William of Germany by Stanley Shaw
page 33 of 453 (07%)
page 33 of 453 (07%)
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He did not, like young Bismarck, drink huge flagons of beer at a
sitting, day after day. He was not followed everywhere by a boar-hound. He fought no student's duels--though a secret performance of the kind is mentioned as a probability in the chronicles--or go about looking for trouble generally as the swashbuckling Junker, Bismarck, did; for in the first place his royal rank would not allow of his taking part in the bloody amusement of the _Mensur_, and his natural disposition, if it was quick and lively, was not choleric enough to involve him in serious quarrel. His studies were to some extent interrupted by military calls to Berlin, for after being appointed second lieutenant in the First Regiment of Foot Guards at Potsdam on his tenth birthday, the Hohenzollern age for entering the army, he was promoted to first lieutenant in the same regiment on leaving Cassel. For the most part the university lectures he attended were the courses in law and philosophy, and he is not reported to have shown any particular enthusiasm for either subject. The differences between an English and a German university are of a fundamental kind, perhaps the greatest being that the German university does not aim at influencing conduct and character in the same measure as the English, but is rather for the supply of knowledge of all sorts, as a monster warehouse is for the supply of miscellaneous goods. Again, the German university, which, like all American universities except Princetown, has more resemblance to the Scottish universities than to those at Oxford, Cambridge, or Dublin, is not residential nor divided into colleges, but is departmentalized into "faculties," each with its own professors and _privat docentes_, or official lecturers, mostly young savants, who have not the rank or title of professor, but have obtained only the _venia legendi_ from the university. The lectures, |
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