institution to confer degrees, twice received the
sign manual of the Crown, and each time was
stayed, at the last stage of passing the great
seal, by memorials from Oxford and Cambridge.
There was, in fact, a five years' battle on the
subject. King's College, founded in connexion
with the Church and under the shadow of the
ancient universities, desired no power of
conferring degrees, but referred those of its students
who needed them to Oxford and Cambridge.

At the beginning of the year eighteen
hundred and thirty-six, government had been
proposing to found a distinct Board of Examiners,
who were to represent impartially the University
of London as a degree-conferring power.
There was much question whether this body
should admit to competition for its degrees
"candidates from all parts of the United Kingdom,
and from every seminary of education,
whether chartered or unincorporated," or whether
degrees in Arts should in the first instance be
granted only to students of the two colleges we
have named, with power reserved to the Crown
to admit to the same privileges any other
institution. The degrees in medicine were to be
open to the students in all well-appointed
medical schools. It was in accordance with the
last-named plan that, in the seventh year of the
reign of William the Fourth, the first charter
was given to that body which is now known as
the University of London. The institution in
Gower-street gave up its name, and thenceforth
became University College.

The present University of London, thus
established, fulfils on an enlarged scale the intentions
of those liberal statesmen and scholars by whom
the establishment in Gower-street was planned
and founded. The principle on which they based
their labour, had been, for half a dozen years, hotly
contested, and during that period the name of
"London University," which they had given to
their institution, had been incessantly before the
public in connexion with it. When the contested
points were settled by the founding of a separate
degree-conferring body, and when the teachers
in Gower-street gave up to that body the name
of University, under which they had worked
themselves, taking in exchange for it the name
which was proper to them of a College, there
was peace established. The public heard little
more about the matter, and a large part of the
public, not having occasion to make active
inquiry, has so far preserved the old impression of
things as, even at this day, to confound University
College with the University of London:
though the names have meant two perfectly
distinct things throughout all the years of the
reign of Queen Victoria.

This journal is not the place for a minute
detail of the steps by which the University of
London has advanced to the position it now
holds. Our purpose is, to show what part it
has been playing in the story of our day, what
it has achieved, and what its meaning is. Its
powers were enlarged by a supplemental charter
after the first dozen years of its existence. King's
College and University College were then less
exclusively considered its affiliated colleges.
Many colleges in various parts of England
trained students for its degrees. Last year, the
charter was again revised, and again every
change tended to increase the value of the
people's university. The new charter is so
worded that, in fact, every hard worker who
can prove his competence, may come for a degree
to the University of London; and there is
allowed to graduates in convocation, a free voice
in its affairs as well as the right of appointing
certain men of their own choice to assist in its
government as members of the senate. In the
same spirit, the University of France, which ten
or eleven years ago was limited to a certain set
of lyceums and ex-colleges, now includes none but
the ignorant who come for its certificate of
knowledge. Perhaps, also, there will be found
no better solution of a certain Catholic difficulty
than to throw open in the same manner to
students of all schools and creeds the Queen's
University in Ireland.

The Oxford don may smile over his old port
at an university that will extend her hand and
offer a firm grip even to the young shoemaker
who studies in his garret. He may feel a little
scornful of an university that, to the poor as to
the rich, gives to the man with few
opportunities, as to the man with many, a free
chance of obtaining, at the cost of hard toil
and years of self-denial, the name and rank
of a scholar. That is not the way of our old
universities; but, of the universities of old,
that was the way. If a scholar of the sixteenth
century, to whom the universities were all in all,
were to come back to earth and travel into
England for the sake of posting up his knowledge to
the latest date, and carrying back to Hades a
trustworthy certificate that he had done so—in
which of our towns would he find the men
foremost in every science, teaching it publicly and
demonstrating it to the utmost by experiment?
Where would he get the opportunity of putting
his wits to the surest trial for the sake of satisfying
men on earth, or ghosts below, and specially
himself, that he had really mastered fairly what
he came to learn? If that knowledge-devouring
old doctor, Cardan, were to come up for a second
course of study, would he ask for the renewal of
his degree of physician, from the University of
Oxford, or the University of London? Revive
and bring among us all the old thirsters after
knowledge who lived in the heyday of the true
university system, and where would they be?
As they used, poor and rich, to crowd, for law to
Alciat at Bourges; or to demand that Vesalius
should be professor of anatomy in three or four
places at once; always athirst for the latest and
the amplest knowledge of all kinds; so, we should
find them here in London haunting the dissecting-
rooms, following our great physicians round
the hospitals, flitting about the Kew Botanic
Gardens, attentive to their scientific studies at
the School of Mines in Jermyn-street, following
that chemist and this physiologist, while they
rubbed up their classics by reading authors who
had been unearthed since their own departure from