old days the wandering student's heart as on the distant hill-top he
turned to take a last look at disappearing Bologna and remembered the
fair curtain-lecturing Novella de Andrea[1]--fair prototype of modern
Mrs. Caudle; how his spirits rose when, like Lucentio, he came to 'fair
Padua, nursery of arts;' or how he mused for the last time wandering
beside the turbid Arno, in

'Pisa, renowned for grave citizens,'

we wot not. Little do we know either of the ancient 'larks' of the
Sorbonne, of Leyden, Utrecht, and Amsterdam; somewhat less, in spite of
gifted imagining, of _The Student of Salamanca_. But Howitt's _Student
Life in Germany_, setting forth in all its noisy, smoking, beer-drinking
conviviality the significance of the Burschenleben,

'I am an unmarried scholar and a free man;'

Bristed's _Five Years in an English University_, congenial in its
setting forth of the Cantab's carnal delights and intellectual
jockeyism; _The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman_,
wherein one 'Cuthbert Bede, B.A.' has by 'numerous illustrations' of
numerous dissipations, given as good an idea as is desirable of the
'rowing men' in that very antediluvian receptacle of elegant
scholarship; are all present evidences of the affectionate interest with
which the graduate reverts to his college days. In like manner _Student
Life in Scotland_ has engaged the late attention of venerable
_Blackwood_, while the pages of _Putnam_, in _Life in a Canadian
College_,[2] and _Fireside Travels_,[3] have given some idea of things
nearer home, some little time ago. But while numerous pamphlets and
essays have been written on our collegiate systems of education, the
general development and present doings of Young America in the
universities remain untouched.

The academic influences exerted over American students are, it must be
premised, vastly different from those of the old world. Imprimis, our
colleges are just well into being. Reaching back into no dim antiquity,
their rise and progress are traceable from their beginnings--beginnings
not always the greatest. Thus saith the poet doctor of his Alma Mater:

'Pray, who was on the Catalogue
When college was begun?
Two nephews of the President,
And _the_ Professor's son,
(They turned a little Indian by,
As brown as any bun;)
Lord! how the Seniors knocked about
That Freshman class of one!'

From small beginnings and short lives our colleges have gathered