"I have started on above, having engaged a private coach. I had 430 answers to my application. My choice fell on a gentleman named Minshull, a Peterhouse man who dwells in the vicinity. He took his degree only last year and expects to enter the Church shortly. He comes every morning at nine o'clock and we work till one. He lunches with me, after which we take a walk in the Park or elsewhere, returning for tea and another two hours' work. Then Minshull leaves me, and after a light dinner I do preparation for him for another two hours and then to bed. On Saturday we knock off at one, and I generally take an outing with Mrs. Higginbotham, who wishes to be kindly remembered to you. She takes a great interest in my enterprise, and refreshes her memory and mine during our little jaunts by getting me to repeat to her without book such things as I have learnt during the week as come within the limits of the curriculum to which she applied herself during girlhood. The subjects themselves are hardly such as in my judgment repay the amount of study necessary to master them. What with the growing competition in commercial life, and the great influx of foreigners--Germans and others--it seems to me waste of time to devote three valuable years of a young man's life in getting up the opinions of a man like Plato, who lived so many years ago that his ideas are by no means up-to-date. Or take a poet like Virgil again--if Virgil can be justly called a poet. Compare his thoughts with those of our own immortal Shakespeare--the Swan of Avon--or even with Macaulay's _Lays of Ancient Rome_, if you _must_ have matters of ancient history treated in poetry. And what is the use of puzzling over the Acts of the Apostles in the Original Greek, when that book, as well as the rest of the New Testament, has been so admirably translated in the Revised Version? What the authorities of our Universities entirely fail to grasp is that Latin and Greek _are not spoken nowadays_. How much better young men would be fitted for the business of life if they were trained to speak and write French and German fluently! This is so obvious to a man of experience that I seriously thought of writing to the Chancellor of the University, the Duke of Devonshire, and laying my views before him, but Minshull dissuaded me, saying that I should be in a better position to bring to bear any influence I might possess after I have taken my degree, which is perfectly true. But the truth of it is there are too many old women at the head of the Universities. What you want are keen-headed men, men of experience in the world, who would move with the times, and get Oxford and Cambridge to move with them. I am so convinced I am right in this opinion, that if it were not for the cares of business, to which I must return when I have finished with Cambridge, I should apply for a Trinity fellowship after I have taken my degree, and try to infuse a little spirit into the counsels of the