To keep up that characteristic which the Popedom only offered, the monarchs of the larger Protestant states have endeavoured to apply the incorporation principle to universities. In small states and republics the difficulty of obtaining a general sanction to frank their honours to any distance from the place where they are given is still greater; yet it is in such places that, through fortunate coincidents, an academy sometimes acquires a widespread reputation and influence. To what eminence the universities in the United States are destined who shall predict? yet, in the estimate of many, they have no right to be called universities at all; and of the doctors’ degrees which they freely distribute in this country, much doubt is entertained of the genuineness. Yet if it would be difficult to lay down how it is that these American institutions have acquired any power to grant degrees—that is to say, the power not only to confer prizes and rewards among their own alumni, but to invest them with insignia of literary rank current for their value over the world—it would be equally difficult for any of the ancient universities in Protestant states to claim an exclusive right to such a power, since this could only be done through Papal authority. It will be said that there is just the same practical difficulty in this as in all other departments of human institutions, and especially those which, like rank, are transferable from country to country, so as to require and obtain an estimate of their value in each. It will be said that the exclusiveness which denies the Heidelberg Doctor of Philosophy a parallel with the LL.D. of Oxford is just the same as that which will by no means admit the count or baron who is deputy-assistant highways controller, as on a par with an earl or baron in the peerage of England. The Kammer Junker of Denmark is not looked on as a privy-councillor. The Sheriff of Mecca, the Sheriff of London, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh, are three totally different personages, and would feel very much puzzled how to act if they were to change places for a while. Some Eastern dignitaries—Baboo, Fudky, and the like, must occasionally puzzle even the adepts of Leadenhall. Nor are we without our instances near at hand. What is the Knight of Kerry, what the Captain of Clanranald, what The Chisholm—and how do the authorities at the Herald’s Office deal with them? Has not an Archbishop of York been suspected of imposture in a Scottish bank when he signed with the surname of Eborac; and have not our Scottish judges, with their strange-sounding peerage-titles, made mighty confusion in respectable English hotels, when my Lord Kames is so intimate with Mrs Home, and my Lord Auchinleck retires with Mrs Boswell? But admitting the confusion to be irremediable in the department of political and decorative rank, the absence of a uniform intellectual hierarchy is not the less to be regretted, while the great effort made to secure it in an early and