Why is this done? Be fair to us, Gentlemen. We
do it not only to accommodate the burden to your backs, to avoid
overtaxing one-and-a-half or two years of study; not merely to
guide you that you do not dissipate your reading, that you shall
--with us, at any rate--know where you are. We do it chiefly, and
honestly--you likewise being honest--to give you each year, in
each prescribed course, a sound nucleus of knowledge, out of
which, later, your minds can reach to more. We are not, in the
last instance, praiseworthy or blameworthy for your range. I
think, perhaps, too little of a man's _range_ in his short while
here between (say) nineteen and twenty-two. For anything I care,
the kernel may be as small as you please. To plant it wholesome,
for a while to tend it wholesome, then to show it the sky and
that it is wide--not a hot-house, nor a brassy cupola over a man,
but an atmosphere shining up league on league; to reach the
moment of saying 'All this now is yours, if you have the
perseverance as I have taught you the power, _coelum nactus es,
hoc exorna_': this, even in our present Tripos, we endeavour to
do.

III

All very well. But, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked,

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers?

'Yes,' I hear you ingeminate; 'but what about Examinations? We
thank you, sirs, for thus relieving and guiding us: we
acknowledge your excellent intentions. But in practice you hang
up a bachelor's gown and hood on a pole, and right under and just
in front of it you set the examination-barrier. For this in
practice we run during three years or so, and to this all the
time you are exhorting, directing us--whether you mean it or not,
though we suspect that you cannot help yourselves.' Yes; and, as
labouring swimmers will turn their eyes even to a little boat in
the offing, I hear you pant 'This man at all events--always so
insistent that good literature teaches _What Is_ rather than
_What Knows_--will bring word that we may float on our backs,
bathe, enjoy these waters and be refreshed, instead of striving
through them competitive for a goal. He _must_ condemn literary
examinations, nine-tenths of which treat Literature as matter of
Knowledge merely.'

IV

I am sorry, Gentlemen: I cannot bring you so much of comfort as
all that. I have a love of the past which, because it goes down
to the roots, has sometimes been called Radicalism: I could never
consent with Bacon's gibe at antiquity as _p