now, either by the undergraduates or by the public. We do not make our students enjoy the sense of power that flows from mastery of a difficult subject and on a higher plane we do not make them feel the romance of scholarly discovery. Every one follows the travels of a Columbus or a Livingston with a keen delight which researches in chemistry or biology rarely stir. The mass of mankind can, no doubt, comprehend more readily geographical than scientific discovery; but for the explorer himself it would be pitiful if the joy of the search depended on the number of spectators, rather than on zeal in his quest.

America has not yet contributed her share to scholarly creation; and the fault lies in part at the doors of our universities. They do not strive enough in the impressionable years of early manhood to stimulate intellectual appetite and ambition; nor do they foster productive scholarship enough among those members of their staffs who are capable thereof. Too often a professor of original power explains to docile pupils the process of mining intellectual gold, without seeking nuggets himself, or, when found, showing them to mankind. Productive scholarship is the shyest of all flowers. It cometh not with observation, and may not bloom even under the most careful nurture. American universities must do their utmost to cultivate it, by planting the best seed, letting the sun shine upon it, and taking care that, in our land of rank growth, it is not choked by the thorns of administrative routine.

If I have dwelt upon only a small part of the problems of the university, if I have said nothing of the professional and graduate schools, of the library, the observatory, the laboratories, the museums, the gardens, and the various forms of extension work, it is not because they are of less importance, but because the time is too short to take up more than two or three pressing questions of general interest. The university touches the community at many points, and as time goes on it ought to serve the public through everincreasing channels. But all its activities are more or less connected with, and most of them are based upon, the college. It is there that character ought to be shaped, that aspirations

ought to be formed, that citizens ought to be trained, and scholarly tastes implanted. If the mass of undergraduates could be brought to respect, nay, to admire, intellectual achievement on the part of their comrades, in at all the measure that they do athletic victory; if those among them of natural ability could be led to put forth their strength on the objects which the college is supposed to represent, the professional schools would find their tasks lightened, and their success enhanced. A greater solidarity in college, more earnestness of purpose and intellectual enthusiasm, would mean much for our nation. It is said that if the temperature of the ocean were raised, the water would expand until the floods covered the dry land; and if we can increase the intellectual ambition of college students, the whole face of our country will be changed. When the young men shall see visions, the dreams of old men will come true.

INAUGURAL DISCOURSE

BY LORD BROUGHAM

It now becomes me to return my very sincere and respectable thanks for the kindness which has placed me in a chair filled at former times by so many great men, whose names might well make any comparison formidable to a far more worthy successor.

While I wish you to accept this unexaggerated expression of gratitude, I am anxious to address you rather in the form which I now adopt, than in the more usual one of an unpremeditated discourse. I shall thus at least prove that the remarks which I deem it my duty to make are the fruit of mature reflections, and that I am unwilling to discharge an important office in a perfunctory manner.

I feel very sensibly that if I shall now urge you by general exhortations to be instant in the pursuit of the learning which, in all its branches, flourishes under the kindly shelter of these roofs, I may weary you with the unprofitable

repetition of a thrice-told tale; and if I presume to offer my advice touching the conduct of your studies, I may seem to trespass upon the province of those venerable persons under whose care you have the singular happiness to be placed. But I would, nevertheless, expose myself to either charge, for the sake of joining my voice with theirs in anxiously entreating you to believe how incomparably the present season is, verily and indeed, the most precious of your whole lives. It is not the less true, because it has been oftentimes said, that the period of youth is by far the best fitted for the improvement of the mind, and the retirement of a college almost exclusively adapted to much study. At your enviable age everything has the lively interest of novelty and freshness; attention is perpetually sharpened by curiosity; and the memory is tenacious of the deep impressions it thus receives, to a degree unknown in after life; while the distracting cares of the world, or its beguiling pleasures, cross not the threshold of these calm retreats; its distant noise and bustle are faintly heard, making the shelter you enjoy more grateful; and the struggles of anxious mortals embarked upon that troublous sea are viewed from an eminence, the security of which is rendered more sweet by the prospect of the scene below. Yet a little while, and you, too, will be plunged into those waters of bitterness; and will cast an eye of regret, as now I do, upon the peaceful regions you have quitted forever. Such is your lot as members of society; but it will be your own fault if you look back on this place with repentance or with shame; and be well assured that, whatever time-ay, every hour-you squander here ɔn unprofitable idling, will then rise up against you, and be paid for by years of bitter, but unavailing, regrets. Study, then, I beseech you, so to store your minds with the exquisite learning of former ages, that you may always possess within yourself sources of rational and refined enjoyment, which will enable you to set at naught the grosser pleasures of sense whereof other men are slaves; and so imbue yourselves with the sound philosophy of later days, forming yourselves to the virtuous habits which

are its legitimate offspring, that you may walk unhurt through the trials which await you, and may look down upon the ignorance and error that surround you, not with lofty and supercilious contempt, as the sages of old times, but with the vehement desire of enlightening those who wander in darkness, and who are by so much the more endeared to us by how much they want our assistance.

Assuming the improvement of his own mind, and of the lot of his fellow creatures to be the great end of every man's existence, who is removed above the care of providing for his sustenance, and to be the indispensable duty of every man, as far as his own immediate wants leave him any portion of time unemployed, our attention is naturally directed to the means by which so great and urgent a work may best be performed; and as in the limited time allotted to this discourse, I can not hope to occupy more than a small portion of so wide a field, I shall confine myself to two subjects, or rather to a few observations upon two subjects, both of them appropriate to this place, but either of them affording ample materials for an entire course of lectures the study of the rhetorical art, by which useful truths are promulgated with effect, and the purposes to which a proficiency in this art should be made subservient.

It is an extremely common error among young persons, impatient of academical discipline, to turn from the painful study of ancient and particularly of Attic composition, and solace themselves with work rendered easy by the familiarity of their own tongue. They plausibly contend, that as powerful or captivating dictation in a pure English style is, after all, the attainment they are in search of, the study of the best English models afford the shortest point to this point; and even admitting the ancient examples to have been the great fountains from which all eloquence is drawn, they would rather profit, as it were, by the classical labors of their English predecessors, than toil over the same path themselves. In a word, they would treat the perishable results of those labors as the standard, and give themselves no care about the immortal originals. This

argument, the thin covering which indolence weaves for herself, would speedily sink all the fine arts into barrenness and insignificance. Why, according to such reasoners, should a sculptor or painter encounter the toil of a journey to Athens or to Rome? Far better work at home, and profit by the labor of those who have resorted to the Vatican and the Parthenon, and founded an English school adapted to the taste of our own country. Be you assured that the works of the English chisel fall not more short of the wonders of the Acropolis, than the best productions of modern pens fall short of the chaste, finished, nervous, and overwhelming compositions of them that "resistless fulmined over Greece." Be equally sure that, with hardly any exception, the great things of poetry and of eloquence have been done by men who cultivated the mighty exemplars of Athenian genius with daily and with nightly devotion. Among poets there is hardly an exception to this rule, unless Shakespeare, an exception to all rules, may be so deemed; and Dante, familiar as a contemporary with the works of Roman art, composed in his mother tongue, having taken not so much for his guide as for his "master, Vergil, himself almost a translator from the Greeks. But among orators I know of none among the Romans, and scarcely any of our own times. Cicero honored the Greek masters with such singular observance, that he not only repaired to Athens for the sake of finishing his rhetorical education, but afterward continued to practise the art of declaiming in Greek; and altho he afterward fell into a less pure manner through the corrupt blandishments of the Asian taste, yet do we find him ever prone to extol the noble perfections of his first masters, as something placed beyond the reach of all imitation. Nay, at a mature period of his life, he occupied himself in translating the greater orations of the Greeks which composed almost exclusively his treatise "De optimo genere Oratoris"; as if to write a discourse on oratorical perfection were merely to present the reader with the two immortal speeches upon the crown. Sometimes we find him imitating, even to a literal version, the beauties of those divine originals-as the beautiful