advancement of learning--at least, it is hard to see what other inducement there was to face what must have been, even with all due allowance made, the exceptional hardships of a student’s life. Then came the Colleges--University dating from unknown antiquity, although the legend which connects its foundation with Alfred has now shared the fate of most legends; Balliol and Merton, at the end of the thirteenth century; and the succeeding centuries were fruitful in the establishment of many other now venerable foundations, taking example and encouragement from the success and reputation of their earlier compeers. In their original form colleges were probably intended to be places of quiet retirement and study, where the earnest scholar might peacefully pursue his researches without fear of disturbance by the wilder spirits who roamed the streets and carried on the traditional feuds of Town and Gown or of North and South. [Illustration: _NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD. Drawn by E. Stamp._] By a curious reverse of circumstances the collegian and the ’_scholaris nulli collegio vel aulae ascriptus_’ of modern days seem to have changed characters. For I have heard it said by those who have to do with college discipline that their _alumni_ are no longer invariably distinguished by ’a gentle nature and studious habits’--qualities for which, as the Warden of Merton says, colleges were originally intended to provide a welcome haven of rest, and which are now the especial and gratifying characteristics of that whilom roisterer and boon companion, the Unattached Student. We have it on the authority of historians that the original collegiate design was, properly speaking, a kind of model lodging-house; an improved, enlarged, and strictly supervised edition of the many hostels where the primitive undergraduate did mostly congregate. Fellows and scholars alike were to be studious and discreet persons; the seniors were to devote themselves to research, and to stand in a quasi-parental or elder-brotherly relation to the juniors who had not yet attained to the grade of a Baccalaureus. Very strict rules--probably based on those of monastic institutions--governed the whole body: rules, however, which are not unnecessarily severe when we consider the fashion of the age and the comparative youth of both fellows and scholars. Many scholars must have been little more than children, and the junior don of the fifteenth century may often have been young enough to receive that corporal punishment which our rude forefathers inflicted even on the gentler sex. ’Solomon said, in accents mild, Spare the rod and spoil the child; Be they man or be they maid, Whip ’em and wallop ’em, Solomon said’