together -namely, the work of the university, as a great organ of preparation for after life; and that, in treating of what constitutes the great bond between us, he should desire and endeavor to assist in arming you, as far as he may, for the efforts and trials of your ca

reer.

Subject to certain cycles of partial revolution, it is true that, as in the material so in the moral world, every generation of man is a laborer for that which succeeds it, and makes an addition to that great sum-total of acchieved results, which may, in commercial phrase, be called the capital of the race. Of all the conditions of existence in which man differs from the brutes, there is not one of greater moment than this, that each one of them commences life as if he were the first of a species, whereas man inherits largely from those who have gone before. How largely, none of us can say; but my belief is that, as years gather more and more upon you, you will estimate more and more highly your debt to preceding ages. If, on the one hand, that debt is capable of being exagger

ated or misapprehended-if arguments are sometimes strangely used which would imply that, because they have done much, we ought to do nothing more; yet on the other hand, it is no less true that the obligation is one so vast and manifold that it can never as

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whole be adequately measured. It is not only in possessions, available for use, enjoyment, and security; it is not only in language, laws, institutions, arts, religion; it is not only in what we have, but in what we are. For as character is formed by the action and reaction of the human being and the circumstances in which he lives, it follows that, as those circumstances vary, he alters too, and he transmits a modified-it ought to be also an enlarged and expanding-nature onwards in his turn to his posterity, under that mysterious law which establishes between every generation and its predecessors a moral as well as a physical association.

In what degree this process is marred, on the one hand, by the perversity and by the infirmity of man, or restored and extended, on the other, by the remedial provisions of the Divine mercy, this is not the place to inquire. The progress of mankind is upon the whole a chequered and an intercepted progress; and even where it is full formed, still, just as in the individual, youth has charms, that maturity under an inexorable law must lose, so the earlier ages of the world will ever continue to delight and instruct us by beauties that are exclusively or peculiarly their own. Again it would seem as though this progress (and here is a chastening and a humbling thought) were a progress of mankind, and not of the individual man; for it seems to be quite clear that whatever be the comparative greatness of the race now and in its infant or early stages, what may be called the normal specimens, so far as they have been made known to us, either through external form or through the works of the intellect, have tended rather to dwindle-or at least to diminish, than to grow in the highest elements of greatness.

But the exceptions at which these remarks have glanced, neither destroy nor materially weaken the profound moment of the broad and universal canon, that every generation of men, as they traverse the vale of life, are bound to accumulate, and in divers manners do accumulate, new treasuscs for the race, and leave the world richer on their departure, for the advantage of their descendants, than, on their entrance, they themselves had found it. Of the mental portion of this treasure no small part is stored-and of the continuous work I have described no small part is performed-by universities; which have been, I venture to say, entitled to rank

among the greater lights and glories of fusion of intelligence which multiplies the Christendom. natural guardians of civilization. These are It is, I believe, a fact, and if so, it is a fact perhaps not merely isolated phenomena. highly instructive and suggestive, that the Perhaps they are but witnesses, and but a university, as such, is a Christian institution. few among many witnesses, to the vast The Greeks, indeed, had the very largest change which has been wrought, since the ideas upon the training of man, and pro- advent of our Lord, in the state of man. duced specimens of our kind with gifts that Perhaps they re-ccho to us the truth that, have never been surpassed. But the nature apart from sound and sure relations to its of man, such as they knew it, was scarcely Maker, the fitful efforts of mankind must at all developed; nay, it was maimed, in its needs be worsted in the conflict with chance. supreme capacity-in its relations towards and change; but that, when by the dispensaGod. Hence, as in the visions of the proph- tion of Christianity the order of our moral et, so upon the roll of history, the imposing nature was restored, when the rightful king fabrics of ancient civilization never have en- had once more taken his place upon his dured. Greece has bequeathed to us her throne, then, indeed, civilization might come ever-living tongue and the immortal produc- to have a meaning and a vitality such as tions of her intellect. Rome made ready for Christendom the elements of polity and law; but the brilliant assemblage of endowments, which constitutes civilization, having no root in itself, could not brook the shocks of time and vicissitude; it came and it went; it was seen and it was gone :

had before been denied it. Then, at length, it had obtained the key to all the mysteries of the nature of man, to all the anomalies of its condition. Then it had obtained the ground plan of that nature in all its fulness, which before had been known only in remnants or in fragments; fragments of which, even as now in the toppling remains of some "Hunc tantum terris ostendent fata; neque ancient church or castle, the true grandeur ultra esse sinent." and the ethereal beauty were even the more We now watch, gentlemen, with a trem-conspicuous because of the surrounding ruins. bling hope, the course of that later and But fragments still, and fragments only, unChristian civilization which arose out of the til, by the bringing of life and immortality ashes of the old heathen world, and ask our- to light, the parts of our nature were reselves whether, like the Gospel itself, so that united, its harmony was re-established, our which the Gospel has wrought beyond itself life, heretofore a riddle unsolved, was at in the manners, arts, laws, and institutions of men, is in such manner and degree salted with perpetual life, that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it? Will the civilization, which was springing upwards from the days of Charlemagne, and which now, over the face of Europe and America, seems to present to us in bewildering conflict the mingled signs of decrepitude and of vigor, perish like its older 'types, and, like them, be known thereafter only in its fragments; or does it bear a charmed life, and will it give shade from the heat and shelter from the storm to all generations of men?

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length read as a discipline, and so obtained its just interpretation. All that had before seemed idle conflict, wasted energy, barren effort, was seen to be but the preparation for a glorious future; and death itself, instead of extinguishing the last hopes of man, became the means and the pledge of his fection.

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It was surely meet that a religion aiming at so much on our behalf should, in its historical development, provide an apparatus of subsidiary means for the attainment of its noble end far beyond what man in earlier days had dreamed of. To some of the particular organs formed in this apparatus for carrying man upwards and onwards to the source of his being, I have already adverted. Read in the light of these ideas the appearance of the university among the great institutions of Christian civilization is a phenomenon of no common interest. Let us see whether, itself among the historical results of Christianity, it does not vindicate its origin, and repay, so to speak, the debt of its birth, by the service that it renders to the great work of human cultivation.

In any answer to such a question, it would perhaps be easier to say what would not, than what would, be involved. But some things we may observe, which may be among the materials of a reply. The arts of war are now so allied with those of peace, that barbarism, once so terrible, is reduced to physical impotence; and what civilized man has had the wit to create, he has also the strength to defend. Thus one grand destructive agency is paralyzed. Time, indeed, is the great destroyer; but his power, too, is greatly neutralized by printing, by commerce I do not enter, gentlemen, into the queswhich lays the foundations of friendship tion from what source the university etymoamong nations, by the ease of communica- logically derives its name. At the very least, tion which binds men together, by that dif- it is a name most aptly symbolizing the pur

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pose for which the thing itself exists. For the head of all human knowledge, and bethe work of the university as such covers the cause it was, so to speak, in possession of whole field of knowledge, human and divine; the ground, and in the exercise of very powthe whole field of our nature in all its powers; erful influence, at the period when the less the whole field of time, in binding together organized institutions for teaching began to successive generations as they pass in the develop themselves into their final form of prosecution of their common destiny; aiding universities. But the university was founded each to sow its proper seed and to reap its in the principle of universal culture; and proper harvest from what has been sown be- the name Arts was intended to embrace fore; storing up into its own treasure house every description of knowledge that, rising the spoils of every new venture in the do-above mere handicraft, could contribute to main of mental enterprise, and ever binding train the mind and faculties of man. To the present to pay over to the future an ac- say, then, that the university was founded knowledgement at least of the debt which in arts, was to assert the universality of its for itself it owes the past. If the work of work. The assertion was not less true, nor improvement in human society under Chris- less far-sighted, because those who first made tian influences be a continuous and progres- it may not have been conscious of its comsive work, then we can well conceive why prehending more than the studies of the the king's daughter, foreshadowed in Holy Writ, has counted the university among her handmaids. If, apart from what may be the counsels of Providence as to ultimate success, it lay essentially in the nature of Christianity that it should aim at nothing less than the entire regeneration of human nature and society, such a conception as that of the university was surely her appropriate ally. Think as we will upon the movement of man's life and the course of his destiny, there is a fit association, and a noble and lofty harmony, between the greatest gift of the Almighty to our race, on the one hand, and the subordinate but momentous ministries of those chief institutions of learning and education, the business of one among which has gathered us to-day.

trivium and the quadrivium, which included grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. This catalogue is indeed a brief one, as compared with the countless branches of modern study; yet within its narrow bounds it contains in principle, at the least, the philosophy of speech, the philosophy of the mind, the mathematical sciences, pure and mixed, and the fine arts. It is both more easy and more rational, all circumstances taken into view, to admire the vastness of the conception of the university, than to wonder that it was at first but partially unfolded and applied.

The sincerity, the sagacity, the energy of purpose, with which the old universities were designed and organized may be discerned, as in other ways, so by the progressive exThe idea of the university, as we find it pansion of their studies. The Roman law, historically presented to us in the middle after remaining long almost forgotten, beage, was to methodize, perpetuate, and apply came known anew to Europe; and, as it all knowledge which existed, and to adopt grew to be a study, the universities provided and take up into itself every new branch as for it with their faculty of laws; and with it came successively into existence. These those degrees, principal and professors, various kinds of knowledge were applied for which call this day for my grateful appreciathe various uses of life, such as the time ap- tion. Again, when the final triumph of barprehended them. But the great truth was barism at Constantinople compelled Greek always held, and always kept in the centre learning to seek a home in the west, provisof the system, that man himself is the crown-ion began to be made forthwith in universiing wonder of creation; that the study of ties for its reception. I think my distinhis nature is the noblest study that the world guished brother, if I may presume so to call affords; and that, to his advancement and him (Professor Mansell), could tell us that improvement, all undertakings, all professions, all arts, all knowledge, all institutions are subordinated as means and instruments to their end.

The old and established principle was that the university had its base in the faculty of arts; Universitas fundata est in artibus. It was not meant by this maxim that the faculty of arts was to have precedence over all other faculties, for this honor was naturally and justly accorded to theology; both, we may suppose, because of the dignity of its subject-matter, which well may place it at

one of the first of those foundations was made in the very college at Oxford which he himself adorns. And the study, of which Greek learning is the main and most fruitful as well as the most arduous part, made its way under the well-deserved name of humanity, to the very head of the faculty of arts. When in all physical science man, guided in no small degree by our own illustrious Bacon, became content (in Bacon's language) to acknowledge himself only the servant and interpreter of Nature, and to walk in the paths of patient observation, the ground was

laid first for that faculty of medicine, which has attained in the university of Edinburgh to a distinction destined, I hope, to be as long-lived as it is without doubt extraordinary. We can hardly expect that human institutions should, without limit of time, retain the flexible and elastic tissues of their youth; and universities in particular, as they have grown old and great, have come to interlace at many points with the interests and concerns of that outer world which has but little sympathy with their proper work: or they might have displayed at this day an organization as complete, relatively to the present state of knowledge and inquiry, as was that which they possessed some centuries ago.

The older history of the universities of Europe not only presents many features of the utmost interest, but upon the whole inspires satisfaction and challenges praise from the impartial observer.

we view them, there was a completeness in the idea and work of universitics, in proportion as their proper development was attained, which may well excite our wonder. They aimed alike, as we have seen, at the preservation of all old learning, and at the appropriation of all new. They bound themselves to prosecute alike those studies which fit men for the professions and the daily needs of life, and those which terminate upon man himself, whether by the investigation of truth or by the pursuit of refinement. They bore, and indeed they still bear, a character at once conservative and progressive. If not uniformly, yet in general, their influence tended to mitigate extreme opinions: the papal power, for example, knew no more formidable curb than the great university of Paris, and in England it was the special privilege of Oxford to rear up many centuries ago very eminent men of the class who have been well described by a German writer as reformers before the Reformation. I speak now of men of action; but in both of the universities I have named-and they are, I think, the two placed by Huber at the head of all the northern universities-there were also reared many men of the first order in power of thought, who discussed even the highest subjects with a freedom as well as a force much beyond what has been tolerated in the Latin church since the alarm and shock of the Reformation. Of all these, the best-known name to modern cars is Abelard; for it is associated with a romantic tale cf passion, which some, and even some famous, writers have not thought it beneath them to degrade. But quite apart from the profound and sad interest, and the warning lcssons of his history, he was a man that gave to the human mind one of those enduring impulses whose effects remain long after their source has been forgotten, and influence the course of thought, and through thought, of action, after many generations.

I might detain you long, gentlemen, upon the various kinds of good they did, and I might scarch long without discovering any characteristic evils to set down against it. What the castle was to the feudal baron, what the guild was to the infant middleclass, they were to knowledge and to mental freedom; nor was it only that from them local culture received local shelter, and enjoyed through them an immunity from the assaults of barbarism in its vicinity: they established, so to speak, a telegraph for the mind; and all the elements of intellectual culture scattered throughout Europe were brought by them into near communion. Without a visible head, or a coercive law, or a perilous tendency to aggression, they did for the mind of man what the unity of the Roman Church aimed at doing for his soul. They did it by the strong sympathy of an inward life, and by a common interest and impulse, almost from their nature incapable of being directed to perverse or dangerous ends. Indeed, it was not in their Universities were, in truth, a great medinature to supply the materials of any combi- ating power between the high and the low, nation formidable to other social powers act-between the old and the new, between specing each in its proper sphere, for they were on every side watched by jealous interests, and kept at once in check and in activity by competition. The monasteries for the Church, and the legal and medical professions with their special establishments of education, as they were matured in after times, prevented an undue ascendancy; while in these seats alone there was supplied that good preservative against excess and disorder, that human knowledge was in them regarded as a whole, and its various branches had, from their very neighborhood, better definitions of their proper provinces, and of their mutual relations. In whatever light

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ulation and action, between authority and freedom. Of these last words, in their application to the political sphere, modern history, and the experience of our own time, afford abundant excmplification. In countries which enjoy political liberty, the universities are usually firm supports of the established order of things; but in countries under absolute government they acquire a bias towards innovation. Some excess may be noted in these tendencies, but in the main they bear witness against greater and more pernicicus excesses. To take instancesthe university of Edinburgh did not very easily accommodate itself to the Revolution

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