When a man strikes out a new idea, he is not allowed to keep it to himself very long. The new idea soon gets taken up; sometimes it gets improved upon; sometimes very much the reverse. For a wise man acts upon a hint, and it germinates; a fool only half apprehends the meaning of a hint, and he displays his folly in producing a caricature. Hugh de Balsham seems to have aimed at improving upon Merton's original idea. He meant well, doubtless; but his college of Peterhouse, the first college in Cambridge, was a very poor copy of the Oxford foundation. Merton was a man of genius, a man of ideas; Balsham was a man of the cloister. Moreover, he was by no means so rich as his predecessor, and he did not live to carry out his scheme. The funds were insufficient. The first college at Cambridge was long in building. Cambridge, in fact, was very unfortunate. Somehow there was none of the dash and enthusiasm, none of the passion for progress, which characterized Oxford. Cambridge had no moral genius like Grosseteste to impress his strong personality upon the movement which the friars stirred, no commanding intellect like that of Roger Bacon to attract and dazzle and lead into quite new regions of thought the ardent and eager spirits who felt that a new era had begun; no Occam or Duns Scotus or Bradwardine; no John Wielif to kindle a new flame--say, rather, to take up the torch which had dropped from Bradwardine's hand, and continue the race which the others had run so well. What a grand succession of men it was! Five colleges had been founded at Oxford before a second arose at Cambridge. After that they followed in rapid succession, and the reign of Edward the Third had not come to an end when no fewer than seven colleges had been opened at Cambridge. Five of them have survived to our own days, and two were eventually absorbed by the larger foundation which Henry the Seventh was ambitious of raising, and which now stands forth in its grandeur, the most magnificent educational corporation in the world. * * * * * * * Where did all the money come from, not only to raise the original buildings in which the _University_, as a teaching body, pursued its work, but which also provided the _houses_ in which the _colleges_ of scholars lived and laboured?