"King Lear," 'certain specified works'--and so on, with other courses of study. Why is this done? Be fair to us, Gentlemen. We do it not only to accommodate the burden to your backs, to avoid overtaxing one-and-a-half or two years of study; not merely to guide you that you do not dissipate your reading, that you shall --with us, at any rate--know where you are. We do it chiefly, and honestly--you likewise being honest--to give you each year, in each prescribed course, a sound nucleus of knowledge, out of which, later, your minds can reach to more. We are not, in the last instance, praiseworthy or blameworthy for your range. I think, perhaps, too little of a man's _range_ in his short while here between (say) nineteen and twenty-two. For anything I care, the kernel may be as small as you please. To plant it wholesome, for a while to tend it wholesome, then to show it the sky and that it is wide--not a hot-house, nor a brassy cupola over a man, but an atmosphere shining up league on league; to reach the moment of saying 'All this now is yours, if you have the perseverance as I have taught you the power, _coelum nactus es, hoc exorna_': this, even in our present Tripos, we endeavour to do. III All very well. But, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning asked, Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers? 'Yes,' I hear you ingeminate; 'but what about Examinations? We thank you, sirs, for thus relieving and guiding us: we acknowledge your excellent intentions. But in practice you hang up a bachelor's gown and hood on a pole, and right under and just in front of it you set the examination-barrier. For this in practice we run during three years or so, and to this all the time you are exhorting, directing us--whether you mean it or not, though we suspect that you cannot help yourselves.' Yes; and, as labouring swimmers will turn their eyes even to a little boat in the offing, I hear you pant 'This man at all events--always so insistent that good literature teaches _What Is_ rather than _What Knows_--will bring word that we may float on our backs, bathe, enjoy these waters and be refreshed, instead of striving through them competitive for a goal. He _must_ condemn literary examinations, nine-tenths of which treat Literature as matter of Knowledge merely.' IV I am sorry, Gentlemen: I cannot bring you so much of comfort as all that. I have a love of the past which, because it goes down to the roots, has sometimes been called Radicalism: I could never consent with Bacon's gibe at antiquity as _pessimum augurium,_ and Examinations have a very respectable antiquity. Indeed no University to my knowledge has ever been able in the long run to do without them: and although certain Colleges--King's College here, and New College at Oxford--for long persevered in the attempt, the result was not altogether happy, and in the end they have consigned with custom.