"A university," said Lowell, "is a place where nothing useful is taught." By utility Lowell undoubtedly meant, to use the definition which Huxley puts into the average Englishman's mouth, "that by which we get pudding or praise or both." A natural reply to the statement of Lowell is that great numbers of fathers every year, at a pecuniary sacrifice, send their sons to college with the idea of fitting them better to earn their living, in obedience to the general sentiment of men of this country that there is a money value to college training. But the remark of Lowell suggests another object of the University which, to use the words of Huxley again, is "to catch the exceptional people, the glorious sports of nature, and turn them to account for the good of society." This appeals to those imbued with the spirit of the academy who frankly acknowledge, in the main, our inferiority in the scholarship, which produces great works of literature and science, to England, Germany, and France, and who with patriotic eagerness wish that we may reach the height attained in the older countries. To recur to my own study again, should we produce a historian or historical writer the equal of Gibbon, Mommsen, Carlyle, or Macaulay there would be a feeling of pride in our historical genius which would make itself felt at every academical and historical gathering. We have something of that sentiment in regard to Francis Parkman, our most original historian. But it may be that the historical field of Parkman is too narrow to awaken a world-wide interest and I suspect that the American who will be recognized as the equal of Gibbon, Mommsen, Carlyle, or Macaulay must secure that recognition by writing of some period of European history better than the Englishman, German, or Frenchman has written of it. He must do it not only in the way of scientific history, in which in his field Henry Charles Lea has won so much honor for himself and his country, but he must bring to bear on his history that quality which has made the historical writings of Gibbon, Carlyle, and Macaulay literature. EDWARD GIBBON Lecture read at Harvard University, April 6, 1908, and printed in _Scribner's Magazine_, June, 1909. EDWARD GIBBON