students dined in common hall. He was a fellow student of Dr. Chalmers, and only a few years ago Tom Chalmers’ room within St. Salvator’s College was shown to visitors, while the janitor, with a peculiar chuckle, described the wild pranks in which the youthful divine employed his leisure moments, to the terror of the townspeople. This state of things, although so recent, is almost forgotten in Scotland. There is no such thing as opposition between town and gown. In Edinburgh, indeed, there is no gown—no badge of studentship whatever. Worse than this, the student, after he has gone through his academical course, has nothing further to do with the university. Why should he take a degree? It is a bootless honour. It gives him no privileges. A.M. after a man’s name on a title-page may look very pretty, but who is going to write books? “Not I,” says the student; “and why should I run the chance of a pluck, besides going to the expense of the fees, when the certainty of success can bring me no advantage?”[27] Thus the bond between the student and the university, has been weakened to the utmost. What else are we to expect, when a great university, with all its venerable associations, is planned on the model of a day-school? In Scotland all schools are day-schools, from the very highest to the very lowest. The parental and domestic influence is esteemed so much, that no boy is allowed to escape from it, and the young man is kept under it as long as possible. The boy who is at school all day returns home in the evening to be kissed by his mamma and to be questioned by his papa. The student who has all the morning been dissecting dead bodies or devouring dissertations on the Epistles of Phalaris, returns to dine with his sisters and to kneel down at evening prayer with his grey-haired sire. The system has its advantages (filial reverence, for example, being much stronger in Scotland than it is in England, just as in England it is much stronger than in America, where early independence is the ideal of life)—but the advantages are purchased at the cost of the student life, and ultimately at the cost of the university. Alas! for the university which does not make its students feel that they are sons, which does not nurse the corporate feeling, which loses its hold on the students after they have gone into the world! It is mainly through neglect of this kind that the Scottish universities have drooped in public esteem. The education afforded is not poor, and the examinations are not easy, as some imagine, going quite off the scent, in their endeavour to account for such a falling-off. The real reason is, that men leaving the university are cut adrift; they are not associated with it in any way; they forget it; they are in no way called upon to support it. Not so in England. In Pall Mall we have two clubs, which clearly enough illustrate the abiding influence of Oxford and Cambridge upon their graduates, an