Let the people of England look to it. If their old adage be true, that “learning is better than house and land,” a heritage is passing from them. “The nation has a claim to the national universities,” it is said. If it means anything, it means this—that rank, and wealth, and worldly position are not to hold them, to the exclusion of the poor seeker after knowledge. Will they believe us, if we tell them, that the great and good men who in other days built and endowed these colleges, said more than this; they said the poor _alone_ should hold the seats of honour there, if they could prove that they were led by the love of learning to enter in and take possession. The sons of the rich and noble might resort there for education; but their fellowships and their scholarships, endowed by their bounty, were for the poor for ever. Is this truth disputed? Is there any moral doubt that the poor scholars of England are the true heirs of the “city of palaces,” any more than of the true purpose of the Hospital of St Cross, which has just engaged so much of the public attention? Is there one whit more iniquity in Lord Guildford’s acts, than there will be in this act, if it passes? We believe that in this case, as well as in that, the public is not awake to the fact, and needs to have the wrong set very plainly before them in order to appreciate it. Ancient statutes—even were the handwriting legible, and the Latin easy—are not popular reading. Yet there are some things in them which would open, to many a shrewd reader amongst our middle classes, a new chapter of the rights of man. It might form a novel, and not wholly unprofitable, theme for a popular lecturer to teach his hearers that the Scholars or Fellows of Oriel were, by the founder’s will, to be not only “casti et humiles” but “indigentes;” not necessarily first- or second-class men, who had spent large sums of money upon private tutors, but merely “ad studium habiles,” “proficere volentes;” that the same qualifications, nearly word for word, repeated as a sacred formula, are those for the Scholars or Fellows of the rich and noble foundations of St John’s, of Merton, of Balliol; that at Magdalen—perhaps now the most luxurious of all our colleges—they were, and _are_ commanded by the same statutes, by which they claim to hold their rich endowments, to elect “_pauperes_ et _indigentes_,” guarding the rights of the poor by a double title. And it might not be uninstructive to trace the different interpretations put, in different ages, upon those strange old Latin words—especially the last new interpretation of them; and, by the help of grammar and dictionary, impressing upon an audience, by this time somewhat interested, the rapid advance made, in this age of progress, and under a government of progress, both in the philosophy of language and the recognition of popular rights. There is many an honest Radical, hating a parson or a lord, who no doubt chuckles over reform in any shape, but especially