The term _University_, in its original acceptation, was used to designate any aggregate of _persons_ associated in a political, religious, or trading corporation, having common interests, common privileges, and common property. The inhabitants of a town, the members of a fraternity, the brethren of a guild, the monks or canons of a religious house, when addressed in formal instruments, were addressed as a _University_. Nay! when the whole body of the faithful is appealed to as Christian men, the ordinary phrase made use of by lay or ecclesiastical potentate, when signifying his wishes or intentions, is "Noverit _Universitas_ vestra." A University in this sense, regarded as an aggregate of persons, might be localized or it might not; its members might be scattered over the whole Christian world, or they might constitute an inner circle of some larger community, of which they--though a _Universitas_--formed but a part. A University in its original signification meant no more than our modern term an Association. When men associated together for purposes of trade, they were a trading _Universitas_; when they associated for religious objects, they were a religious _Universitas_; when they associated for the promotion of learning, they were a learned _Universitas_. But the men came first, the bricks and mortar followed long after. The architectural history, in its merely technical and professional details, could only start at a point where the University, as an association of scholars and students, had already acquired power and influence, had been at work for long, and had got to make itself felt as a living force in the body politic and in the national life. It was because the antiquaries of a former age lost sight of this truth that they indulged in the extravagances they did. Starting from the assumption that stonewalls make an institution, they professed to tell when the Universities came into existence and who were their earliest founders. The authors of this modern _Magnum Opus_ have set themselves to deal with a far more instructive problem. Their object has been to trace the growth of the University of to-day in its concrete form, down from the early times when it existed only in the germ; and to show us how "the glorious fellowship of living men," which constituted the _personal_ University of the eleventh or the twelfth century, developed by slow degrees into the brick-and-mortar Universities of the nineteenth--such Universities as are springing up all over the world; their teachers advertised for in _The Times_, and their students tempted to come and be taught in them by the bait of money rewards. * * * * * * *