Trinity? Doubtless, the education provided in these ancient seminaries is of the very highest quality; but learning may be obtained elsewhere than at college. For that matter, indeed, most men are self-educated. What they acquire from a teacher is as nothing to what they acquire from their own researches. What a university or a great public school gives, that cannot be obtained elsewhere, is society—the society of equal minds. A boy is taken from under the parental wing, is sent to school and thrown upon his own resources. He can no longer sing out when he is worsted—“I’ll tell mamma;” he has to hold his own in a little world that is made up entirely of boys; he must learn independence; he must fight his way: he must study the arts of society before he has well laid aside his petticoats. So at college—it is in the clash of wit and the pulling of rival oars, it is in the public life and the social habit, it is in the free-and-easy measuring of man with man, that the chief value of a residence in the university lies. The system no doubt has its drawbacks. We must take the bad with the good; and no man who has had experience of it will deny that almost nothing in after life can make up for the want of that early discipline, which is to be obtained only in the rough usage of a school and the wild play of a university. Society, in these haunts, may exist chiefly in its barbaric elements, but they are elements that bring out the man; and the great glory of our universities is not so much that they make us scholars (though they have this also to boast of), as that they make us men.