tes
the exercise of the affections and some engaging occupation or pursuit;
both which are highly relevant to the attainment of happiness. Indeed
with an exemption from cares, and a considerable share of the positive
gratifications, we can enjoy life on a very slender stock of health;
otherwise, where should we be in the inevitable decline that age brings
with it?]

[Footnote 14: This Society has since been dissolved.]

* * * * *

VI.

THE UNIVERSITY IDEAL--PAST AND PRESENT.[15]

GENTLEMEN,

By your flattering estimate of my services, I have been unexpectedly
summoned from retirement, to assume the honours and the duties of the
purple, and to occupy the most historically important office in the
Universities of Europe.

The present demands upon the Rectorship somewhat resemble what we are
told of the Homeric chief, who, in company with his Council or Senate,
the _Boule_, and the Popular Assembly, or _Agora_, made up the political
constitution of the tribe. The functions of the chief, it is said, were
to supply wise counsel to the _Boule_ (as we might call our Court), and
unctuous eloquence to the _Agora_. The second of these requirements is
what weighs upon me at the present moment.

Whatever may have been the practice of my predecessors, generally
strangers to you, it would be altogether unbecoming in me to travel out
of our University life, for the materials of an Address. My remarks then
will principally bear on the UNIVERSITY IDEAL.

[THE HIGHER TEACHING IN GREECE.]

To the Greeks we are indebted for the earliest germ of the University.
It was with them chiefly that education took that great leap, the
greatest ever made, from the traditional teaching of the home, the shop,
the social surroundings, to schoolmaster teaching properly so called.
Nowadays, we, schoolmasters, think so much of ourselves, that we do not
make full allowance for that other teaching, which was, for unknown
ages, the only teaching of mankind. The Greeks were the first to
introduce, not perhaps the primary schoolmaster, for the R's, but
certainly the secondary or higher schoolmaster, known as Rhetorician or
Sophist, who taught the higher professions; while their Philosophers or
wise men, introduced a kind of knowledge that gave scope to the
intellectual faculties, with or without professional applications; the
very idea of our Faculty of Arts.

So self-asserting were these new-born teachers of t