On the cam. Lectures on the University of Cambridge in England

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Preface

The following twelve lectures were delivered in the hall of the Lowell Institute in Boston, in the months of January and February, 1864. In preparing them for the press, it could not escape my notice that much of the matter they contained was of an essentially rhetorical character, better suited for a lecture than an essay. It was no less evident, however, that any attempt to change their tone to something more didactic would be to re-write them entirely, and as they form a connected whole, the result would probably be that the facts and theories brought forward would be made less interesting without any gain in perspicuity or accuracy. They have been therefore submitted to the public exactly as dedelivered.

For the emphasis with which certain views are advanced, I trust no apology is needed. A residence of seven years and more in two Universi-

VI PREFACE. i

ties can hardly fail to generate strong opinions on such topics as the value of College studies ; and between three and four years passed in a foreign country is apt to leave the mind in a very different disposition to its inhabitants from those contracted by occasional and short encounters with them. The pages in which a sentiment of the most cordial good-will towards England is advanced were written and spoken at a time when our relations to her were most apathetic, if not antagonistic ; I can see no reason to change them now, when recent events, glorious or sad, have brought the countries so much nearer. No class of men appears to me less truly patriotic than those whose only idea of upholding our own country is to run down others ; there are such everywhere, and whether Americans or English, they will find little satisfaction in these pages.

It may be proper to say that all statistics with reference to the present condition of Cambridge are taken from the Cambridge Calendar for 1863 ; the architectural and antiquarian notes from Le Keux's "Memorials of Cambridge"; the reminiscences of the early Puritans from Young's " Chronicles of Massachusetts."

Contents

Introduction xi

LECTURE I.

General View of Cambridge Uniybbsitt.

Introduction

In order that the reader may thoroughly appreciate the position in which these lectures were written, I must here trouble him, once for all, with certain personal records, in order to avoid constant egotistical reminiscences in the body of the work.

Having graduated at Harvard in July, 1859, I sailed for Engl&nd on September 21st of that year. Arriving on. October 2d, I was admitted a pensioner of Trinity College, Cambridge, on October 10th, Rev. William Whewell, D. D., being Master of the College, and Rev. J. B. Lightfoot the College tutor, under whose care I was placed. I remained here for three entire academic years of three terms each, including also portions of the Christmas and Easter vacations of each year, and the months of July and August in the long vacations of 1860 and 1862. In June, 1861, being the beginning of the long vacation, I returned to America, leaving it again in October of the same year. Beginning the fourth academic year in October, 1862, I took the degree of B. A. on the 31st of January, 1863, remaining at Cambridge as

Xll INTRODUCTION.

k Bachelor of Arts till June of that year, excepting seven weeks on the Continent in March and April, and returned to America in the summer of 1863.

During this interval, I passed the following University examinations : Three for the University scholarships in February, 1860, 1861, and 1862 ; Little-Go or previous examination in April, 1861 ; Mathematical Tripos in January, 1863, in virtue of which I received the degree ; and Classical Tripos in the ensuing Februaiy ; also competing for certain University prizes. My College examinations were : For admission, October, 1859 ; May examinations, 1860, 1861, 1862 ; Christmas examination, 1860 ; for Foundation Scholarships, Easter 1861 and 1862, after the second of which I was chosen to one of the Scholarships. I also competed for certain College prizes, with a partial amount of success.

During this period, the Prince Consort, Chancellor of the University, died, and the Duke of Devonshire was elected to the vacant place. The successive Vice-Chancellors were Rev. W. H. Bateson, Master of St. John's ; Hon. and Rev. L. Neville, Master of Magdalene ; Rev. George Phillips, President of Queens', and Rev. Edward Atkinson, Master of Clare. From the hands of this last I received my degree. The Prince of Wales connected himself with the University in the spring of 1861, and left on his father's decease ; and the

INTRODUCTION. XU1

British Scientific Association met at Cambridge in 1862.

It will be observed that this period embraces in the history of England the outbreak and terminar tion of the Chinese War ; the gradual cessation of Reform agitation ; the death of Lord Macaulay ; the publication of Essays and Reviews, and of Dr. Colenso's Theological Works; the distress in the manufacturing districts ; the death of the mother and husband of the reigning sovereign ; the anticipation of French invasion; the inauguration of the Rifle Volunteer movement ; the Trent affair, and other complication of England in American matters ; the death of Lord Herbert and Sir G. Gornewall Lewis ; the gradual uneasy breaking up and reuniting of parties ; the marriage of the Prince of Wales and others of the royal family. The death of Count Cavour, the consolidation of Italy, and the Polish outbreak, are the chief topics of interest in Europe.

American history during the same time comprehends the visit of the Prince of Wales to this country; the election of 1860; and the whole history of the secession, rebellion, and war, down to Lee's advance into Pennsylvania, which was the news received at the quarantine ground in New York by the steamer in which I finally returned. During the first battles of the war, — Rich Mountain, Bull Run, &c, — I was in this country.

These great public events make less stir in an

XIV INTRODUCTION.

English than in an American college. The almost monastic isolation is so great, that it seemed a greater event to me to change my rooms from letter D, New Court, where I was for two years and a half, to letter I, Old Court, where I ended my course, than for the command of the army to pass from McClellan to Burnside. The effect of contemporary events is therefore but slightly touched in these lectures, which are meant to exhibit Cambridge as it is.

Soon after I entered, I was entreated by several friends in America to collect all the materials I could for a book on Cambridge and England. Had I made a business of this, these lectures would be fuller of educational and architectural lore ; but they would have entirely lost the spirit of the place, and after all would have been inferior to Le Keux's " Memorials," and Cooper's " Athenae Cantabrigienses." I conceived that the best materials I could collect were those picked up in the daily pathway of an undergraduate, and never went out of that path to gather precious gems or hew out shapely blocks.

As I finish these lines, the last written of this book, a feeling of irresistible sadness comes over me, which no one will reprehend. I went to Cambridge with the counsel, the help, the blessing of one to whom, under heaven, I owe all that makes my life worth living. I passed nearly four years of exile in the light of home thoughts where

INTRODUCTION. XV

he was the central sun. I delivered these lectures on my return with his constant encouragement and favor ; and now that I make my first start on the path he chose for his own, I can only sigh for the presence which would have excused all errors, doubled all efforts, and supplied all needs, and which is taken from me, from his country, forever.

Cambridge, Mass., Jane 29, 1865.

GENERAL VIEW OP CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY.

Introduction. — Old and New Cambridge. — American Ignorance or English Universities. — Cambridge and Vicinity described. — Connection and Distinction or University and Colleges. — Analogy of the Union and the States.

It is a task, arduous in no slight degree, for a wholly untried lecturer, a young man, scarce assured that he is free from the discipline of school and college, to appear before such an audience as this, and in such a place. If America is the country, par excellence, of popular lecturing, the Lowell Institute must be the head of all the institutions that offer this form of instruction to the people ; and any one, however experienced or well-informed, may well feel a tremor, on first attempting so honorable a work, and one where so much is expected, as a course of Lowell Lectures. I know, my honored fellow-citizens, that I may expect at your hands sympathy and indulgence for all the imperfections of youth. You are not to listen to-night, as all of us used to do with so much pleasure, l ▲ to the voice of the most learned and accomplished classical scholar of Massachusetts ; but you will be satisfied when I tell you that my model of a lecturer is he whose instructions were my delight at home, whose encouragement attended me abroad, and whose loss has given the harshest shock to my happiness at returning, — the erudite, the brilliant, the beloved Felton.

If I fail — as who should hope to succeed? — in reproducing to you the lecturers of other years, you will at least give me credit for an ardent wish to please you, for a young man's enthusiasm in my subject, and for American loyalty. And I fear that this last quality, which we all need so much now, I shall need doubly to-night, — for my subject will involve what, in the opinion of many good Americans, is a fatal objection to any writer or speaker, the praises of England and of some English institutions. Having passed nearly four years in England; returning with a sadly fragmentary knowledge of the great events that have taken place at home, — though I have tried to make the most of them abroad, — my heart is full, and so must my course be, of the place where I went to seek education. I must therefore impose upon you a frequent, though I hope not undiscriminating, eulogy of the Old Country. Nor am I sorry to have this opportunity so to do. I am not proposing to defend her conduct in the first years of the war. I believe it to be indefensible, though

LECTUBE I. 3

not perhaps inexcusable. Even the excuses which might be, which are given by intelligent Englishmen, I will not go through here. But is it fair, is it just, is it overcoming evil with good, to indulge in indiscriminate and fanatical abuse of a great nation, because her conduct to us has been illjudged and selfish ? We blame the editorials of the Times; have not our own newspapers been rapidly bringing their criticisms on foreign affairs to the standard of the Times ? Are we, after the reception we gave the Prince of Wales in 1860, really and truly prepared to make Louis Napoleon our model of a sovereign instead of the good Queen Victoria ? Or has the conduct of England in the present war altered a single item in that domestic life, wherein so many points used to excite our admiration and love? It is my hope, ladies and gentlemen, that I may succeed in interesting you not only in the great English University, but in the country by which that University is supported, and to which it gives so much of her strength ; and that as I have fought in England for the country of my birth, I may not have hard work to fight here for the country that extended to me her hospitality.

It is remarked of the Americans, that beginning their national, and so to speak, their physical existence so recently, they are of all peoples the most eager to search out the previous history of all that belongs to them ; to know all about everything

American as it was before it became American. The chief support of genealogists in England is derived from Yankees, who, with more than their native inquisitiveness, will know from what precise lovely pasture in Northamptonshire came the particular John Brown, in honor of whom their town is called Fairfield. To facilitate these researches, an enterprising and ubiquitous citizen has re-edited the Massachusetts Colonial Records, that we may, at all events, get our ancestors safe as far back as the first settlement. I extract therefrom, without attempting to do justice to the admirable and ingenious orthography, the following entries : —

" 16S7. Nov. 15. The College shall be at Newtown."

" 1638. May 2. Newtown shall be called Cambridge."

And why Cambridge ? Why should one of the most insignificant t>f English boroughs be picked out to give its name to the settlement, where such men as Winthrop and Leverett seriously thought of establishing the seat of government of " the Massachusetts? " — the town whence the pioneers of Springfield departed on their fourteen days' journey to the Connecticut?- — the town^ where the first printing-press in the United States was established ? Was not Norwich, the second city in England, or York, the capital of the North* where Saltonstall had so often attended the assizes, or Huntingdon, the home of their beloved Cromwell,

LECTURE L 5

or Wendbver, of the still more honored Hampden, worthier of commemoration ? Why not London itself, a name which John Smith had vainly sought to fix on the old Bay of Dorchester ? It is the first of the records I have read that explains the second. The college was to be at Newtown. The ancient University, where most of our pilgrim ancestors had tasted of the sweets of learning which they desired to perpetuate, was at Cambridge in England. It was from Cambridge that John Harvard came to cast in bis lot among us. In filial and grateful remembrance of their own Alma Mater, did our ancestors give the name of Cambridge to the settlement of Newtown, the seat of their infant college.

I am sure, my honored friends, I do not misinterpret your feelings if I say that on no subject could the American passion for historical research be more eagerly and delightedly exercised than the parentage of Harvard College. It is from no common interest that for seven generations the wealth of Massachusetts has been lavished on her, that the competition of her halls has stimulated the noblest youth of our city and our country. No common share of our hearts' blood must be in that institution that has sent out over four hundred children to fight in their country's warfare, and the best of them to fall in siege and battle and swamp and hospital. When Boston forgets Harvard, may her right hand forget its cunning.

When she remembers not her ancient university, may her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth.

And since we delight in all that can illustrate her history, — since it is our boast that we love to cut deeper, year after year, the inscriptions on the graves of our ancestors, and trace with eagerness in English soil the roots and stock which have put forth the branches of American learning and civilization, — since we Bostonians boast to be liberal and cultivated men and women, enjoying the study of any place where good and wise teachers of youth have been wont to gather, — I invite you to cross the water with me to-night, and to pass six weeks at Cambridge in England. We shall study its history, its character, its prospects, — its studies and its recreations, its fathers and its sons, its precepts and its warnings. Like children going back to their grandfather's mansion, we shall run through the rooms where our fathers were born and bred; we shall stroll along the green turf and by the bright streams where they grew up ; and we shall stumble upon many queer nooks, winding passages, and dark closets, some of them not a little musty, where they made their resort for pleasure or punishment. And I hope that when we meet some of our cousins there, you will take them affectionately by the hand, remembering the relationship ; for they have for four years been giving a hearty welcome to their American kinsman; taken him to school with them, and shared with him their bed and board; though I admit their hospitality did not prevent their charging him a good price. And if you do not come back at the beginning of spring with love to Old Cambridge in your hearts, it will not be her fault, but mine.

I am surprised that on a subject so interesting and important as the English Universities, scarcely anything has been written from which an American can derive correct ideas of them. Le Keux's magnificent volumes on the Architectural History and Memorials of Cambridge, of which a new and enlarged edition has lately appeared, seldom finds its way into American libraries. The learned works of Huber and Hayward are rather scientific discussions than popular treatises. The meagre notices of novelists and magazine-writers mislead on exactly the points where they seek to instruct. I should say, from what observations I have been able to make, that the general opinion of Americans is as follows. There is in England a college or university, the terms being used interchangeably, situated at Oxford, to which the name of Cambridge is occasionally applied ; of which " The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green " is the guidebook, published by official authority; that the young men wear a peculiar dress, of which the main part is generally known as the Oxford hat ; that studies are pursued, standing in the same relation to those of our colleges that they do to those of our public schools ; that the undergraduates are, on an average, six or eight years older than our own ; that boating is practised, the least bit inferior to ours; that the Articles of the Church of England are frequently signed by all the members of this college, — Oxford College, sometimes called Cambridge; and that it is infested by a swarm of things called Lords, who make the necks of the other students their habitual promenade. I have stated all this not a£ a caricature, but as what I honestly believe to be a fair exposition of the opinion held by a majority of Americans, as far as they have any opinion at all, of the great fountains of English learning. Now, it is, in fact, hardly more correct than the statement of a writer in All the Year Round, that the horse-raifroad passed by the house of the poet Longfellow to the beautiful rural cemetery on the banks of the Schuylkill. Cambridge is not Oxford, and Oxford is not Cambridge. The dress of the students at the two places is as different as the uniforms of army and navy ; their head-dress is never known as an Oxford hat, and the wearers are in general about a year and a half older than our students. What is the value of their studies and their exercise, as compared with ours, I shall have occasion to state shortly ; but any person can enter, and take his bachelor's, and at Cambridge his master's degree, without any .oath or subscrip-

LECTUBE L 9

tion whatsoever, — whether connected with the Church or State of England. " Verdant Green " was written by a graduate of neither university, — it is a very shallow, imperfect picture of a certain style of Oxford life ; and a lord, with the undergraduates, is a man. And all these errors are the more unjustifiable, because there is one book, giving, as far as Cambridge goes, a capital account of the English university system, at once fall, accurate, and lively beyond any work I know. I allude to Mr. C. A. Bristed's excellent work, " Five Years in an English University." I shall doubtless have frequent occasion to recur to the obligations I am under to this book. Its plates were most unfortunately destroyed in the Harpers' fire. Had it not been out of print, my occupation here would be gone.

Perhaps the reason why we have had no good account, except Bristed's, of an English university in comparison with the flood of information about the German system, though even that is very imperfectly understood, is, that so few Americans have ever pursued their studies at one. This has arisen from several causes. The expense of living in England, — various difficulties, great, but not insuperable, in the way of a foreigner's residence at Oxford or Cambridge, — the desire to reside in some Continental town, to learn the language, — and a general persuasion that English scholars are inferior to German, and English people inferior to l* brutes, — has deterred all but a very few Americans from seeking the Alma Mater of their fathers, the fountain from which their own streams of learning had flowed. I cannot think there is any- American who has encountered the ordeal, but has been thankful he did so. And now that all disabilities to the residence of foreigners at Oxford or Cambridge are removed, I trust an American student will never again be a subject for Punch's celebrated caricature, representing a tall and lanky youth dressed in stars and stripes, accosted by a short and stout proctor thus : —

"Sir — you are smoking a cigar in the High Street of Oxford!!"

" Guess I could have told you that, old hoss." Since, then, I have the honor to be one of few who have seen the old Lady in her best parlor, her dining-room, her bed-chambers, and her school-room, let me lay the foundations of her house correctly. I repeat — Cambridge is not Oxford, and Oxford is not Cambridge. To prevent all further danger of confusion, I would call your attention to the fact, that these two university towns are almost exactly as far apart as our two university towns of Providence and Hartford, and that the generally travelled route from Cambridge to London, and from London by Reading to Oxford, is not unlike a journey from Providence to New London or Stonington, and thence by New Haven to Hartford. I hope in the course of these lectures to find

LECTUBE L 11

space for a few words concerning Oxford. Suffice it at present to say that the two great universities of England are generous rivals in wealth and learning, equally matched, full of mutual respect, each convinced of its own superiority, and each confident that the other is vastly superior to any third place of learning in the world.

But if Cambridge claims to be the equal of Ox- % ford, it must be exclusively from its academic pretensions. The two towns are far from being a match. Oxford is one of the most picturesque of England's old cathedral cities, and one of the most active of its modern county capitals, situated too on the banks of its noblest river, in the bosom of a fine range of hills, and in the immediate vicinity of some of the most beautiful and famous localities in Britain. Sport and love, politics and warfare, Little John and Fair Rosamond, Charles the First and Marlborough, have left their memorials at its very threshold. Cambridge, on the contrary, is of all provincial English boroughs the most insignificant, the dullest and the ugliest. It is at once the last town on the chalk, and the first on the fen, — a combination admirable for raising wheat, but wholly at variance with beauty of all kinds. An endless expanse of marsh, cut up by longdrawn reaches of sluggish brooks, bordered with pollard willows and unhappy poplars, forms the prospect of the lowlands. On the south, a mixture of chalk and Hint rises into a slope of a few hundred feet high, dignified by the title of the Gogmagog Hills, without a tree or a tower, or indeed anything to break the outline but some windmills and an insane asylum. Near the foot of this molework, and through the melancholy of these marshes, creeps what seems a forgotten canal, nowhere over seventy feet wide, with a few locks and half a hundred black barges ; — and this you are informed is the river Cam, whence Cambridge. Here and there on its banks are clustered the cottages of little hamlets, ugly towards the fen side, prettier towards the chalk, and now and then cropping out into groves and gardens, millpools, weirs affording presage of trout, and all of a cosy, household kind of beauty, quite enrapturing in such a waste of dullness. The site of one mill, otherwise as commonplace as its fellows, has been immortalized, for, says Chaucer, —

" At Trompington, not far from Cantabrigge Ther goth a brook, and over it a brigge, Upon the whiche brook ther stout a meile ; (Now this is very sothe that you I tell.) "

Though if very sothe were told, the mill is just over the border in Granchester, the next parish to Trumpingten. The chalk country of Cambridge is in no way remarkable. It is the last out-cropping spur of the great calcareous range that fills up the southeastern corner of England, abounding in those curious fossils called Coprolites, which are very extensively worked as a fertilizer by the Cambridge peasants.

LECTtflEtE L 13

But the fen or Isle of Ely, on whose extreme southern limit stands Cambridge, is one of the most singular features of Great Britain. It is the great estuary of the Ouse and the Nen rivers, whose quaint Saxon names are connected with the history of some of our most honored heroes, for it was by the banks of the Ouse that the gentlest of poets, William Cowper, took his daily walk, and the Nen in its course through Northampton parts at equal distances of a few miles the towns of Ecton and Sulgrave, the ancestral seats of the families of Franklin and Washington. The Isle of Ely is the vast accumulation of mud and peat brought down by these rivers, rfhd deposited, Bke the delta of the Nile, just at the point where the German Ocean flings its fiercest tides on the east coast of England. It is in fact perfectly described as a bit of Holland m the centre of England, and the Saxon name of Holland, or hollow land, is still retained by a similar tract in Lincolnshire. The primitive condition of the Isle of Ely is admirably described by Lord Macaulay in the eleventh chapter of his immortal history. One feature he there commemorates must not be omitted here. On the largest of the knolls of solid earth," originally islands, which here and there stud the marsh, a few thousand souls are gathered around the glorious cathedral of Ely, still one of the most magnificent Gothic shrines in England, though a great part of the west end appears to have been destroyed. Its majestic towers are a landmark for miles, in spite of the atmosphere of the fens, noted for its heaviness and moisture even in England. In the course of the last two hundred years, the enterprise of various great proprietors, particularly the noble house of Russell, Dukes of Bedford, has converted the fen of Ely into a field of inexhaustible agricultural wealth. The sea is kept out by dikes, which, however, are not always adequate. In the year 1862, one of the sluiceways burst, and flooded the lower part of the fen, so that people came from all the neighboring counties to watch the devastations of the tide as a spectacle. Sixteen miles south of Ely the fen terminates, almost at the foot of another landmark, less lofty than the cathedrals, but contesting with all of them, in spite of Ruskin's glittering paradoxes, the palm for perfection of proportion, simplicity of design, and elegance of detail, — the chapel of King's College, (of which the library of Harvard is not, as some persons suppose, an exact copy, but quite the reverse,) whose pinnacles, 146 feet high, mark, for all the fen, the site of Cambridge.

I have said that Cambridge is an insignificant and ugly town. Its population is not far from that of our own Cambridge, between twenty and twenty-five thousand, and the space it covers is much less. Being the capital of an entirely agricultural country, it wants the bustle of a mining district and the enterprise and progress of a manufacturing one. It seems to have stagnated for three hundred years, seeing new articles in the shops, and new faces in the streets, and occasionally some new houses, only because the population was larger. Its streets are too crooked to be convenient or imposing, and not crooked enough to be picturesque. The buildings are mostly of bricks baked of the local clay, which is of a dirty white, relieved by occasional touches of dingy red, and all, to use Dr. Holmes's admirable classification, of no particular order of architecture but their own. Here and there a building in the white freestone of the neighborhood would be really ornamental, were it not for the uniform pall of coal-smoke that blackens everything in an English market-town, and is in Cambridge rendered doubly swarthy by the condensations of the marsh fog. Its churches, on which English towns mainly depend to relieve their architectural sameness, are by no means unsightly, but on very commonplace models, with one exception, the beautiful little round church of the Holy Sepulchre, often known as St. Sepulchre's. It is one of four in England which the Knight Templars built in a circular form, to commemorate the shape of the Sepulchre in Jerusalem. When Brian de Bois^Guilbert travelled northward, he undoubtedly first paid his vows at the round Temple Church in London ; on the first stage from London, he would arrive at the round church in Essex; the second would take him to this at Cambridge ; the fourth would bring him to one in Northamptonshire, and for the rest of hfs journey to Rotherwood he would have to content himself with a sanctuary not on the Templar model.