especially acts upon the imagination; it does not convince, but it impresses; it has the force of authority, rather than of reason; and concurrence in it is, not an intelligent decision, but a submission or belief. This circumstance at once suggests to us how we are to proceed in the case under consideration. Arguments are the fit weapons with which to assail an erroneous judgment, but assertions and actions must be brought to bear upon a false imagination. The mind in that case has been misled by representations; it must be set right by representations. What it asks of us is, not reasoning, but discussion. In works on Logic, we meet with a sophistical argument, the object of which is to prove that motion is impossible; and it is not uncommon, before scientifically handling it, to submit it to a practical refutation;-Solvitur ambulando. Such is the sort of reply which I think it may be useful just now to make to public opinion, which is so indisposed to allow that a Catholic University of the English tongue can be set in motion. I will neither directly prove that it is possible, nor answer the allegations in behalf of its impossibility; I shall attempt a humbler, but perhaps a not less efficacious service, in employing myself to the best of my ability, and according to the patience of the reader, in setting forth what a University is. I will leave the controversy to others; I will confine myself to description and statement, concerning the nature, the character, the work, the peculiarities of a University, the aims with which it is established, the wants it may supply, the methods it adopts, what it involves and requires, what are its relations to other institutions, and what has been its history. I am sanguine that my labour will not be thrown away, though it aims at nothing very learned, nothing very systematic; though it should wander from

one subject to another, as each happens to arise, and gives no promise whatever of terminating in the production of a treatise.

And in attempting as much as this, while I hope I shall gain instruction from criticisms of whatever sort, I do not mean to be put out by them, whether they come from those who know more, or those who know less than myself; from those who take exacter, broader, more erudite, more sagacious, more philosophical views than my own; or those who have yet to attain such measure of truth and of judgment as I may myself claim. I must not be disturbed at the animadversions of those who have a right to feel superior to me, nor at the complaints of others who think I do not enter into or satisfy their difficulties. If I am charged with being shallow on the one part, or off-hand on the other, if I myself feel that fastidiousness at my own attempts, which grows upon an author as he multiplies his compositions, I shall console myself with the reflection, that life is not long enough to do more than our best, whatever that may be; that they who are ever taking aim, make no hits; that they who never venture, never gain; that to be ever safe, is to be ever feeble; and that to do some substantial good, is the compensation for much incidental imperfection.

With thoughts like these, which, such as they are, have been the companions and the food of my life hitherto, I address myself to my undertaking.

CHAPTER II.

WHAT IS A UNIVERSITY?

FI were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or "School of Universal Learning.' This description implies the assemblage of strangers from all parts in one spot;-from all parts; else, how will you find professors and students for every department of knowledge? and in one spot; else, how can there be any school at all? Accordingly, in its simple and rudimental form, it is a school of knowledge of every kind, consisting of teachers and learners from every quarter. Many things are requisite to complete and satisfy the idea embodied in this description; but such as this a University seems to be in its essence, a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse, through a wide extent of country.

There is nothing far-fetched or unreasonable in the idea thus presented to us; and if this be a University, then a University does but contemplate a necessity of our nature, and is but one specimen in a particular medium, out of many which might be adduced in others, of a provision for that necessity. Mutual education, in a large sense of the word, is one of the great and incessant occupations of human society, carried on partly with set purpose, and partly not. One generation form:

It

another; and the existing generation is ever acting and reacting upon itself in the persons of its individual members. Now, in this process, books, I need scarcely say, that is, the litera scripta, are one special instrument. is true; and emphatically so in this age. Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how they are developed at this time in the never-intermitting issue of periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature, we must allow there never was a time which promised fairer for dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We have sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks; works larger and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of miles a day. Our seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.

I allow all this, and much more; such certainly is our popular education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all, even in this age, whenever men are really serious about getting what, in the language of

trade, is called "a good article," when they aim at something precise, something refined, something really luminous, something really large, something choice, they go to another market; they avail themselves, in some shape or other, of the rival method, the ancient method, of oral instruction, of present communication between man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence of a master, and the humble initiation of & disciple, and, in consequence, of great centres of pilgrimage and throng, which such a method of education necessarily involves. This, I think, will be found to hold good in all those departments or aspects of society, which possess an interest sufficient to bind men together, or to constitute what is called "a world." It holds in the political world, and in the high world, and in the religious world; and it holds also in the literary and scientific world.

If the actions of men may be taken as any test of their convictions, then we have reason for saying this, viz. :—that the province and the inestimable benefit of the litera scripta is that of being a record of truth, and an authority of appeal, and an instrument of teaching in the hands of a teacher; but that, if we wish to become exact and fully furnished in any branch of knowledge which is diversified and complicated, we must consult the living man and listen to his living voice. I am not bound to investigate the cause of this, and anything I may say will, I am conscious, be short of its full analysis;-perhaps we may suggest, that no books can get through the number of minute questions which it is possible to ask on any extended subject, or can hit upon the very difficulties which are severally felt by each leader in succession. Or again, that no book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its