The gowns in the court clothe the learned and the unlearned, and make a present of as brave an academic appearance to the rowdiest of non-readers as to the future senior wrangler. The academic year is divided into 3 terms of 8 or 9 weeks each: half the year only is therefore passed at Cambridge. For serious study the intervals are too long and the ‘long vacation term’ has become the reading man’s term _par excellence_; all the colleges are then half full, the numbers being swelled by the medical students. The multiplication of extra-collegiate scholarships has not told all one way. Parents who used to make sacrifices to send a son to the university now count upon a scholarship, with the result that on the principle of ‘light come light go’ less use is made of opportunities. The university authorities look to the “advanced students” (of whom there are now 60 or 70 in residence) who are staying up for research work or come from other universities, for solid academic achievement. [Sidenote: Class from which the academic population has been drawn.] There is no more interesting enquiry connected with our subject than that concerning the classes from which the academic population has been recruited at different epochs, and the careers for which the university has fitted its members. The Church has always remained the most constant client of academic advantages: it was the churchmen who on the decline of the monasteries and when the universities were established as learned corporations, exchanged the cloister for the college education. The dissolution of the monasteries and the breach with Rome left the universities as the only representatives of the faculty of theology; and during the last century, especially, if a man were destined for the Church he went--_ipso facto_--to Cambridge or Oxford even though he were the only member of his family to do so. In the xv as in the xvi centuries it was chiefly men destined for the faculties of theology and law who frequented the universities, and then, as always in their history, the poorest scholar lived side by side with the youth of family and influence.