a

picture. It is impossible to avoid the feeling that in this large book-the 'Life' contains nearly fifteen hundred closely-printed pages-the artist, though one of exceptional powers, does not give us a really great portrait. Mr. Benson must have read the remarks on human judgments which we have quoted from Dean Church, and his classical memory must have retained passage on letters from a prince of letter-writers which might have shortened this 'Life' by many pages: 'Quam multa joca solent esse in epistolis quae, prolata si sint, inepta videantur: quam multa seria neque tamen ullo modo divulganda.' But if there are many pages which might have been omitted without loss to the reader, there are many more which throw much light, not only on the development of a truly great character and the beauty of an ideal family life, but also upon the history of the Church in this generation. The seventh and eleventh chapters of the second volume, which deal with the Lincoln Trial and the attempted rapprochement with Rome, are so full of interest that a separate issue of them would be a public boon.

Mr. Benson is much too true an artist to forget that even a saint cannot be painted without shadows, but his determination to avoid the temptation natural to a son leads him now and then to give undue prominence to a shadow which should be barely indicated. Little infirmities of temper and positiveness -especially when in the wrong-are not unknown in schoolmasters, and are said to have been inherited by more than one of Prince Lee's pupils. A tendency to inaccuracy is always the accompaniment of a nature emotional and imaginative, as Benson's was; but there was more truth in his imagination than in a whole series of mathematical tables. Little foibles about dress and personal appearance are the things which make a man not a hero to his valet; but it is only to his valet that he is not a hero. Still, when the Dean Hook of the future writes the Lives of the later Archbishops of Canterbury, he will assuredly assign a place of high honour among them to Edward White Benson, and he will owe a debt of gratitude to his biographer for the abundance of materials out of which to construct his work.

If we think the Archbishop's 'Life' suffers from excess of material, this is certainly not the case with that of Bishop Durnford, who had long outlived his early friends and seems to have preserved no journal. His papers were fortunately placed in the experienced hands of the present Dean of Winchester, who edited the early chapters, written by the Bishop's sons, and who also had the advantage of help from the President of Magdalen, rightly proud of the Nestor of his college. A

series of letters and addresses on important ecclesiastical questions forms the main substance of the work, which gives in moderate compass a striking portrait of a very remarkable figure.

Of the deans in our group two are happily allowed to tell the story of their own lives in a series of letters which are in each case edited by the loving hand of a daughter. Merivale wrote the brief biography of his own earlier years, intending it for his family only, but a wider public is greatly indebted to the literary judgment which has made it now generally accessible. The story of Church's early years is told with much simple beauty by his daughter, and Canon Scott Holland has furnished a sketch of the work at St. Paul's. One could perhaps have wished for more of the Oxford Movement, without that suppression of Church himself which characterises his posthumous work on it. Dr. Milman had a difficult task in presenting his father's life to a generation which has grown up under different conditions of ecclesiastical work and thought, and to which many of the Dean's writings are unknown; but he has succeeded in presenting an eminently interesting record, though one perhaps unduly weighted with family details. Mr. Berdmore Compton's Memoir' of his friend Dean Goulburn has at least the merit of brevity; and for brevity in biography the Dean's own authority is quoted :

'People will not tolerate lengthy biographies.... John Burgon's 'Lives of Twelve Good Men' marked a stage of public thought on the subject of biographies. Make it as short as you please.'

But we could wish that his biographer had not allowed his devotion to his friend to lead him into depreciation of others. Short as this sketch is, there are not a few passages through which Goulburn himself would certainly have drawn his pen. The biographer of Dean Liddell was peculiarly happy in his subject. The features of the public life stood out, like those of the man, in marked distinctness; the veil of the inner life is drawn only enough to disclose the great and tender heart that beat beneath a shy reserve which was often read as pride. And the subject was peculiarly happy in his biographer. Near to him, but not too near-pupil, colleague, friend-he has given us, in a single volume, the record of a full and noble life extending over eighty-seven years.

ART. IX.-THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON.

1. Statutes and Regulations made for the University of London by the Commissioners appointed under the University of London Act, 1898; with an accompanying Report. February 1900. THE task entrusted to the distinguished body of Com

Titsioners appointed under the University of London

Lord Davey, the

Act, 1898, has now been accomplished. Bishop of London, Sir Owen Roberts, Professor Jebb, Sir Michael Foster, Mr. E. H. Busk, and Dr. Thomas Barlow (in succession to the late Sir William Roberts), with Mr. Bailey Saunders as Secretary, commenced their labours in November of that year; and the draft of their Statutes and Regulations, having been laid before Parliament, awaits the Royal Assent. When the draft becomes law, a long controversy will be ended. A scheme will come into operation which in favourable circumstances ought to exercise a beneficent effect upon higher education in this country. The seats of learning and science in London will be co-ordinated. They will be grouped round an existing centre. They will become parts of a University needing only adequate equipment and maintenance to be worthy of its position in the capital of the British Empire.

More than three centuries have elapsed since the first step was taken to provide students in London with an opportunity of receiving systematic instruction in all the higher branches of knowledge. The first step, like every subsequent advance in the same direction, encountered serious opposition. When Sir Thomas Gresham in 1575 bequeathed his house and garden in Bishopsgate to the purposes of education, and endowed seven professorships in subjects closely corresponding to those taught at the great universities of his day, he found-what other educational reformers have also found-that the advancement of learning often receives the severest checks in the very quarters from which support might have been expected. He had to overcome the fears that were entertained at Oxford and Cambridge that his new foundation would irreparably injure the prestige of those ancient homes of learning. Such fears were not, indeed, at the time entirely groundless. In little more than half a century Gresham College was spoken of as academiæ epitome, and it took rank with the great Schools of Divinity and Law which then flourished in London. They had all attained so great a reputation that they were collectively described as an institution lacking nothing but a common government and the protection of an honourable

Chancellor to be placed side by side with older foundations.' The appendix to Stow's 'Annals' (ed. 1615) included these places of study in a detailed account of the three most famous Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and London.' But for instruction in natural science there was, at least in London, no organised provision; and in 1661 Abraham Cowley, influenced in no small degree by Bacon's sketch of an ideal academy in the New Atlantis,' suggested that experimental philosophy, as he called it, might be advanced by the establishment, on the banks of the Thames, of a college with twenty resident professors, and such laboratories and appliances as might be needed for the investigation of nature. This project, however, was too ambitious to have any chance of being carried out, even in the age that saw the foundation of the Royal Society. It slumbered until the early years of the nineteenth century. Another poet then made the attempt to promote adequate instruction, not only in science, but also in the chief branches of humane learning. In 1825 Thomas Campbell wrote an open letter to Brougham,* to urge the foundation of a University for teaching and examining young men of the middle classes in London. His letter gained him the support of Zachary Macaulay, Grote, James Mill, Tooke, and other men prominent at that time. The sum of 160,000l. was soon collected, and the institution now known as University College, London, was founded in 1826, and opened in 1828, with provision for teaching in all the Faculties then recognised, except Theology. In the following year, in order to meet the objections raised by this deliberate exclusion of the religious element, King's College, London, was established, and in 1831 began its career as a place in which instruction in the doctrines and duties of Christianity, as the same are inculcated by the United Church of England and Ireland, should be for ever combined with other branches of useful education.'

Efforts were soon made to obtain for University College the status of a university and the right to confer degrees. They were strongly opposed, not only by Oxford and Cambridge, on the ground that a society which was unconnected with the Established Church, and taught no system of religion, had no right to confer academical distinction; but also by the medical colleges and schools of London, where the threatened extension of the right to grant a medical or surgical qualification was regarded with alarm. But the wave of liberal opinion which culminated in the Reform Bill of 1832 was favourable to the demand. In

Pro

1835 the House of Commons carried by a large majority an Address to the Crown, praying for the grant of a Charter to University College with the right of conferring degrees. The Government of the day, considering the interests of King's College and of other institutions likely to be affected, decided to issue two Charters, the one incorporating University College and undertaking to incorporate other institutions of the same kind which might thereafter be established; the other constituting a Board of Examiners to be called the University of London, with power to admit to graduation students educated at University College or King's College or any other institution in London or elsewhere which might, with the consent of the Home Secretary, be afterwards named as an affiliated college. The first Chancellor of the University thus constituted was the Earl of Burlington, father of the present Duke of Devonshire; and the first Vice-Chancellor was Sir John William Lubbock, father of the present Lord Avebury. The Senate was wholly nominated by the Crown. minent among its earliest members was Arnold of Rugby, whose endeavours to provide that religious knowledge should be an essential factor in the curriculum for a degree in Arts met with no success. The affiliated colleges soon came to include the chief educational institutions, Nonconformist, Roman Catholic, and secular, in the English provinces and in Ireland; and for twenty years the University continued to impose a course of study, to be pursued in one of these institutions, as an indispensable qualification for admission to the examinations for degrees. But in the absence of any power on the part of the Senate to visit these institutions or to regulate the courses of study pursued, and with the natural tendency of the institutions themselves to issue certificates of attendance on different conditions of stringency, or to make them a matter of form, the connexion between the University and its affiliated colleges ceased to have any practical value. In 1858 a new Charter was granted, by which, so far as the degrees in Arts and Laws were concerned, the exaction of a certificate of attendance was abandoned, and the examinations were thrown open freely to all students wherever educated. At the same time the graduates were admitted as part of the corporate body and permitted to assemble in Convocation. In 1867 special examinations with special diplomas were instituted for women, and in 1878 all the degrees and certificates of proficiency which the University was empowered to bestow were made accessible to women upon precisely the same conditions as applied to men.