have been demanded of you range themselves under two categories, according as they bind you to duties to yourselves, and duties to others, and they are conformable to the aim of the State in the foundation of this and of other kindred institutions. To secure to yourselves the intellectual benefit resulting from education, you must necessarily cultivate many faculties which serve the larger purpose of rendering you useful citizens, and enabling you to benefit your fellow-men. Although I know that the first impulse of many a student, when he has completed the educational test, for which he proposes to offer himself, is to say as Prospero said,
' Deeper than did ever plummet sound I'll drown my books.'
I also know that, when the thirst for knowledge has been excited, and the irksomeness of compulsory study withdrawn, there are few who do not feel,
' He that made us with such large disoonrse Looking before and after, gave us not That capacity and god-like reason To fust in us unused.'
It is not, I believe, a rare experience that the student applies himself more diligently to study after he has completed the course for his degree, than he did before, and if I did not fear you might find some difficulty in mastering the peculiarity of his diction, I should recommend you to give some of your leisure to the study of the writings of a great man, who has lately passed to his rest. It is somewhat difficult to assign to Thomas Carlyle his just place in literature. He was an idealistic philosopher, but it is said his philosophy does not admit of systematic exposition, and I believe it to have been imperfect, because he did not fully accept the only possible solution of the phenomena he observed. He was a poet deeply touched with the beautiful in nature, but using this power and sense only to illustrate and enforce his philosophy. He was a minute investigator of the facts of history, but wanting the impartial judgment of a true historian. Preeminently he was a moralist, he employed his vast and varied gifts of thought and expression, his humour, irony and pathos to inculcate truths he felt to be eternal, and insist on the practice of virtues of which it seemed to him the nation needed urgently to be reminded. It is an often mooted question how far great men are formed by the age in which they live, and how far they form their age. They cannot be insensible to the influences which surround their youths ; and those influences, if of a national character, must be operating at the same time
