w as ever it was. Still more appropriate to the present day
was Mr. Carlyle's protest against the notion that a University is
the place where a man is to be fitted for the special work of a
profession. A University, as he puts it, teaches a man how to read,
or, as we may say more generally, how to learn. It is not the function
of such a place to offer particular and technical knowledge, but to
prepare a man for mastering any science by teaching him the method of
all. A child learns the use of his body, not the art of a carpenter or
smith, and the University student learns the use of his mind, not the
professional lore of a lawyer or a physician. It is pleasant to meet
with a strong reassertion of doctrines which the utilitarianism of a
commercial and manufacturing age is too apt to make us all forget.
Mr. Carlyle is essentially conservative in his notions on academic
functions. Accuracy, discrimination, judgment, are with him the be-all
and end-all of educational training. If a man has learnt to know a
thing in itself, and in its relation to surrounding phenomena, he
has got from a University what it is its proper duty to teach.
Accordingly, we find him bestowing a good word on poor old Arthur
Collins, who showed that he possessed these valuable qualities in the
humble work of compiling a Peerage.

"The new Lord Rector is, however, as conservative in his choice of the
implements of study as he is in the determination of its objects. The
languages and the history of the great nations of antiquity he puts
foremost, like any other pedagogue. The Greeks and the Romans are,
he tells the Edinburgh students, 'a pair of nations shining in the
records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the
darkness of the past ages;' and he adds that it would be well worth
their while to get an understanding of what these people were, and
what they did. It is here, however, that an old error of Mr.
Carlyle's crops up among his well-remembered truths. He quotes from
Machiavelli--evidently agreeing himself with the sentiment, though he
refrained from asking the assent of his audience to it--the statement
that the history of Rome showed that a democracy could not permanently
exist without the occasional intervention of a Dictator. It is
possible that if Machiavelli had had the experience of the centuries
which have elapsed since his day, he would have seen fit to alter his
conclusion, and it is to be regretted that the admir