hope, specially intended to ignore them as lawfully “engaged in the tuition or discipline of the said University.” And assuredly a “heavy blow and a great discouragement” is dealt out to their present occupation in the wide powers given to open private halls; whilst, at the same time, we are glad to think it opens a legitimate field of usefulness, and, we hope, emolument, to the many talented and excellent men so employed; for it is against the whole system of private tuition that our strictures are directed, and not the individuals who are forced to take a false position by its general prevalence. It is the more necessary to draw public attention to this prudent omission in the bill, because already voices are raised in complaint against it. This body is too numerous and too influential not to have its organs both in and out of the House. The fluent Mr Byng, representing one phase of young Oxford, takes the earliest opportunity of claiming for them their share in the new representation;[7] and it would be very hard if they had not their champion among the pamphleteers. We only trust that no parliamentary friend, by some ingenious insertion of words, will be allowed to establish a new reading of the aforesaid clause in their favour. So much for the evil which this bill might have proposed to do, and which it has happily left undone. These are its virtues of omission; it has also its sins. If it has sometimes firmly resisted the mischievous proposals of the Commissioners, it has in no case had the courage to take a bold line of its own. One measure of practical reform which would have trenched upon no rights, and violated no principle, and therefore, perhaps, was not sufficiently telling to recommend itself to the Commissioners—but which the public would have thankfully acknowledged, and which the University could hardly have objected to—was the removal of the inconvenient fiction, which demands four years for the first degree, whilst, in the thirteenth term, the beginning of the fourth year, the final examination may be, and often is, passed, not only with success, but with honour. We are not arguing, it must be remembered, for an actual shortening (unless it were by the odd thirteenth term) the academical course, which we agree with Mr Justice Coleridge in regarding as an evil; but merely for insisting, in the case of all pass-men, that the period which is now the minimum should also be the maximum of their university course, and that the absurd and expensive anomaly of “grace terms” should be altogether done away with. We will not trouble our readers again with the arguments on this subject which we have used before;[8] but we must confess the disappointment with which we have looked in vain through the Reports, both of the Hebdomadal and of the Tutors’ Committee, and find this most simple and convenient re-arrangement,—change it can hardly be called—either wholly overlooked, or only noticed to be dismissed without consideration. It is