For those who know the history of the ancient universities of England, it is not difficult to find out why they should have been less inclined than their continental sisters to make timely provision for the encouragement of these and other important branches of linguistic research. Oxford and Cambridge, as independent corporations, withdrawn alike from the support and from the control of the state, have always looked upon the instruction of the youth of England as their proper work; and nowhere has the tradition of classical learning been handed down more faithfully from one generation to another than in England; nowhere has its generous spirit more thoroughly pervaded the minds of statesmen, poet, artists, and moulded the character of that large and important class of independent and cultivated men, without which this country would cease to be what it has been for the last two centuries, a _res publica_, a commonwealth, in the best sense of the word. Oxford and Cambridge have supplied what England expected or demanded, and as English parents did not send their sons to learn Chinese or to study Cornish, there was naturally no supply where there was no demand. The professorial element in the university, the true representative of higher learning and independent research, withered away; the tutorial assumed the vastest proportions during this and the last centuries. But looking back to the earlier history of the English universities, I believe it is a mistake to suppose that Oxford, one of the most celebrated universities during the Middle Ages and in the modern history of Europe, could ever have ignored the duty, so fully recognized by other European universities, of not only handing down intact, and laid up, as it were, in a napkin, the traditional stock of human knowledge, but of constantly adding to it, and increasing it fivefold and tenfold. Nay, unless I am much mistaken, there was really no university in which more ample provision had been made by founders and benefactors than at Oxford, for the support and encouragement of a class of students who should follow up new lines of study, devote their energies to work which, from its very nature, could not be lucrative or even self-supporting, and maintain the fame of English learning, English industry, and English genius in that great and time-honoured republic of learning which claims the allegiance of the whole of Europe, nay, of the whole civilized world. That work at Oxford and Cambridge was meant to be done by the Fellows of Colleges. In times, no doubt, when every kind of learning was in the hands of the clergy, these fellowships might seem to have been intended exclusively for the support of theological students. But when other studies, once mere germs and shoots on the tree of knowledge, separated from the old stem and assumed an independent growth, whether under the name of natural science, or history, or scholarship, or jurisprudence, a fair division ought to have been made