dead against them, and they suffer for it in the end. They have very seldom been regularly educated, and when they go to college they devote much of that energy which ought to be given to their studies to earning their daily bread by teaching or by manual labour. Overworked and underfed, many of them go home, at the end of the session, shadows of their former selves, and death written in their faces—almost all of them have made acquaintance with disease. The number of men at the Scottish universities who run the course of Henry Kirke White is prodigious. Friends write their biographies; their college essays and school poems are published; their fellow-students are told to beware, and everybody takes an interest in their fate, about which a certain air of romance hangs. Year after year, however, one hears of so many cases that, at last, one becomes callous and feels inclined to ask—Why did not this young Kirke White remain in the butcher's shop? It would have been better for him to have slaughtered oxen, sold mutton-*chops, and ridden the little pony all his life, giving such leisure as he could really afford to books, than die in the vain endeavour to take the position of a gentleman and a clergyman. Most of these men, if they survive their period of study, go into the Church, and the result is that the Scottish clergy are notorious for their ill-health. How can it be otherwise? The fearful struggle which they have to maintain at college has to be kept up for eight long years before a licence to preach the Gospel can be obtained. Eight years of the university is an exorbitant demand, and it would be impossible to satisfy it, save, in the first place, by cheapening the course of study as much as possible, and secondly, by permitting the students to enter at a comparatively early age. The average age of students in Scotland is not less than in England; but if in the one country the ordinary course of study is extended over four years, while in the other it is limited to three, the freshmen must evidently in the former be a year younger than in the latter, in order to be of the same age at the time of graduating. If after graduating, another four years must be devoted to the Divinity Hall before one can have the chance of a living, it is clear that the student destined for the Church must begin his studies even earlier. He must, therefore, at the most critical period of his life, when most he requires physical strength, enter upon his suicidal course, and keep it up without intermission for eight long years. His only relief occurs in the vacation which fortunately for him lasts seven months. Then he recruits a little, while the student who went up to College better prepared both by previous education, and with the means of living, chafes at the delay, and longs for the introduction of a system, which, by the expedient of a summer session, would reduce the compulsory period of study, as in the English universities, to three years.
The effect of these arrangements on the student life may easily be conceived. A society formed on these conditions must evidently be a very mixed society; therefore, a society extremely suspicious of its members; therefore, also a society which has little cohesion and tends to
