The lawyers, perhaps, have gone in equal proportions to a university or to one of the Inns of Court; many have gone to both. The great change to be observed is as regards students of the third faculty, medicine. In the xix century the doctor and the tradesman’s son did not go to a university; but this century, as we have seen, has already been marked by the enormous accession of medical students at Cambridge. The gradual growth of a powerful middle class resulted in the later xvi century in filling the universities with the sons not only of the older yeomanry of our shires but of the new Merchant Adventurers, often themselves men of gentle blood and coat armour. It is perhaps from this century that the idea began to prevail that an academic education was the proper education of a gentleman. Of this century it was true as it had been true of no other that “the civil life of all English gentlemen” is begun at Oxford or Cambridge. Statesmen and ministers, the political and the diplomatic careers, were recruited at the universities, and university-trained canonists and lawyers like Cranmer and More, and churchmen like Wolsey and Gardiner were chosen to be the ambassadors and secretaries of state. Ascham complains to Cranmer that sons of rich men “who sought only superficial knowledge” and “to qualify themselves for some place in the State” overran the university, and both universities soon became, in Macaulay’s words, the training ground not only of all the eminent clergy, lawyers, physicians, poets, and orators, but of a large proportion of the “nobility and opulent gentry” of the country. In England men belonging to what have, hitherto, been the governing classes have always sought advantages which would doubtless be less apparent in countries where nobility and gentry are synonyms and where government is not carried on by means of two such institutions as the House of Commons and the House of Lords. A _noblesse_ which gives no scions to the professions or to a representative chamber has seldom sought academic distinction. The man destined for parliament for the diplomatic service and the government office--occupations which an acute American observer has said are chosen by Englishmen as the business of their lives “without studying any other profession”[374]--prepared himself in no other way than by three or four years spent at the university, with or without graduating there. It was not however till the nineteenth century opened that the distinctively aristocratic trend of a university was defined. Throughout that century the university was _par excellence_ the seminary of the English gentleman, and the parson. A few bankers’ sons might be put into their fathers’ counting houses, a few government officials might place their sons at an early age in a government office, but the exception only proved the rule. [Sidenote: Examples.] [Sidenote: xvi c.] [Sidenote: xvii c.]