Faculty of Paris. During the latter half of the fifteenth century, the famous Colleges," or those "of complete exercise," (cc. magna celebria, famosa, famata, de plein exercise,) in the Faculty of Arts, amounted to eighteen-a number which, before the middle of the seventeenth, had been reduced to ten. About eighty others, (cc. parva, non celebria,) of which above a half still subsisted in the eighteenth century, taught either only the subordinate branches of the faculty, (grammar and rhetoric,) and this only to those on the foundation, or merely afforded habitation and stipend to their bursars, now admitted to education in all the larger colleges, with the illustrious exception of Navarre. The Rue de la Fouarre, (vicus stramineus,) which contained the schools belonging to the different nations of the faculty, and to which the lectures in philosophy had been once exclusively confined, became less and less frequented; until at last the public chair of Ethics, long perpetuated by an endowment, alone remained; and "the street" would have been wholly abandoned by the university, had not the acts of Determination, the forms of Inceptorship, and the Examinations of some of the nations, still connected the faculty of Arts with this venerable site. The colleges of full exercise in this faculty continued to combine the objects of a classical school and university; for, besides the art of grammar laught in six or seven classes of humanity or ancient literature, they supplied courses of rhetoric, logic, metaphysics, physics, mathematics, and morals; the several subjects taught by different professors. A free competition was thus maintained between the Colleges; the principals had every inducement to appoint only the most able teachers; and the emoluments of the rival professors (who were not astricted to celibacy) depended mainly on their fees. A blind munificence quenched this useful emulation. In the year 1719, fixed salaries and retiring pensions were assigned by the crown to the college regents; the lieges at large now obtained the gratuitous instruction which the poor had always enjoyed, but the University gradually declined. After Paris, no continental University was more affected in its fundamental faculty by the collegial system than Louvain. Originally, as in Paris, and the other Universities of the Parisian model, the lectures in the Faculty of Arts were exclusively delivered by the regents in vico, or in the general schools, to each of whom a certain subject of philosophy, and a certain hour of teaching, was assigned. Colleges were founded; and in some of these, during the fifteenth century, particular schools were established. The regents in these colleges were not disowned by the faculty, to whose control they were subjected. Here, as in Paris, the lectures by the regents in vico gradually declined, till at last the three public professorships of Ethics, Rhetoric, and Mathematics, perpetuated by endowment, were in the seventeenth century the only classes that remained open in the halls of the Faculty of Arts, in which, besides other exercises, the Quodlibetic Disputations were still annually performed. The general tuition of that faculty was conducted in four rival colleges of full exercise, or paedogogia, as they were denominated, in contradistinction to the other colleges, intended less for the education than for the habitation and aliment of youth during their studies. These last, which amounted to above thirty, sent their bursars for education to the four privileged Colleges of the Faculty; to one or other of which these minor establishments were in general astricted. In the paedegogia, with the single exception of the Collegium Porci, Philosophy alone was taught, and this under the fourfold division of Logic, Physics, Metaphysics, and Morals, by four ordinary professors and a prin

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cipal. Instruction in the Literæ Humaniores was, in the seventeenth century, discontinued in the other three (cc. Castri, Lilii, Falconis;the earlier institution in this department being afforded by the oppidan schools then every where established; the higher by the Collegium Gandense; and the highest by the three professors of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew literature, in the Collegium trilingue, founded in 1517, by Hieronymus Buslidius a memorable institution, imitated by Francis I. in Paris, by Fox and Wolsey in Oxford, and by Ximenes in Alcala de Henares. In the paedagogia; the discipline was rigorous; the diligence of the teachers admirably sustained by the rivalry of the different Houses; and the emulation of the students, roused by daily competition in their several classes and colleges, was powerfully directed towards the great general contest, in which all the candidates for a degree in arts from the different paedagogia were brought into concourse-publicly and minutely tried by sworn examinators-and finally arranged with rigorous impartiality in the strict order of merit. This competition for academical honours, long the peculiar glory of Louvain, is only to be paralleled by the present examinations in the English Universities;* we may explain the former when we come to speak of the latter.

In Germany collegial establishments did not obtain the same preponderance as in the Netherlands and France. In the older universities of the empire, the academical system was not essentially modified by these institutions; and in the universities founded after the commencement of the sixteenth century, they were rarely called into existence. In Prague, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Erfurth, Leipsic, Rostoch, Ingolstadt, Tubingen, etc. we find conventual establishments for the habitation, aliment, and superintendence of youth; but these, always subsidiary to the public system, were rarely able, after the revival of letters, to maintain their importance even in this subordinate capacity.

In Germany, the name of College was usually applied to foundations destined principally for the residence and support of the academical teachers; the name of Bursa was given to houses inhabited by students, under the superintendence of a graduate in arts. In the colleges, which were comparatively rare, if scholars were admitted at all, they received free lodging or free board, but not free domestic tuition; they were bound to be diligent in attendance on the lectures of the public readers in the University; and the governors of the house were enjoined to see that this obligation was faithfully performed. The Bursa, which corresponded to the ancient halls of Oxford and Cambridge, prevailed in all the older Universities of Germany. They were either benevolent foundations for the reception of a certain class of favoured students, who had sometimes also a small exhibition for their support (bb. private), or houses licensed by the Faculty of Arts, to whom they exclusively belonged, in which the students admitted were bound to a certain stated contribution (positio) to a common exchequer (bursa-hence the name), and to obedience to the laws by which the discipline of the establishment was regulated (bb. communes). Of these varieties, the second was in general engrafted on the first. Every bursa was governed by a gra duate (rector, conventor); and, in the larger institutions, under him, by his delegate (corrector) or assistants (magistri conventores). In most Univer sities it was enjoined that every regular student in the Faculty of Arts should enrol himself of a burse; but the burse was also frequently inhabited by

We suspect that the present Cambridge scheme of examination and honours was a direct imitation of that of Louvain. The similarity in certain points seems too precise to be accidental

masters engaged in public lecturing in their own, or in following the courses of a higher faculty. To the duty of rector belonged a general superintendence of the diligence and moral conduct of the inferior members, and (in the larger bursæ, with the aid of a procurator or œconomus) the management of the funds destined for the maintenance of the house. As in the colleges of France and England, he could enforce discipline by the infliction of corporeal punishment. Domestic instruction was generally introduced into these establishments, but, as we said, only in subservience to the public. The rector, either by himself or deputies, repeated with his bursars their public lessons, resolved difficulties they might propose, supplied deficiencies in their knowledge, and moderated at the performance of their private disputations.

The philosophical controversies which, during the middle ages, divided the universities of Europe into hostile parties, were waged with peculiar activity among a people, like the Germans, actuated, more than any other, by speculative opinion and the spirit of sect. The famous question touching the nature of Universals, which created a schism in the University of Prague, and thus founded the University of Leipsic, which formally separated into two, the faculty of arts in Ingolstadt, Tubingen, etc., and occasioned a ceaseless warfare in the other schools of philosophy throughout the empire, -this question modified the German bursæ in a far more decisive manner than it affected the colleges in the other countries of Europe. The Nominalists and Realists withdrew themselves into different bursæ; whence, as from opposite castles, they daily descended to renew their clamorous, and notalways bloodless, contests, in the arena of the public schools. In this manner the bursæ of Ingolstadt, Tubingen, Heidelberg, Erfurth, and other universities, were divided between the partisans of the Via Antiquorum, and the partisans of the Via Modernorum; and in some of the greater schools the several sects of Realism-the Albertists, Thomists, Scotists-had bursæ of their "peculiar process."

The effect of this was to place these institutions more absolutely under that scholastic influence which swayed the faculties of arts and theology; and however adverse were the different sects, when a common enemy was at a distance, no sooner was the reign of scholasticism threatened by the revival of polite letters, than their particular dissensions were merged in a general resistance to the novelty equally obnoxious to all-a resistance which, if it did not succeed in obtaining the absolute proscription of classical literature in the Universities, succeeded, at least, in excluding it from the course prescribed for the degree in arts, and from the studies authorized in the bursa, of which that faculty had universally the control. In their relations to the revival of ancient learning, the bursæ of Germany, and the colleges of France and England, were directly opposed; and to this contrast is, in part, to be attributed the difference of their fate. The colleges, indeed, mainly owed their stability-in England to their wealth-in France to their coalition with the University. But in harbouring the rising literature, and rendering themselves instrumental to its progress, the colleges seemed anew to vindicate their utility, and remained, during the revolutionary crisis at least, in unison with the spirit of the age. The bursa, on the contrary, fell at once into contempt with the antiquated learning which they defended; and before they were disposed to transfer their allegiance to the dominant literature, other instruments had been organized, and circum

stances had superseded their necessity. The philosophical faculty to which they belonged had lost, by its opposition to the admission of humane letters into its course, the consideration it formerly obtained; and in the Protestant Universities a degree in arts was no longer required as a necessary passport to the other faculties. The Gymnasia, established or multiplied on the Reformation throughout Protestant Germany, sent the youth to the universities with sounder studies and at a maturer age; and the public prelections, no longer intrusted to the fortuitous competence of the graduates, were discharged, in chief, by professors carefully selected for their merit,-rewarded in exact proportion to their individual value in the literary market, --and stimulated to exertion by a competition unexampled in the academical arrangements of any other country. The discipline of the bursa was now found less useful in aid of the University, and the student less disposed to submit to their restraint. No wealthy foundations perpetuated their existence independently of use; and their services being found too small to warrant their maintenance by compulsory regulations, they were in general abandoned.

:

In the English Universities, the history of the collegial clement has been very different nowhere did it deserve to exercise so small an influence; nowhere has it exercised so great. The colleges of the continental Universities were no hospitals for drones; their foundations were exclusively in favour of teachers and learners; the former, whose number was determined by their necessity, enjoyed their stipend under the condition of instruction; and the latter, only during the period of their academical studies. In the English colleges, on the contrary, the fellowships, with hardly an exception, are perpetual, not burdened with tuition, and indefinite in number. In the foreign colleges, the instructors were chosen from competence. In those of England, but especially in Oxford, the fellows in general owe their election to chance. Abroad, as the colleges were visited, superintended, and reformed by their faculty, their lectures were acknowledged by the University as public courses, and the lecturers themselves at last recognised as its privileged professors. In England, as the University did not exercise the right of visitation over the colleges, their discipline was viewed as private and subsidiary; while the fellow was never recognised as a public character at all, far less as a privileged instructor. In Paris and Louvain, the college discipline superseded only the precarious lectures of the graduates at large. In Oxford and Cambridge it was an improved and improvable system of professorial education that the tutorial extinguished. In the foreign Universities the right of academical instruction was deputed to a limited number of famous colleges," and in these only to a full body of co-operative teachers. In Oxford all academical education is usurped, not only by every house, but by every fellow-tutor it contains. The alliance between the Colleges and University in Paris and Louvain was, in the circumstances,

* In Paris (1562) the celebrated Ramus proposed a judicious plan of reform for the Faculty of Arts. He disapproved of the lectures on philosophy established in the colleges, and was desirous of restoring these to the footing of the public courses delivered for so many centuries in the Rue de la Fouarre, and only suspended a few years previously; and that eight accredited professors should there teach the different branches of mathematics, physics, and morals, while the colleges should retain only instruction in grammar, rhetoric, and logic. This was to bring matters towards the very statutory constitution subverted in the English Universities by the colleges, and which, with all its imperfections, was even more complete than that proposed by Ramus, as an improvement on a collegial mechanism of tuition, perfection itself, in comparison to the intrusive system of Oxford.

perhaps a rational improvement,-the dethronement of the University by the Colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, without doubt, a preposterous revolution.

It was the very peculiarity in the constitution of the English colleges which disqualified them, above all similar incorporations, even for the lower offices of academical instruction, that enabled them in the end to engross the very highest; and it only requires an acquaintance with the history of the two Universities, to explain how a revolution so improbable in itself, and so disastrous in its effects, was, by the accident of circumstances, and the influence of private interest, accomplished. "Reduce," says Bacon, "things to their first institution, and observe how they have degenerated." This explanation, limited to Oxford, will be given by showing, 1. How the students, once distributed in numerous small societies through the halls, were at length collected into a few large communities within the colleges; 2. How in the colleges, thus the penfolds of the academical flock, the fellows frustrated the common right of graduates to the office of tutor; and, 3. How the fellow-tutors supplanted the professors-how the colleges superseded the University.

1. In the mode of teaching-in the subjects taught in the forms of graduation, and in the general mechanism of the faculties, no Universities for a long time resembled each other more closely than the first and second schools of the church, Paris and Oxford; but in the constitution and civil polity of the bodies there were, from the first, considerable differences. In Oxford, the University was not originally established on the distinction of Nations; though, in the sequel, the great national schism of the northern and southern men had almost determined a division similar to that which prevailed from the first in the other ancient Universities.* In Oxford, the chancellor and his deputy combined the powers of the rector and the two chancellors in Paris; and the inspection and control, chiefly exercised in the latter, through the distribution of the scholars of the University into nations and tribes, under the government of rector, procurators, and deans, was in the former more especially accomplished by collecting the students into certain privileged houses, under the control of a principal, responsible for the conduct of the members. This subordination was not indeed established at once; and the scholars at first lodged, without domestic superintendence, in the houses of the citizens. In the year 1231, we find it only ordained, "that every clerk or scholar resident in Oxford must subject himself to the discipline and tuition of some master of the schools," i. e., we presume, enter himself as the peculiar, disciple of one or other of the actual regents. (Wood's Annals, a. c.) By the commencement of the fifteenth century, it appears, however, to have become established law, that all scholars should be members of some college, hall, or entry, under a responsible head (Wood, a. 1408); and in the subsequent history of the university, we find more frequent and decisive measures taken in Oxford against the Chamberdekyns, or scholars haunting the schools, but of no authorized house, than in Paris were ever employed against the Martinets. (Wood, aa. 1413, 1422, 1512, etc.) In the foreign Universities it was never incumbent on

Matters went so far, that as, in Paris, each of the four nations elected its own procurator, so, in Oxford (what is not mentioned by Wood), the two proctors (procuratores) were necessarily chosen, one from the northern, the other from the southern men; also the two scrutators, anciently distinct (?) from the proctors.