‘And yet what days were those, Parmenides, When we were young, when we could number friends, In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we joined your train, Ye sun-born virgins, on the road of truth! Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us, But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On single minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppressed our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eased, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again In the delightful commerce of the world.’ Bagehot has himself described, evidently from his own experience, the kind of life we lived in those days, in an article on Oxford Reform: ‘So, too, in youth, the real plastic energy is not in tutors, or lectures, or in books “got up,” but in Wordsworth and Shelley, in the books that all read because all like; in what all talk of because all are interested; in the argumentative walk or disputatious lounge; in the impact of young thought upon young thought, of fresh thought on fresh thought, of hot thought on hot thought; in mirth and refutation, in ridicule and laughter; for these are the free play of the natural mind, and these cannot be got without a college.’[2] The late Professor Sewell, when asked to give his pupils some clear conception of the old Greek Sophists, is said to have replied that he could not do this better than by referring them to the Professors of University College, London. I do not think there was much force in the sarcasm, for though Professor T. Hewitt Key, whose restless and ingenious mind led him many a wild dance after etymological Will-of-the-wisps—I remember, for instance, his cheerfully accepting the suggestion that ‘better’ and ‘bad’ (_melior_ and _malus_) came from the same root, and accounting for it by the probable disposition of hostile tribes to call everything bad which their enemies called good, and everything good which their enemies called bad—may have had in him much of the brilliance, and something also, perhaps, of the flightiness, of the old sophist, it would be hard to imagine men more severe in exposing pretentious conceits and dispelling dreams of theoretic omniscience, than Professors De Morgan, Malden, and Long. De Morgan, who at that time was in the midst of his controversy on formal logic with Sir William Hamilton, was, indeed, characterised by the great Edinburgh metaphysician as ‘profound in mathematics, curious in logic, but wholly deficient in architectonic power;’ yet, for all that, his lectures on the Theory of Limits were a far better logical discipline for young men than Sir William Hamilton’s on the Law of the Unconditioned or the Quantification of the Predicate. Professor Malden contrived to imbue us with a love of that fastidious taste and that exquisite nicety in treating questions of scholarship,