Before entering upon the details of the university exercises and examinations, we ought to try to divest ourselves of a modern opinion, that study exists for examinations rather than examinations for study. Indeed, to apply the measure of their prevalence and efficiency to the education of past generations, would be to commit an anachronism.

We might look in vain for any public examination to justify the learning and research which in the seventeenth century made English students famous:—whose efforts were fostered, rather by the encouragement of tutors and friends, than by the disputations in the schools. Examinations in our modern acceptation there were none. As books became cheaper, the quicker and the more diligent students discovered that they could acquire knowledge for themselves where previous generations had been dependent on the oral teaching. Then arose the necessity of examination, and as this has come to be more scientifically conducted, and its results to be more public, and at last in a sense marketable, there has been a fresh demand for oral instruction.

Again, the increased use of paper and of printing, which has done much to improve and facilitate the art of examining, has in a great measure changed the character of the tripos itself.

The Cambridge tripos is a development of the eighteenth century, and its growth may be fairly taken as a sign of the vitality of Cambridge.

Until the present century Trinity was the only college in Cambridge where the fellowships were open without territorial appropriation.

All the other colleges (with the exception of King's) filled up each vacancy by electing if possible some one whose name had been matriculated as belonging to the same county as the outgoing fellow.

The counties were thus distributed for Peterhouse in 1630 (by a statute superseding Warkworth cap. xii.) into north (Boreales) and south (Australes) by a line diawn from Yarmouth to Machynlleth.

Northern. Bedford, Cheshire, Cumberland, Derby, Durham, York, Hunts, Lancaster, Leicester, Lincoln, Norfolk, Northampton, Northumberland, Notts, Rutland, Salop, Stafford, Warwick, Westmoreland, Worcester,—Anglesea, Caernarvon, Denbigh, Flint, Merioneth, Montgomery.

Southern. Berks, Bucks, Cambridge, Kent, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Essex, Gloster, Herts, Hereford, Middlesex, Monmouth, Oxon, Southampton, Surrey, Sussex, Suffolk, Somerset, Wilts,– Brecon, Caermarthen, Cardigan, Glamorgan, Pembroke, Radnor.

There might he four fellows at one time from Middlesex or Cambridgeshire, but only one each from any of the others (the whole of Wales counting as one) except by royal dispensation.

If it happened that there was no candidate of the right county ready, the election would I suppose lie between the men of any northern (or southern) counties which had no representatives in the existing body of fellows.

In 1785, Henry Gunning did not enter at S. John's because Cambridgeshire was filled by the bishop of Ely's fellow, and a professor's son, already admitted, was prepared to step into his shoes.

While we thoroughly accept the position that, if Cambridge is our mother, Oxford is our aunt; and while we admit the vigour of the latter in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, we shall hardly be considered unfairly prejudiced if we declare our opinion that there were more certain signs of vitality and usefulness in our north-easterly university in the eighteenth century, at least in the latter half of it.

Matters at Cambridge are apt to be at a level (not always of necessity a dead level), shewing something of the natural characteristics of the country and the town in which her lot is cast. Their beauty is retiring, and the point from which they may be seen is sometimes far to seek. The elegancies and the virtues of Oxford are more prominent, more obvious, even to those who do not look for them.

We may draw a parallel similarly for the intellectual character as it is trained by the traditional method of each university. Oxford shews her sons how they may make the most of each point of excellence and turn the smallest details to advantage. Cambridge may be colder and duller, but her purpose is to aim immediately at nothing higher than preparing the ground with care and laying the foundation conscientiously.

In very early times universities seem to have taken great interest in such geography and history as was known. As, according to a well known legend, Herodotus read his history at a panathenaic festival when young Thucydides was by, so we read that Giraldus de Barri (Cambrensis) recited his Topographia Hiberniae in the convention of the university of Oxford at the close of the 12th century, and Rolandius his chronicle in the presence of the professors and scholars of Padua.

Before the twelfth century the study of History meant reading the work of Paulus Orosius, a book founded on his master Augustine's De civitate Dei.

In later times a taste sprang up for rhyming chronicles, and mirabilia mundi; then for moral tales and anecdote, flowers of histories, illustrative of the Virtues and Vices, and (with the exception of the interesting and romantic character of their incidents) bearing scarcely higher claims to the title than the History of the Fairchild Family, or the story of Sandford and Merton. Such were the Gesta romanorum and the Speculum historiarum, printed in 1483.

No one who has any experience of the working and life of Cambridge can be ignorant how completely we have been removed from Cambridge of half a century ago, or that we have lost almost the last glimpse of what our University, even forty years since, was like.

Not only has she changed, as all that lives must change, but one after another the men of advanced years or of clear memory (such as Dr Gilbert Ainslie, Francis Martin, Sedgwick, Shilleto and Dr Cookson) have passed away, leaving no such memoranda as Gunning or Pry me left, at least none which are at present generally accessible, to tell us what were the methods and processes of University Study through which were educated the minds which have done much ta make our University and our Country what they are.

In this quick transition of our academical methods, customs, and institutions, the difficulty becomes intense when we set ourselves to attempt to picture either of our Universities (for the like holds good of Oxford) at a period removed still further from us by two or three generations.

Though I am conscious how unworthy my work is of the Universities, to the knowledge of whose history I desire even remotely to contribute, I have endeavoured to collect in this volume some of the materials which are requisite for a faithful account of Cambridge and Oxford in the Eighteenth Century.

Although some of the chief men who were interested in mineralogy and geology in the last century got their degrees elsewhere, we find that both at Oxford and at Cambridge the study of stones was not a novelty. Two keepers of the Ashmolean, Ro. Plott (Magd. H.) and E. Llwyd (Jes.) established the credit of Oxford in the 17th century. The latter edited a catalogue of english fossils in the Ashmolean Museum, under the title of Lithophylacii Britannici Iconographia (8vo. Lond. 1699; ed. 2. Oxon. 1760). Llwyd's book has been useful ever since, especially for the figures.

‘A Lapidary or the history of Pretious Stones by T. Nichols sometimes of Jesus-Colledge in Cambridge,’ printed by T. Buck, 4to. Camb. 1652, was founded chiefly upon the Gemmarum Historia of Anselm Boetius de Boot. The classification of stones by sizes tells of diligence and system at Cambridge, if the science was but infantile.

It is unnecessary to go through all the details of the admission of the Questionists on Friday (afterwards Saturday) morning as detailed by Mr Raworth in the Calendar of 1802. Suffice it to say that the class-lists of the Questionists are hung on the pillars at 8 a.m. At 10 a Bedell calls up the Houses to hear the Moderator's Latin speech, and admit their Supplicats which are approved, and carried to the Scrutators in the non-regenthouse to be placeted. The Questionists come down from the gallery of the senate-house ; and at a given signal the hoodling begins, i.e. each man's bed-maker puts his rabbit's-fur hood over his head. The School-keeper gives all men so distinguished a copy of the following oath:

‘Iurabis quod nihil ex iis omnibus sciens uolens praetermisisti, quae per leges aut probatas consuetudines huius Academiae, ad hunc gradum quern ambis adipiscendnm, aut peragenda, aut persoluenda, requiruntur, nisi quatenus per gratiam ab Academia concessam tecum dispensatum fuerit. Iurabis etiam quod Cancellario, et Pro-cancellario nostro comiter obtemperabis, et quod statuta nostra, ordinationes, et consuetudines approbatas, obseruabis. Denique iurabis quod compositionem inter Academiam et collegium Regale factam sciens uolens, non uiolabis. Ita te Deus adiuuet et sancta Dei Euangelia.’

The ‘Fathers’ present their ‘Sons’ to the Vice-Chancellor as ‘tarn moribus quam doctrina … idoneos ad respondendum quaestioni.’

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries many students may have got their first degree in Arts with little examination or none at all. Each was called upon to answer one question in ‘Aristotle's Priorums’ and to be able to walk through the Respondent's Stall! In 1555 and 1665 we read of all candidates being required to keep the Lenten exercise of ‘sitting in xlmâ’ (quadragesima), which ceremony is also described in D'Ewes' diary (1619), p. 67. ‘It was the custom for the Bachelor commencers to sit in the Schools during the whole of Lent, “except they bought it out,” and to defend themselves against all opponents.’ But it must have depended entirely upon the Regents whether any student was called upon to dispute; and the arguguments and questions which were uttered seem to have been often frivolous and undignified. At Oxford the proceeding seems to have been conducted in a still more unseemly manner. Just before Laud's cancellariate a number of ‘necessary regents’ in addition to the ‘masters of the schools’ had to be called in to aid the proctors in quelling the fights and in checking the potations and lounging which disgraced the schools of that university.

The candidates having been in the three terms beneath the scrutiny of two pairs of Moderators, at least in the capacity of opponent, have arrived at the dignity of Questionists by about the middle of January, six weeks before the First Tripos is published. They breakfast with the ‘Father’ of their college at 7 o'clock on the morning of Plough-Monday (ominous name to modern academical ears for the Monday after Epiphany!) se'nnight. Then (though they are not yet formally admitted ad respondendum Quaestioni) the B.A. examination begins: the Admission of Bachelors taking place on the following Friday, five weeks before ‘the First Tripos comes out’; this is the expression of the Univ. Calendar, but it does not mean the first publication of the honour list.

The examiners have already made a preliminary assortment of the examinees, into ‘classes’ of six, eight, or ten, according to the notes made by the moderators at their acts (the persons in each class being arranged alphabetically), and half-a-dozen of these classes (eight, or so, in all) have been published at Deighton's, or elsewhere, on the previous Thursday.