"Pretty much so," replied the Baron; "which cannot fail to please
you, since you are in pursuit of tranquillity. As to the University,
it is, as you know, one of the oldest in Germany. It was founded in
the fourteenth century by the Count Palatine Ruprecht, and had in
the first year more than five hundred students, all busily
committing to memory, after the old scholastic wise, the rules of
grammar versified by Alexander de Villa Dei, and the extracts made
by Peter the Spaniard from Michel Psellus's Synopsis of Aristotle's
Organon, and the Categories, with Porphory's Commentaries. Truly, I
do not much wonder, that Eregina Scotus should have been put to
death byhis scholars with their penknives. They must have been
pushed to the very verge of despair."

"What a strange picture a University presents to the imagination.
The lives of scholars in their cloistered stillness;--literary men
of retired habits, and Professors who study sixteen hours a day, and
never see the world but on a Sunday. Nature has, no doubt, for some
wise purpose, placed in their hearts this love of literary labor and
seclusion. Otherwise, who would feed the undying lamp of thought?
But for such men as these, a blast of wind through the chinks and
crannies of this old world, or the flapping of a conqueror's banner,
would blow it out forever. The light of the soul is easily
extinguished. And whenever I reflect upon these things I become
aware of the great importance, in a nation's history, of the
individual fame of scholars and literary men. I fear, that it is far
greater than the world is willing to acknowledge; or, perhaps I
should say, than the world has thought of acknowledging. Blot out
from England's history the names of Chaucer, Shakspere, Spenser, and
Milton only, and how much of her glory would you blot out with them!