We are inclined to think that the public have not been sufficiently alive to this not unimportant difference between Oxford and Heidelberg--Cambridge and Vienna. Certes, but little account was taken of the peaceful bearing of our academic population. On the contrary, much supercilious wordiness has been lavished, more or less to the discredit of cap and gown, by portions of the London press in the lead, and, as a necessary consequence, by provincial journalists _ad libitum_. This talk, current now for some years, was all concentrated and endued with new vigour by a movement of the University of Cambridge itself. The people who stop your way by talking of "progress," and deal out dark rhodomontade on the subject of "enlightenment," were all set agog by what they thought a symptom of capitulation in the strongholds of the Ancient. All our old imbecile friends, the cant phrases of twenty and thirty years ago, started up as fresh as paint, ready to go through all the handling they had before endured. We heard of, "keeping alive ancient prejudices," "cleaving pertinaciously to obsolete forms," "following a monastic rule," "forgetting the world outside their college walls," and multifarious twaddle of this sort, till the Pope fled from Rome, or some other little revolution occurred to withdraw the attention of the public from this set of phrases to another, no doubt not less forcible and original. Others, again, took a friendly tone and spoke apologetically: it was a great thing to get any move at all from the university: those who took the lead in her management were not men who mixed with the world at large, and allowance must be made if they did not altogether march with the times. "The world at large" is an expression of very doubtful import: "all think their little set mankind:" but when the resident fellows of colleges are charged with not duly mixing with the world at large, we cannot help thinking that those who use the phrase are ignoring the existence of the Didcot Junction and Eastern Counties Railway, and borrowing their ideas of academic life from the time when Hobson travelled "betwixt Cambridge and the Bull." As far as our observation goes, we should say that there is no class of persons who have better opportunities of taking an extended view of different phases of social being, or who are more disposed to take advantage of those opportunities. A fellow of a college is not engaged much more than half the year in university business; for four months, at the very least, he generally has it in his power to expatiate where he will, from May Fair to Mesopotamia; he has no household ties to detain him, and if he does not rub off the lexicographic rust, and the mathematical mouldiness, which he may have contracted during his labours of the term, he must be possessed of a local attachment almost vegetable: some few instances of which secluded existence still linger in quiet nooks of our halls