ADDRESS
DELIVERED TO THE
STUDENTS OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY,
APRIL 2, 1866.
GENTLEMEN,
I have accepted the office you have elected me to, and have now the
duty to return thanks for the great honour done me. Your enthusiasm
towards me, I admit, is very beautiful in itself, however undesirable
it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable
to all men, and one well known to myself when I was in a position
analogous to your own. I can only hope that it may endure to the
end--that noble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of
honour, and come to be more and more select and discriminate in the
choice of the object of it; for I can well understand that you
will modify your opinions of me and many things else as you go
on. (Laughter and cheers.) There are now fifty-six years gone
last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite
fourteen--fifty-six years ago--to attend classes here and gain
knowledge of all kinds, I know not what, with feelings of wonder and
awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this
is what we have come to. (Cheers.) There is something touching
and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third
generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up and
saying, "Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the
vineyard: you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and
have had many judges." As the old proverb says, "He that builds by the
wayside has many masters." We must expect a variety of judges; but the
voice of young Scotland, through you, is really of some value to
me, and I return you many thanks for it, though I cannot describe my
emotions to you, and perhaps they will be much more conceivable if
expressed in silence. (Cheers.)
When this office was proposed to me, some of you know that I was not
very ambitious to accept it, at first. I was taught to believe that
there were more or less certain important duties which would lie in
my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it--at
least, in reconciling the objections felt to such things; for if I can
do anything to honour you and my dear old Alma Mater, why should I
not do so? (Loud cheers.) Well, but on practically looking into the
matter when the office actually came into my hands, I find it grows
more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether there is much real
duty that I can do at all. I live four hundred miles away from you,
in an entirely different state of things; and my weak health--now for
many years accumulating upon me--and a total unacquaintance with
such subjects as concern your affairs here,--all this fills me
with apprehension that there is really nothing worth the least
consideration that I can do on that score. You may, however, depend
upon it that if any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my
most faithful endeavour to do whatever is right and proper, according
to the best of my judgment. (Cheers.)
In the meanwhile, the duty I have at present--which might be very
pleasant, but which is quite the reverse, as you may fancy--is to
address some words to you on some subjects more or less cognate to the
pursuits you are engaged in. In fact, I had meant to throw out some
loose observations--loose in point of order, I mean--in such a way as
they may occur to me--the truths I have in me about the business you
are engaged in, the race you have started on, what kind of race it is
you young gentlemen have begun, and what sort of arena you are likely
to find in this world. I ought, I believe, according to custom, to
have written all that down on paper, and had it read out. That would
have been much handier for me at the present moment (a laugh), but
when I attempted to write, I found that I was not accustomed to write
speeches, and that I did not get on very well. So I flung that away,
and resolved to trust to the inspiration of the moment--just to what
came uppermost. You will therefore have to accept what is readiest,
what comes direct from the heart, and you must just take that in
compensation for any good order of arrangement there might have been
in it.
I will endeavour to say nothing that is not true, as far as I can
manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. (A laugh.)
Advices, I believe, to young men--and to all men--are very seldom much
valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful
performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action, is
better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into
advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the
summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare
say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first
time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at
present or not--namely, that above all things the interest of your own
life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day,
in this place where you have come to get education. Diligent! That
includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I mean to include
in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction
and improvement in such a place. If you will believe me, you who
are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it
called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do
not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to
reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in
the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have
not done what you have heard from your advisers--and among many
counsellers there is wisdom--you will bitterly repent when it is too
late. The habits of study acquired at Universities are of the highest
importance in after-life. At the season when you are in young years
the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself
into any shape that the owner of the mind pleases to order it to form
itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually
to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of
an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence, I mean among other things--and very chiefly--honesty in
all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the
way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavour to do that.
Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really
come to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all
that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to
be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing
as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it
is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with
intelligence.
There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and
endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when
he does not know more than the outside skin of them; and he goes
flourishing about with them. ("Hear, hear," and a laugh.) There is
also a process called cramming in some Universities (a laugh)--that
is, getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put
questions about. Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honourable
habit. Be modest, and humble, and diligent in your attention to what
your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to
bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able
to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if
possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your
fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it
is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work
he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality as regards study is,
as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides
all others. A dishonest man cannot do anything real; and it would be
greatly better if he were tied up from doing any such thing. He does
nothing but darken counsel by the words he utters. That is a very old
doctrine, but a very true one; and you will find it confirmed by
all the thinking men that have ever lived in this long series of
generations of which we are the latest.
I daresay you know, very many of you, that it is now seven hundred
years since Universities were first set up in this world of ours.
Abelard and other people had risen up with doctrines in them the
people wished to hear of, and students flocked towards them from all
parts of the world. There was no getting the thing recorded in books
as you may now. You had to hear him speaking to you vocally, or else
you could not learn at all what it was that he wanted to say. And so
they gathered together the various people who had anything to teach,
and formed themselves gradually, under the patronage of kings
and other potentates who were anxious about the culture of their
populations, nobly anxious for their benefit, and became a University.
I daresay, perhaps, you have heard it said that all that is greatly
altered by the invention of printing, which took place about midway
between us and the origin of Universities. A man has not now to go
away to where a professor is actually speaking, because in most cases
he can get his doctrine out of him through a book, and can read it,
and read it again and again, and study it. I don't know that I know of
any way in which the whole facts of a subject may be more completely
taken in, if our studies are moulded in conformity with it.
Nevertheless, Universities have, and will continue to have, an
indispensable value in society--a very high value. I consider the very
highest interests of man vitally intrusted to them.
In regard to theology, as you are aware, it has been the study of the
deepest heads that have come into the world--what is the nature of
this stupendous universe, and what its relations to all things, as
known to man, and as only known to the awful Author of it. In
fact, the members of the Church keep theology in a lively condition
(laughter), for the benefit of the whole population, which is the
great object of our Universities. I consider it is the same now
intrinsically, though very much forgotten, from many causes, and
not so successful as might be wished at all. (A laugh.) It remains,
however, a very curious truth, what has been said by observant people,
that the main use of the Universities in the present age is that,
after you have done with all your classes, the next thing is a
collection of books, a great library of good books, which you proceed
to study and to read. What the Universities have mainly done--what I
have found the University did for me, was that it taught me to read
in various languages and various sciences, so that I could go into the
books that treated of these things, and try anything I wanted to make
myself master of gradually, as I found it suit me. Whatever you may
think of all that, the clearest and most imperative duty lies on
every one of you to be assiduous in your reading; and learn to be good
readers, which is, perhaps, a more difficult thing than you imagine.
Learn to be discriminative in your reading--to read all kinds of
things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be really
fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a
great deal of the reading incumbent on you you must be guided by the
books recommended to you by your professors for assistance towards the
prelections. And then, when you get out of the University, and go into
studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have
selected a field, a province in which you can study and work.
The most unhappy of all men is the man that cannot tell what he is
going to do, that has got no work cut out for him in the world, and
does not go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies
and miseries that ever beset mankind--honest work, which you intend
getting done. If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to
choice--perhaps the best you could get--is a book you have a great
curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible
conditions to improve by that book. It is analogous to what doctors
tell us about the physical health and appetites of the patient. You
must learn to distinguish between false appetite and real. There is
such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries
with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he
should not eat at all, and would not but that it is toothsome, and for
the moment in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find
out what he really and truly has an appetite for--what suits his
constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought
to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all
of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history--to
inquire into what has passed before you in the families of men. The
history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and
you will find that all the knowledge you have got will be extremely
applicable to elucidate that. There you have the most remarkable race
of men in the world set before you, to say nothing of the languages,
which your professors can better explain, and which, I believe, are
admitted to be the most perfect orders of speech we have yet found
to exist among men. And you will find, if you read well, a pair of
extremely remarkable nations shining in the records left by themselves
as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past
ages; and it will be well worth your while if you can get into the
understanding of what these people were and what they did. You will
find a great deal of hearsay, as I have found, that does not touch on
the matter; but perhaps some of you will get to see a Roman face to
face; you will know in some measure how they contrived to exist, and
to perform these feats in the world; I believe, also, you will find
a thing not much noted, that there was a very great deal of deep
religion in its form in both nations. That is noted by the wisest of
historians, and particularly by Ferguson, who is particularly well
worth reading on Roman history; and I believe he was an alumnus in our
own University. His book is a very creditable book. He points out the
profoundly religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding the
wildness and ferociousness of their nature. They believed that Jupiter
Optimus--Jupiter Maximus--was lord of the universe, and that he
had appointed the Romans to become the chief of men, provided they
followed his commands--to brave all difficulty, and to stand up with
an invincible front--to be ready to do and die; and also to have the
same sacred regard to veracity, to promise, to integrity, and all the
virtues that surround that noblest quality of men--courage--to
which the Romans gave the name of virtue, manhood, as the one thing
ennobling for a man.
In the literary ages of Rome, that had very much decayed away; but
still it had retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman
people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks, along with their
beautiful and sunny effulgences of art, you have a striking proof, if
you look for it.
In the tragedies of Sophocles, there is a most distinct recognition of
the eternal justice of Heaven, and the unfailing punishment of crime
against the laws of God.
I believe you will find in all histories that that has been at the
head and foundation of them all, and that no nation that did
not contemplate this wonderful universe with an awe-stricken and
reverential feeling that there was a great unknown, omnipotent, and
all-wise, and all-virtuous Being, superintending all men in it, and
all interests in it--no nation ever came to very much, nor did any man
either, who forgot that. If a man did forget that, he forgot the most
important part of his mission in this world.
In our own history of England, which you will take a great deal of
natural pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find it
beyond all others worthy of your study; because I believe that the
British nation--and I include in them the Scottish nation--produced
a finer set of men than any you will find it possible to get anywhere
else in the world. (Applause.) I don't know in any history of
Greece or Rome where you will get so fine a man as Oliver Cromwell.
(Applause.) And we have had men worthy of memory in our little corner
of the island here as well as others, and our history has been strong
at least in being connected with the world itself--for if you examine
well you will find that John Knox was the author, as it were, of
Oliver Cromwell; that the Puritan revolution would never have taken
place in England at all if it had not been for that Scotchman.
(Applause.) This is an arithmetical fact, and is not prompted by
national vanity on my part at all. (Laughter and applause.) And it
is very possible, if you look at the struggle that was going on in
England, as I have had to do in my time, you will see that people were
overawed with the immense impediments lying in the way.
A small minority of God-fearing men in the country were flying away
with any ship they could get to New England, rather than take the lion
by the beard. They durstn't confront the powers with their most just
complaint to be delivered from idolatry. They wanted to make the
nation altogether conformable to the Hebrew Bible, which they
understood to be according to the will of God; and there could be no
aim more legitimate. However, they could not have got their desire
fulfilled at all if Knox had not succeeded by the firmness and
nobleness of his mind. For he is also of the select of the earth to
me--John Knox. (Applause.) What he has suffered from the ungrateful
generations that have followed him should really make us humble
ourselves to the dust, to think that the most excellent man our
country has produced, to whom we owe everything that distinguishes
us among modern nations, should have been sneered at and abused by
people. Knox was heard by Scotland--the people heard him with the
marrow of their bones--they took up his doctrine, and they defied
principalities and powers to move them from it. "We must have it,"
they said.
It was at that time the Puritan struggle arose in England, and you
know well that the Scottish Earls and nobility, with their tenantry,
marched away to Dunse-hill, and sat down there; and just in the course
of that struggle, when it was either to be suppressed or brought
into greater vitality, they encamped on the top of Dunse-hill thirty
thousand armed men, drilled for that occasion, each regiment around
its landlord, its earl, or whatever he might be called, and eager
for Christ's Crown and Covenant. That was the signal for all England
rising up into unappeasable determination to have the Gospel there
also, and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether
the Parliament or the King should rule--whether it should be old
formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new
conceived in the souls of men--namely, a divine determination to walk
according to the laws of God here as the sum of all prosperity--which
of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of
struggle, it was decided--the way we know. I should say also of that
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's--notwithstanding the abuse it has
encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in
the world, and so on--it appears to me to have been the most salutary
thing in the modern history of England on the whole. If Oliver
Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come
to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could
not have gone on, but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his
mind--there was truth in it when he ruled over it.
Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking about the Romans, that
democracy cannot exist anywhere in the world; as a Government it is an
impossibility that it should be continued, and he goes on proving that
in his own way. I do not ask you all to follow him in his conviction
(hear); but it is to him a clear truth that it is a solecism and
impossibility that the universal mass of men should govern themselves.
He says of the Romans that they continued a long time, but it was
purely in virtue of this item in their constitution--namely, that they
had all the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly necessary
at times to appoint a Dictator--a man who had the power of life and
death over everything--who degraded men out of their places, ordered
them to execution, and did whatever seemed to him good in the name
of God above him. He was commanded to take care that the Republic
suffered no detriment, and Machiavelli calculates that that was the
thing that purified the social system from time to time, and enabled
it to hang on as it did--an extremely likely thing if it was composed
of nothing but bad and tumultuous men triumphing in general over the
better, and all going the bad road, in fact. Well, Oliver Cromwell's
Protectorate, or Dictatorate if you will, lasted for about ten years,
and you will find that nothing that was contrary to the laws of Heaven
was allowed to live by Oliver. (A laugh, and applause.) For example,
it was found by his Parliament, called "Barebones"--the most zealous
of all Parliaments probably--the Court of Chancery in England was in
a state that was really capable of no apology--no man could get up and
say that that was a right court. There were, I think, fifteen thousand
or fifteen hundred--(laughter)--I don't really remember which, but
we shall call it by the last (renewed laughter)--there were fifteen
hundred cases lying in it undecided; and one of them, I remember, for
a large amount of money, was eighty-three years old, and it was going
on still. Wigs were waving over it, and lawyers were taking their
fees, and there was no end of it, upon which the Barebones people,
after deliberation about it, thought it was expedient, and commanded
by the Author of Man and the Fountain of Justice, and for the true
and right, to abolish the court. Really, I don't know who could have
dissented from that opinion. At the same time, it was thought by those
who were wiser, and had more experience of the world, that it was a
very dangerous thing, and would never suit at all. The lawyers began
to make an immense noise about it. (Laughter.) All the public, the
great mass of solid and well-disposed people who had got no deep
insight into such matters, were very adverse to it, and the president
of it, old Sir Francis Rous, who translated the Psalms--those that
we sing every Sunday in the church yet--a very good man and a wise
man--the Provost of Eton--he got the minority, or I don't know whether
or no he did not persuade the majority--he, at any rate, got a great
number of the Parliament to go to Oliver the Dictator, and lay
down their functions altogether, and declare officially with their
signature on Monday morning that the Parliament was dissolved.
The thing was passed on Saturday night, and on Monday morning Rous
came and said, "We cannot carry on the affair any longer, and we
remit it into the hands of your Highness." Oliver in that way became
Protector a second time.
I give you this as an instance that Oliver felt that the Parliament
that had been dismissed had been perfectly right with regard to
Chancery, and that there was no doubt of the propriety of abolishing
Chancery, or reforming it in some kind of way. He considered it, and
this is what he did. He assembled sixty of the wisest lawyers to be
found in England. Happily, there were men great in the law--men who
valued the laws as much as anybody does now, I suppose. (A laugh.)
Oliver said to them, "Go and examine this thing, and in the name of
God inform me what is necessary to be done with regard to it. You will
see how we may clean out the foul things in it that render it poison
to everybody." Well, they sat down then, and in the course of six
weeks--there was no public speaking then, no reporting of speeches,
and no trouble of any kind; there was just the business in hand--they
got sixty propositions fixed in their minds of the things that
required to be done. And upon these sixty propositions Chancery was
reconstituted and remodelled, and so it has lasted to our time. It had
become a nuisance, and could not have continued much longer.
That is an instance of the manner in which things were done when a
Dictatorship prevailed in the country, and that was what the Dictator
did. Upon the whole, I do not think that, in general, out of common
history books, you will ever get into the real history of this
country, or anything particular which it would beseem you to know. You
may read very ingenious and very clever books by men whom it would be
the height of insolence in me to do any other thing than express
my respect for. But their position is essentially sceptical. Man
is unhappily in that condition that he will make only a temporary
explanation of anything, and you will not be able, if you are like the
man, to understand how this island came to be what it is. You will not
find it recorded in books. You will find recorded in books a jumble
of tumults, disastrous ineptitudes, and all that kind of thing. But to
get what you want you will have to look into side sources, and inquire
in all directions.
I remember getting Collins' Peerage to read--a very poor peerage as
a work of genius, but an excellent book for diligence and fidelity--I
was writing on Oliver Cromwell at the time. (Applause.) I could get no
biographical dictionary, and I thought the peerage book would help
me, at least tell me whether people were old or young; and about all
persons concerned in the actions about which I wrote. I got a great
deal of help out of poor Collins. He was a diligent and dark London
bookseller of about a hundred years ago, who compiled out of all kinds
of treasury chests, archives, books that were authentic, and out
of all kinds of things out of which he could get the information he
wanted. He was a very meritorious man. I not only found the solution
of anything I wanted there, but I began gradually to perceive this
immense fact, which I really advise every one of you who read history
to look out for and read for--if he has not found it--it was that
the kings of England all the way from the Norman Conquest down to
the times of Charles I. had appointed, so far as they knew, those who
deserved to be appointed, peers. They were all Royal men, with minds
full of justice and valour and humanity, and all kinds of qualities
that are good for men to have who ought to rule over others. Then
their genealogy was remarkable--and there is a great deal more in
genealogies than is generally believed at present.
I never heard tell of any clever man that came out of entirely stupid
people. If you look around the families of your acquaintance, you will
see such cases in all directions. I know that it has been the case in
mine. I can trace the father, and the son, and the grandson, and the
family stamp is quite distinctly legible upon each of them, so that
it goes for a great deal--the hereditary principle in Government as in
other things; and it must be recognised so soon as there is any fixity
in things.
You will remark that if at any time the genealogy of a peerage
fails--if the man that actually holds the peerage is a fool in these
earnest striking times, the man gets into mischief and gets into
treason--he gets himself extinguished altogether, in fact. (Laughter.)
From these documents of old Collins it seems that a peer conducts
himself in a solemn, good, pious, manly kind of way when he takes
leave of life, and when he has hospitable habits, and is valiant in
his procedure throughout; and that in general a King, with a noble
approximation to what was right, had nominated this man, saying "Come
you to me, sir; come out of the common level of the people, where
you are liable to be trampled upon; come here and take a district of
country and make it into your own image more or less; be a king under
me, and understand that that is your function." I say this is the most
divine thing that a human being can do to other human beings, and no
kind of being whatever has so much of the character of God Almighty's
Divine Government as that thing we see that went all over England, and
that is the grand soul of England's history.
It is historically true that down to the time of Charles I., it was
not understood that any man was made a peer without having a merit in
him to constitute him a proper subject for a peerage. In Charles
I.'s time it grew to be known or said that if a man was by birth a
gentleman, and was worth £10,000 a-year, and bestowed his gifts up and
down among courtiers, he could be made a peer. Under Charles II. it
went on with still more rapidity, and has been going on with ever
increasing velocity until we see the perfect break-neck pace at which
they are now going. (A laugh.) And now a peerage is a paltry kind of
thing to what it was in these old times, I could go into a great many
more details about things of that sort, but I must turn to another
branch of the subject.
One remark more about your reading. I do not know whether it has been
sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books.
When a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of
books--in all books, if you take it in a wide sense--you will find
that there is a division of good books and bad books--there is a good
kind of a book and a bad kind of a book. I am not to assume that you
are all ill acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a
very important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the
idea that people have that if they are reading any book--that if
an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than
nothing at all. I entirely call that in question. I even venture to
deny it. (Laughter and cheers.) It would be much safer and better
would he have no concern with books at all than with some of them. You
know these are my views. There are a number, an increasing number, of
books that are decidedly to him not useful. (Hear.) But he will learn
also that a certain number of books were written by a supreme, noble
kind of people--not a very great number--but a great number adhere
more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written
it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men's
souls--divided into sheep and goats. (Laughter and applause.) Some
of them are calculated to be of very great advantage in teaching--in
forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others are going down,
down, doing more and more, wilder and wilder mischief.
And for the rest, in regard to all your studies here, and whatever
you may learn, you are to remember that the object is not particular
knowledge--that you are going to get higher in technical perfections,
and all that sort of thing. There is a higher aim lies at the rear of
all that, especially among those who are intended for literary, for
speaking pursuits--the sacred profession. You are ever to bear in
mind that there lies behind that the acquisition of what may be called
wisdom--namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all the
objects that come round about you, and the habit of behaving with
justice and wisdom. In short, great is wisdom--great is the value
of wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated. The highest achievement of
man--"Blessed is he that getteth understanding." And that, I believe,
occasionally may be missed very easily; but never more easily than
now, I think. If that is a failure, all is a failure. However, I will
not touch further upon that matter.
In this University I learn from many sides that there is a great and
considerable stir about endowments. Oh, I should have said in regard
to book reading, if it be so very important, how very useful would
an excellent library be in every University. I hope that will not be
neglected by those gentlemen who have charge of you--and, indeed, I am
happy to hear that your library is very much improved since the time I
knew it; and I hope it will go on improving more and more. You require
money to do that, and you require also judgment in the selectors of
the books--pious insight into what is really for the advantage of
human souls, and the exclusion of all kinds of clap-trap books which
merely excite the astonishment of foolish people. (Laughter.) Wise
books--as much as possible good books.
As I was saying, there appears to be a great demand for endowments--an
assiduous and praiseworthy industry for getting new funds collected
for encouraging the ingenious youth of Universities, especially
in this the chief University of the country. (Hear, hear.) Well, I
entirely participate in everybody's approval of the movement. It
is very desirable. It should be responded to, and one expects most
assuredly will. At least, if it is not, it will be shameful to the
country of Scotland, which never was so rich in money as at the
present moment, and never stood so much in need of getting noble
Universities to counteract many influences that are springing up
alongside of money. It should not be backward in coming forward in
the way of endowments (a laugh)--at least, in rivalry to our rude
old barbarous ancestors, as we have been pleased to call them. Such
munificence as theirs is beyond all praise, to whom I am sorry to say
we are not yet by any manner of means equal or approaching equality.
(Laughter.) There is an overabundance of money, and sometimes I cannot
help thinking that, probably, never has there been at any other time
in Scotland the hundredth part of the money that now is, or even the
thousandth part, for wherever I go there is that gold-nuggeting (a
laugh)--that prosperity.
Many men are counting their balances by millions. Money was never so
abundant, and nothing that is good to be done with it. ("Hear, hear,"
and a laugh.) No man knows--or very few men know--what benefit to get
out of his money. In fact, it too often is secretly a curse to him.
Much better for him never to have had any. But I do not expect that
generally to be believed. (Laughter.) Nevertheless, I should think it
a beautiful relief to any man that has an honest purpose struggling
in him to bequeath a handsome house of refuge, so to speak, for some
meritorious man who may hereafter be born into the world, to enable
him a little to get on his way. To do, in fact, as those old Norman
kings whom I have described to you--to raise a man out of the dirt and
mud where he is getting trampled, unworthily on his part, into some
kind of position where he may acquire the power to do some good in his
generation. I hope that as much as possible will be done in that way;
that efforts will not be relaxed till the thing is in a satisfactory
state. At the same time, in regard to the classical department of
things, it is to be desired that it were properly supported--that
we could allow people to go and devote more leisure possibly to the
cultivation of particular departments.
We might have more of this from Scotch Universities than we have. I
am bound, however, to say that it does not appear as if of late times
endowment was the real soul of the matter. The English, for example,
are the richest people for endowments on the face of the earth in
their Universities; and it is a remarkable fact that since the time
of Bentley you cannot name anybody that has gained a great name in
scholarship among them, or constituted a point of revolution in the
pursuits of men in that way. The man that did that is a man worthy
of being remembered among men, although he may be a poor man, and not
endowed with worldly wealth. One man that actually did constitute
a revolution was the son of a poor weaver in Saxony, who edited his
"Tibullus" in Dresden in the room of a poor comrade, and who, while he
was editing his "Tibullus," had to gather his pease-cod shells on the
streets and boil them for his dinner. That was his endowment. But he
was recognised soon to have done a great thing. His name was Heyne.
I can remember it was quite a revolution in my mind when I got hold
of that man's book on Virgil. I found that for the first time I had
understood him--that he had introduced me for the first time into
an insight of Roman life, and pointed out the circumstances in which
these were written, and here was interpretation; and it has gone on in
all manner of development, and has spread out into other countries.
Upon the whole, there is one reason why endowments are not given now
as they were in old days, when they founded abbeys, colleges, and all
kinds of things of that description, with such success as we know. All
that has changed now. Why that has decayed away may in part be that
people have become doubtful that colleges are now the real sources
of that which I call wisdom, whether they are anything more--anything
much more--than a cultivating of man in the specific arts. In fact,
there has been a suspicion of that kind in the world for a long time.
(A laugh.) That is an old saying, an old proverb, "An ounce of mother
wit is worth a pound of clergy." (Laughter.) There is a suspicion that
a man is perhaps not nearly so wise as he looks, or because he has
poured out speech so copiously. (Laughter.)
When the seven free Arts on which the old Universities were based came
to be modified a little, in order to be convenient for or to promote
the wants of modern society--though, perhaps, some of them are
obsolete enough even yet for some of us--there arose a feeling that
mere vocality, mere culture of speech, if that is what comes out of a
man, though he may be a great speaker, an eloquent orator, yet there
is no real substance there--if that is what was required and aimed at
by the man himself, and by the community that set him upon becoming
a learned man. Maid-servants, I hear people complaining, are getting
instructed in the "ologies," and so on, and are apparently totally
ignorant of brewing, boiling, and baking (laughter); above all things,
not taught what is necessary to be known, from the highest to the
lowest--strict obedience, humility, and correct moral conduct. Oh, it
is a dismal chapter, all that, if one went into it!
What has been done by rushing after fine speech? I have written down
some very fierce things about that, perhaps considerably more emphatic
than I would wish them to be now; but they are deeply my conviction.
(Hear, hear.) There is very great necessity indeed of getting a little
more silent than we are. It seems to me the finest nations of the
world--the English and the American--are going all away into wind
and tongue. (Applause and laughter.) But it will appear sufficiently
tragical by-and-bye, long after I am away out of it. Silence is the
eternal duty of a man. He wont get to any real understanding of
what is complex, and, what is more than any other, pertinent to his
interests, without maintaining silence. "Watch the tongue," is a very
old precept, and a most true one. I do not want to discourage any
of you from your Demosthenes, and your studies of the niceties of
language, and all that. Believe me, I value that as much as any of
you. I consider it a very graceful thing, and a proper thing, for
every human creature to know what the implement which he uses in
communicating his thoughts is, and how to make the very utmost of it.
I want you to study Demosthenes, and know all his excellencies. At the
same time, I must say that speech does not seem to me, on the whole,
to have turned to any good account.
Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker if it is not the truth that
he is speaking? Phocion, who did not speak at all, was a great deal
nearer hitting the mark than Demosthenes. (Laughter.) He used to tell
the Athenians--"You can't fight Philip. You have not the slightest
chance with him. He is a man who holds his tongue; he has great
disciplined armies; he can brag anybody you like in your cities here;
and he is going on steadily with an unvarying aim towards his object:
and he will infallibly beat any kind of men such as you, going
on raging from shore to shore with all that rampant nonsense."
Demosthenes said to him one day--"The Athenians will get mad some day
and kill you." "Yes," Phocion says, "when they are mad; and you as
soon as they get sane again." (Laughter.)
It is also told about him going to Messina on some deputation that
the Athenians wanted on some kind of matter of an intricate and
contentious nature, that Phocion went with some story in his mouth to
speak about. He was a man of few words--no unveracity; and after he
had gone on telling the story a certain time there was one burst of
interruption. One man interrupted with something he tried to answer,
and then another; and, finally, the people began bragging and bawling,
and no end of debate, till it ended in the want of power in the people
to say any more. Phocion drew back altogether, struck dumb, and would
not speak another word to any man; and he left it to them to decide in
any way they liked.
It appears to me there is a kind of eloquence in that which is equal
to anything Demosthenes ever said--"Take your own way, and let me out
altogether." (Applause.)
All these considerations, and manifold more connected with
them--innumerable considerations, resulting from observation of the
world at this moment--have led many people to doubt of the salutary
effect of vocal education altogether. I do not mean to say it should
be entirely excluded; but I look to something that will take hold
of the matter much more closely, and not allow it slip out of our
fingers, and remain worse than it was. For if a good speaker--an
eloquent speaker--is not speaking the truth, is there a more horrid
kind of object in creation? (Loud cheers.) Of such speech I hear all
manner and kind of people say it is excellent; but I care very little
about how he said it, provided I understand it, and it be true.
Excellent speaker! but what if he is telling me things that are
untrue, that are not the fact about it--if he has formed a wrong
judgment about it--if he has no judgment in his mind to form a right
conclusion in regard to the matter? An excellent speaker of that kind
is, as it were, saying--"Ho, every one that wants to be persuaded
of the thing that is not true, come hither." (Great laughter and
applause.) I would recommend you to be very chary of that kind of
excellent speech. (Renewed laughter.)
Well, all that being the too well-known product of our method of vocal
education--the mouth merely operating on the tongue of the pupil, and
teaching him to wag it in a particular way (laughter)--it had made a
great many thinking men entertain a very great distrust of this not
very salutary way of procedure, and they have longed for some kind of
practical way of working out the business. There would be room for
a great deal of description about it if I went into it; but I must
content myself with saying that the most remarkable piece of reading
that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book
by Goethe--one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old
man, about seventy years of age--I think one of the most beautiful
he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very
touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It
is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through
many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when
I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind
as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be
executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten
pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather
have written than have written all the books that have appeared since
I came into the world. (Cheers.) Deep, deep is the meaning of what
is said there. They turn on the Christian religion and the religious
phenomena of Christian life--altogether sketched out in the most airy,
graceful, delicately-wise kind of way, so as to keep himself out
of the common controversies of the street and of the forum, yet to
indicate what was the result of things he had been long meditating
upon. Among others, he introduces, in an aërial, flighty kind of way,
here and there a touch which grows into a beautiful picture--a scheme
of entirely mute education, at least with no more speech than is
absolutely necessary for what they have to do.
Three of the wisest men that can be got are met to consider what is
the function which transcends all others in importance to build up
the young generation, which shall be free from all that perilous stuff
that has been weighing us down and clogging every step, and which is
the only thing we can hope to go on with if we would leave the world
a little better, and not the worse of our having been in it for those
who are to follow. The man who is the eldest of the three says to
Goethe, "You give by nature to the well-formed children you bring into
the world a great many precious gifts, and very frequently these are
best of all developed by nature herself, with a very slight assistance
where assistance is seen to be wise and profitable, and forbearance
very often on the part of the overlooker of the process of education;
but there is one thing that no child brings into the world with it,
and without which all other things are of no use." Wilhelm, who is
there beside him, says, "What is that?" "All who enter the world want
it," says the eldest; "perhaps you yourself." Wilhelm says,
"Well, tell me what it is." "It is," says the eldest,
"reverence--Ehrfurcht--Reverence! Honour done to those who are
grander and better than you, without fear; distinct from fear."
Ehrfurcht--"the soul of all religion that ever has been among
men, or ever will be." And he goes into practicality. He practically
distinguishes the kinds of religion that are in the world, and he
makes out three reverences. The boys are all trained to go through
certain gesticulations, to lay their hands on their breast and look
up to heaven, and they give their three reverences. The first and
simplest is that of reverence for what is above us. It is the soul
of all the Pagan religions; there is nothing better in man than that.
Then there is reverence for what is around us or about us--reverence
for our equals, and to which he attributes an immense power in the
culture of man. The third is reverence for what is beneath us--to
learn to recognise in pain, sorrow, and contradiction, even in those
things, odious as they are to flesh and blood--to learn that there
lies in these a priceless blessing. And he defines that as being
the soul of the Christian religion--the highest of all religions; a
height, as Goethe says--and that is very true, even to the letter, as
I consider--a height to which the human species was fated and enabled
to attain, and from which, having once attained it, it can never
retrograde. It cannot descend down below that permanently, Goethe's
idea is.
Often one thinks it was good to have a faith of that kind--that
always, even in the most degraded, sunken, and unbelieving times, he
calculates there will be found some few souls who will recognise what
that meant; and that the world, having once received it, there is no
fear of its retrograding. He goes on then to tell us the way in which
they seek to teach boys, in the sciences particularly, whatever the
boy is fit for. Wilhelm left his own boy there, expecting they would
make him a Master of Arts, or something of that kind; and when he came
back for him he saw a thundering cloud of dust coming over the plain,
of which he could make nothing. It turned out to be a tempest of wild
horses, managed by young lads who had a turn for hunting with their
grooms. His own son was among them, and he found that the breaking of
colts was the thing he was most suited for. (Laughter.) This is
what Goethe calls Art, which I should not make clear to you by any
definition unless it is clear already. (A laugh.) I would not attempt
to define it as music, painting, and poetry, and so on; it is in quite
a higher sense than the common one, and in which, I am afraid, most of
our painters, poets, and music men would not pass muster. (A laugh.)
He considers that the highest pitch to which human culture can go; and
he watches with great industry how it is to be brought about with men
who have a turn for it.
Very wise and beautiful it is. It gives one an idea that something
greatly better is possible for man in the world. I confess it seems to
me it is a shadow of what will come, unless the world is to come to
a conclusion that is perfectly frightful; some kind of scheme of
education like that, presided over by the wisest and most sacred men
that can be got in the world, and watching from a distance--a training
in practicality at every turn; no speech in it except that speech that
is to be followed by action, for that ought to be the rule as nearly
as possible among them. For rarely should men speak at all unless it
is to say that thing that is to be done; and let him go and do his
part in it, and to say no more about it. I should say there is nothing
in the world you can conceive so difficult, prima facie, as that
of getting a set of men gathered together--rough, rude, and ignorant
people--gather them together, promise them a shilling a day, rank
them up, give them very severe and sharp drill, and by bullying and
drill--for the word "drill" seems as if it meant the treatment that
would force them to learn--they learn what it is necessary to learn;
and there is the man, a piece of an animated machine, a wonder of
wonders to look at. He will go and obey one man, and walk into the
cannon's mouth for him, and do anything whatever that is commanded of
him by his general officer. And I believe all manner of things in
this way could be done if there were anything like the same attention
bestowed. Very many things could be regimented and organized into the
mute system of education that Goethe evidently adumbrates there. But I
believe, when people look into it, it will be found that they will not
be very long in trying to make some efforts in that direction; for the
saving of human labour, and the avoidance of human misery, would be
uncountable if it were set about and begun even in part.
Alas! it is painful to think how very far away it is--any fulfilment
of such things; for I need not hide from you, young gentlemen--and
that is one of the last things I am going to tell you--that you have
got into a very troublous epoch of the world; and I don't think
you will find it improve the footing you have, though you have many
advantages which we had not. You have careers open to you, by public
examinations and so on, which is a thing much to be approved, and
which we hope to see perfected more and more. All that was entirely
unknown in my time, and you have many things to recognise as
advantages. But you will find the ways of the world more anarchical
than ever, I think. As far as I have noticed, revolution has come upon
us. We have got into the age of revolutions. All kinds of things are
coming to be subjected to fire, as it were; hotter and hotter the wind
rises around everything.
Curious to say, now in Oxford and other places that used to seem to
live at anchor in the stream of time, regardless of all changes, they
are getting into the highest humour of mutation, and all sorts of new
ideas are getting afloat. It is evident that whatever is not made of
asbestos will have to be burnt in this world. It will not stand the
heat it is getting exposed to. And in saying that, it is but saying
in other words that we are in an epoch of anarchy--anarchy plus the
constable. (Laughter.) There is nobody that picks one's pocket without
some policeman being ready to take him up. (Renewed laughter.) But in
every other thing he is the son, not of Kosmos, but of Chaos. He is
a disobedient, and reckless, and altogether a waste kind of
object--commonplace man in these epochs; and the wiser kind of
man--the select, of whom I hope you will be part--has more and more a
set time to it to look forward, and will require to move with double
wisdom; and will find, in short, that the crooked things that he has
to pull straight in his own life, or round about, wherever he may be,
are manifold, and will task all his strength wherever he may go.
But why should I complain of that either?--for that is a thing a
man is born to in all epochs. He is born to expend every particle of
strength that God Almighty has given him, in doing the work he finds
he is fit for--to stand it out to the last breath of life, and do his
best. We are called upon to do that; and the reward we all get--which
we are perfectly sure of if we have merited it--is that we have got
the work done, or, at least, that we have tried to do the work; for
that is a great blessing in itself; and I should say there is not very
much more reward than that going in this world. If the man gets meat
and clothes, what matters it whether he have £10,000, or £10,000,000,
or £70 a-year. He can get meat and clothes for that; and he will find
very little difference intrinsically, if he is a wise man.
I warmly second the advice of the wisest of men--"Don't be ambitious;
don't be at all too desirous to success; be loyal and modest." Cut
down the proud towering thoughts that you get into you, or see they be
pure as well as high. There is a nobler ambition than the gaining of
all California would be, or the getting of all the suffrages that are
on the planet just now. (Loud and prolonged cheers.)
Finally, gentlemen, I have one advice to give you, which is
practically of very great importance, though a very humble one.
I have no doubt you will have among you people ardently bent to
consider life cheap, for the purpose of getting forward in what they
are aiming at of high; and you are to consider throughout, much more
than is done at present, that health is a thing to be attended to
continually--that you are to regard that as the very highest of all
temporal things for you. (Applause.) There is no kind of achievement
you could make in the world that is equal to perfect health. What are
nuggets and millions? The French financier said, "Alas! why is there
no sleep to be sold?" Sleep was not in the market at any quotation.
(Laughter and applause.)
It is a curious thing that I remarked long ago, and have often
turned in my head, that the old word for "holy" in the German
language--heilig--also means "healthy." And so Heil-bronn means
"holy-well," or "healthy-well." We have in the Scotch "hale;" and,
I suppose our English word "whole"--with a "w"--all of one piece,
without any hole in it--is the same word. I find that you could
not get any better definition of what "holy" really is than
"healthy--completely healthy." Mens sana in corpore sano.
(Applause.)
A man with his intellect a clear, plain, geometric mirror, brilliantly
sensitive of all objects and impressions around it, and imagining all
things in their correct proportions--not twisted up into convex or
concave, and distorting everything, so that he cannot see the truth of
the matter without endless groping and manipulation--healthy, clear,
and free, and all round about him. We never can attain that at all.
In fact, the operations we have got into are destructive of it. You
cannot, if you are going to do any decisive intellectual operation--if
you are going to write a book--at least, I never could--without
getting decidedly made ill by it, and really you must if it is your
business--and you must follow out what you are at--and it sometimes
is at the expense of health. Only remember at all times to get back
as fast as possible out of it into health, and regard the real
equilibrium as the centre of things. You should always look at the
heilig, which means holy, and holy means healthy.
Well, that old etymology--what a lesson it is against certain gloomy,
austere, ascetic people, that have gone about as if this world were
all a dismal-prison house! It has, indeed, got all the ugly things in
it that I have been alluding to; but there is an eternal sky over it,
and the blessed sunshine, verdure of spring, and rich autumn, and all
that in it, too. Piety does not mean that a man should make a sour
face about things, and refuse to enjoy in moderation what his Maker
has given. Neither do you find it to have been so with old Knox. If
you look into him you will find a beautiful Scotch humour in him, as
well as the grimmest and sternest truth when necessary, and a great
deal of laughter. We find really some of the sunniest glimpses of
things come out of Knox that I have seen in any man; for instance, in
his "History of the Reformation," which is a book I hope every one of
you will read--a glorious book.
On the whole, I would bid you stand up to your work, whatever it may
be, and not be afraid of it--not in sorrows or contradiction to yield,
but pushing on towards the goal. And don't suppose that people are
hostile to you in the world. You will rarely find anybody designedly
doing you ill. You may feel often as if the whole world is obstructing
you, more or less; but you will find that to be because the world
is travelling in a different way from you, and rushing on in its own
path. Each man has only an extremely good-will to himself--which he
has a right to have--and is moving on towards his object. Keep out of
literature as a general rule, I should say also. (Laughter.) If you
find many people who are hard and indifferent to you in a world that
you consider to be unhospitable and cruel--as often, indeed, happens
to a tender-hearted, stirring young creature--you will also find there
are noble hearts who will look kindly on you, and their help will be
precious to you beyond price. You will get good and evil as you go on,
and have the success that has been appointed to you.
I will wind up with a small bit of verse that is from Goethe also,
and has often gone through my mind. To me it has the tone of a modern
psalm in it in some measure. It is sweet and clear. The clearest
of sceptical men had not anything like so clear a mind as that man
had--freer from cant and misdirected notion of any kind than any man
in these ages has been This is what the poet says:--
The Future hides in it
Gladness and sorrow:
We press still thorow;
Nought that abides in it
Daunting us--Onward!
And solemn before us,
Veiled, the dark Portal,
Goal of all mortal.
Stars silent rest o'er us--
Graves under us, silent.
While earnest thou gazest
Comes boding of terror,
Come phantasm and error;
Perplexes the bravest
With doubt and misgiving.
But heard are the voices,
Heard are the Sages,
The Worlds and the Ages:
"Choose well: your choice is
Brief, and yet endless."
Here eyes do regard you
In Eternity's stillness;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward you.
Work, and despair not.[A]
[Footnote A: Originally published in Carlyle's "Past and Present,"
(Lond. 1843,) p. 318, and introduced there by the following words:--
"My candid readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a
rhythmic word of Goethe's on our tongue; a word which perhaps has
already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through many a
heart. To me, finding it devout yet wholly credible and veritable,
full of piety yet free of cant; to me joyfully finding much in it, and
joyfully missing so much in it, this little snatch of music, by the
greatest German man, sounds like a stanza in the grand Road Song
and Marching Song of our great Teutonic kindred,--wending, wending,
valiant and victorious, through the undiscovered Deeps of Time!"]
One last word. Wir heissen euch hoffen--we bid you be of hope. Adieu
for this time.
THE MORAL PHILOSOPHY CHAIR IN EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY.
The following is a letter addressed by Mr. Carlyle to Dr. Hutchison
Stirling, late one of the candidates for the Chair of Moral Philosophy
in the University of Edinburgh:--
"Chelsea, 16th June, 1868.
"DEAR STIRLING,--
"You well know how reluctant I have been to interfere at all in the
election now close on us, and that in stating, as bound, what my own
clear knowledge of your qualities was, I have strictly held by that,
and abstained from more. But the news I now have from Edinburgh is of
such a complexion, so dubious, and so surprising to me; and I now find
I shall privately have so much regret in a certain event--which
seems to be reckoned possible, and to depend on one gentleman of the
seven--that, to secure my own conscience in the matter, a few plainer
words seem needful. To whatever I have said of you already, therefore,
I now volunteer to add, that I think you not only the one man in
Britain capable of bringing Metaphysical Philosophy, in the ultimate,
German or European, and highest actual form of it, distinctly home to
the understanding of British men who wish to understand it, but that
I notice in you farther, on the moral side, a sound strength of
intellectual discernment, a noble valour and reverence of mind, which
seems to me to mark you out as the man capable of doing us the highest
service in Ethical science too: that of restoring, or decisively
beginning to restore, the doctrine of morals to what I must ever
reckon its one true and everlasting basis (namely, the divine or
supra-sensual one), and thus of victoriously reconciling and rendering
identical the latest dictates of modern science with the earliest
dawnings of wisdom among the race of men.
"This is truly my opinion, and how important to me, not for the sake
of Edinburgh University alone, but of the whole world for ages to
come, I need not say to you! I have not the honour of any personal
acquaintance with Mr. Adam Black, late member for Edinburgh, but for
fifty years back have known him, in the distance, and by current and
credible report, as a man of solid sense, independence, probity, and
public spirit; and if, in your better knowledge of the circumstances,
you judge it suitable to read this note to him--to him, or indeed to
any other person--you are perfectly at liberty to do so.
"Yours sincerely always,
"T. CARLYLE."
FAREWELL LETTER TO THE STUDENTS.
Mr. Carlyle, ex-Lord Rector of the University of Edinburgh, being
asked before the expiration of his term of office, to deliver a
valedictory address to the students, he sent the following letter to
Mr. Robertson, Vice-President of the Committee for his election:--
"Chelsea, December 6, 1868.
"DEAR SIR,--
"I much regret that a valedictory speech from me, in present
circumstances, is a thing I must not think of. Be pleased to advise
the young gentlemen who were so friendly towards me that I have
already sent them, in silence, but with emotions deep enough, perhaps
too deep, my loving farewell, and that ingratitude or want of regard
is by no means among the causes that keep me absent. With a fine
youthful enthusiasm, beautiful to look upon, they bestowed on me that
bit of honour, loyally all they had; and it has now, for reasons one
and another, become touchingly memorable to me--touchingly, and even
grandly and tragically--never to be forgotten for the remainder of
my life. Bid them, in my name, if they still love me, fight the good
fight, and quit themselves like men in the warfare to which they are
as if conscript and consecrated, and which lies ahead. Tell them to
consult the eternal oracles (not yet inaudible, nor ever to become so,
when worthily inquired of); and to disregard, nearly altogether, in
comparison, the temporary noises, menacings, and deliriums. May they
love wisdom, as wisdom, if she is to yield her treasures, must be
loved, piously, valiantly, humbly, beyond life itself, or the prizes
of life, with all one's heart and all one's soul. In that case (I will
say again), and not in any other case, it shall be well with them.
"Adieu, my young friends, a long adieu, yours with great sincerity,
"T. CARLYLE"
BEQUEST BY MR. CARLYLE.
At a meeting of the Senatus Academicus of Edinburgh University, a few
weeks after his decease, a deed of mortification by Thomas Carlyle
in favour of that body, for the foundation of ten Bursaries in the
Faculty of Arts, was read. The document opens as follows:--
"I, Thomas Carlyle, residing at Chelsea, presently Rector in the
University of Edinburgh, from the love, favour and affection which I
bear to that University, and from my interest in the advancement of
education in my native Scotland, as elsewhere, for these and for other
more peculiar reasons, which also I wish to record, do intend, and
am now in the act of making to the said University, a bequest,
as underwritten, of the estate of Craigenputtoch, which is now my
property. Craigenputtoch lies at the head of the parish of Dunscore,
in Nithsdale, Dumfriesshire. The extent is of about 1,800 acres;
rental at present, on lease of nineteen years, is £250; the annual
worth, with the improvements now in progress, is probably £300.
Craigenputtoch was for many generations the patrimony of a family
named Welsh, the eldest son usually a 'John Welsh,' in series going
back, think some, to the famous John Welsh, son-in-law of the reformer
Knox. The last male heir of the family was John Welsh, Esq., surgeon,
Haddington. His one child and heiress was my late dear, magnanimous,
much-loving, and, to me, inestimable wife, in memory of whom, and
of her constant nobleness and piety towards him and towards me, I am
now--she having been the last of her kindred--about to bequeath to
Edinburgh University with whatever piety is in me this Craigenputtoch,
which was theirs and hers, on the terms, and for the purposes, and
under the conditions underwritten. Therefore I do mortify and
dispose to and in favour of the said University of Edinburgh, for
the foundation and endowment of ten equal Bursaries, to be called
the 'John Welsh Bursaries,' in the said University, heritably and
irredeemably, all and whole the lands of Upper Craigenputtoch. The
said estate is not to be sold, but to be kept and administered as
land, the net annual revenue of it to be divided into ten equal
Bursaries, to be called, as aforesaid, the 'John Welsh Bursaries.' The
Senatus Academicus shall bestow them on the ten applicants entering
the University who, on strict and thorough examination and open
competitive trial by examiners whom the Senatus will appoint for that
end, are judged to show the best attainment of actual proficiency and
the best likelihood of more in the department or faculty called of
arts, as taught there. Examiners to be actual professors in said
faculty, the fittest whom the Senatus can select, with fit assessors
or coadjutors and witnesses, if the Senatus see good, and always the
report of the said examiners to be minuted and signed, and to govern
the appointments made, and to be recorded therewith. More specially I
appoint that five of the 'John Welsh Bursaries' shall be given for the
best proficiency in mathematics--I would rather say 'in mathesis,' if
that were a thing to be judged of from competition--but practically
above all in pure geometry, such being perennial, the symptom not
only of steady application, but of a clear, methodic intellect,
and offering in all epochs good promise for all manner of arts and
pursuits. The other five Bursaries I appoint to depend (for the
present and indefinitely onwards) on proficiency in classical
learning, that is to say, in knowledge of Latin, Greek, and English,
all of these, or any two of them. This also gives good promise of a
young mind, but as I do not feel certain that it gives perennially or
will perennially be thought in universities to give the best promise,
I am willing that the Senatus of the University, in case of a change
of its opinion on this point hereafter in the course of generations,
shall bestow these latter five Bursaries on what it does then consider
the most excellent proficiency in matters classical, or the best proof
of a classical mind, which directs its own highest effort towards
teaching and diffusing in the new generations that will come. The
Bursaries to be open to free competition of all who come to study in
Edinburgh University, and who have never been of any other University,
the competition to be held on or directly before or after their first
matriculation there. Bursaries to be always given on solemnly strict
and faithful trial to the worthiest, or if (what in justice can never
happen, though it illustrates my intention) the claims of two
were absolutely equal, and could not be settled by further trial,
preference is to fall in favour of the more unrecommended and
unfriended under penalties graver than I, or any highest mortal, can
pretend to impose, but which I can never doubt--as the law of eternal
justice, inexorably valid, whether noticed or unnoticed, pervades all
corners of space and of time--are very sure to be punctually exacted
if incurred. This is to be the perpetual rule for the Senatus in
deciding."
After stating some other conditions, the document thus concludes:
"And so may a little trace of help to the young heroic soul struggling
for what is highest spring from this poor arrangement and bequest.
May it run for ever, if it can, as a thread of pure water from the
Scottish rocks, trickling into its little basin by the thirsty wayside
for those to whom it veritably belongs. Amen. Such is my bequest to
Edinburgh University. In witness whereof these presents, written upon
this and the two preceding pages by James Steven Burns, clerk to John
Cook, writer to the signet, are subscribed by me at Chelsea, the
20th day of June, 1867, before these witnesses: John Forster,
barrister-at-law, man of letters, etc., residing at Palace-gate House,
Kensington, London; and James Anthony Froude, man of letters, residing
at No. 5, Onslow Gardens, Brompton, London.
"(Signed) T. CARLYLE.
"JOHN FORSTER,}
"J.A. FROUDE, } Witnesses. |
