reformers, and philosophers of England, have been nurtured within the
walls of her universities, and cherished a portion of their spirit. From
them have sprung the intellectual fires that have, at every crisis of our
history, kindled the nation into a new life; from the age of Wycliffe,
through those of Latimer, Locke, Gibbon, Macaulay, to the present reign of
the Physicists, comparatively few of the motors of their age have been
wholly "without the academic circle." Analysing with the same view the
lives of the British poets of real note from Barbour to Tennyson, we find
the proportion of University men increases. "Poeta nascitur et fit;" and
if the demands of technical routine have sometimes tended to stifle, the
comparative repose of a seclusion "unravaged" by the fierce activities
around it, the habit of dwelling on the old wisdom and harping on the
ancient strings, is calculated to foster the poetic temper and enrich its
resources. The discouraging effect of a sometimes supercilious and
conservative criticism is not an unmixed evil. The verse-writer who can be
snuffed out by the cavils of a tutorial drone, is a poetaster silenced for
his country's good. It is true, however, that to original minds, bubbling
with spontaneity, or arrogant with the consciousness of power, the
discipline is hard, and the restraint excessive; and that the men whom
their colleges are most proud to remember, have handled them severely.
Bacon inveighs against the scholastic trifling of his day; Milton talks of
the waste of time on litigious brawling; Locke mocks at the logic of the
schools; Cowley complains of being taught words, not things; Gibbon
rejoices over his escape from the port and prejudice of Magdalen;
Wordsworth contemns the "trade in classic niceties," and roves "in
magisterial liberty" by the Cam, as afterwards among the hills.

But all those hostile critics owe much to the object of their
animadversion. Any schoolboy can refer the preference of Light to Fruit in
the _Novum Organum_, half of _Comus_ and _Lycidas_, the stately periods of