Performers? It was impossible not to think of
this during the finer parts of the Te Deum and
the Judas Maccabæus; and one friend of the Eye-
witness who was present, and whose own
professional achievements have quickened his
imaginative faculties, declared that as he looked at
Handel's portrait, hanging in front of the
orchestra, it almost seemed to him that the
painted likeness started into life, and that the
hand was beating time.

That white perruque! What thoughts would
have passed through the head that it covered,
had its owner been present at the festival of
eighteen hundred and fifty-nine! Would that
head have been raised in joy and elation, or
would it have sunk forward, overpowered and
crushed down by emotion? Would the head
have triumphed or the heart? Surely the last.

And this, thought the Eye-witness—as once
again at the end of the day he stood where he
had stood at the beginning, by the side of the
old harpsichord—this is what it all came from!
On these wretched wires were tried the sounds
which since here they had their birth men have
paid away money by tens of thousands to hear.
At this instrument, too impatient to wait till he
could try it at the organ, the great composer
must have heard the first sounds of his own
Hallelujah, and of the Hymn of Adoration which
rang through this place to-day. At this instrument,
in his house in Brook-street, he must have
sat and played to many who thought that harpsichord
a mighty musical achievement, and who
admired the poor tinkling machine itself almost
as much as they worshipped him who played
upon it. And lastly, at this instrument, he must
have sat when old and blind (as he was for many
years), recalling ancient melodies and shaping
new ones, and wishing for yet more years of life
in which to put into form the many thoughts of
harmony which he could hear with his soul's
ear, and which descended upon it like sounds
from heaven.

THE ENGLISH PEOPLE'S UNIVERSITY.

A REPUBLIC of teachers and learners, having its
own laws, appointing its own ministers, and
conferring its own titles of honour, is the
essential idea of a university. Subject only
to the supreme law of the nation, it is a state
within a state, which, in the old days when
universities were most valued, knew nothing of
political boundaries, but received its citizens
from all countries of Europe, and recognised
within itself no dignity of count or duke but the
sole dignities of laurelled bachelor or doctor in
one or in all of the three faculties.

There was a time when this independent
constitution of the universities of Europe served
them as a breakwater against the flood and
storm of war. Sometimes there was a breach
made in it. When in the sixteenth
century the King of France fought with the
emperor from Vienna, as their several representatives
are at this day fighting in North Italy, the
tumult of strife caused study to cease in the
University of Pavia; but, in the main, the
universities were left to do their work for the advance,
or at least the maintenance, of scholarship. In
those days of rough weather for politics, when
the work-a-day business of the world was done
by men who counted themselves scholars if
they could write or read, it seemed that the
temple of the world's knowledge would have
been blown down and tossed into ruin if there
were not the universities to serve as props, and
catechisms to serve as pins, by which the walls
were to be kept from cracking. A crack was,
in the language of the schools, known as a schism,
and was, very naturally, dreaded. The simple
fact reads in our day like a mere caricature, but
it is simply a fact that the strong feeling of the
need of these aids to the maintenance of
knowledge once caused learned men to teach that
there must have been universities before the
Flood, because without them the human race
could not have been held together; and there
was a scholar who propounded in good faith
what he supposed to have been the chief points
of an antediluvian catechism.

It was always, and it still is, the highest duty
of an university to maintain all the tradition of
knowledge. Original speculation upon any
subject should begin where extant knowledge of
it ends. It is no part of the purpose of an
university to prosecute discoveries. Its duty is
to see that the men of each generation who
come under its discipline shall go into the world
as far as possible informed as to the state of
knowledge in their day, free to apply or enlarge
it as their wits may give them power.

A few centuries ago it was quite possible for
an attentive student to master in half a lifetime
the whole round of known literature and all the
sciences as far as they were understood. But
what was once a rather barren field of
knowledge has by this time become a fertile
continent. It is not in the power of one man,
although he had fifty lives, to see and measure
all that it contains. Therefore, the old days
of doctors ' utriusque juris'—doctors in
everything—are at an end. The doctor in one faculty
is master of the fullest knowledge in a part only
of that. A man may be a great classical
scholar, or a great physiologist, or a great
chemist; or a great master of one half of
chemistry, organic or inorganic, a perfect
mastery of both being beyond his grasp. In
other things he can be more or less well
informed, and may have profited by university
discipline, but he cannot have come up to the
true university standard, cannot be master of the
whole received tradition.

The natural position of the universities as the
maintainers of tradition, has often brought
them under censure. There is, under free
contact with life, a growth of spirit correspondent
with the growth of substance, in a science or an
art, as in a child. Call a child's nursery its
university, confine it there, cram it with meat
and with maxims: it may grow to be as tall as
other men, but yet, for want of active exercise, it