Connexion of Cambridge founders and eminent men with the university: early Cambridge names—a group of great names in the xiii and xiv centuries—Cambridge men in the historical plays of Shakespeare—genealogical tables of founders—Cantabrigians from the xv century to the present day—Cambridge men who have taken no degree. (pp. 291-309.)
WHAT part is played by a university in the life of a people? This can only be gauged by its output of men, its influence on great movements, the trend and character of the learning it fosters and the opinions it encourages.
During the centuries in which the English universities have existed, the first degree of excellence has been reached in every department of human knowledge and activity by men whom no university can claim. Shakespeare, Bunyan, Hawkins, Raleigh, Drake, the Hoods, Howard of Effingham, Clive, Warren Hastings, Marlborough, Nelson, Wellington, Scott, Dickens, Keats, Browning, were at no university; the same is true of Smollett, Richardson, and Sheridan. It is noticeable, nevertheless, that the literary names cited include none but poets and novelists. Among scientific men and philosophers, Bishop Butler, Faraday, J. S. Mill, Huxley, Lubbock (Lord Avebury), Spencer, G. H. Lewes, Buckle, and Grote were not trained at universities—even among the great educationalists, the founders of colleges in our universities and of great public schools, few received an academic education. Some careers, again, are entirely outside the sphere of university influence—admirals and great captains, sailors and soldiers, do not go to universities, and among inventors hardly one hails from a seat of learning. Art, also, is not fostered by an academic atmosphere; painters, architects, and musicians owe nothing to it; and although universities adorn themselves with professorships of the fine arts, and of music, it is not to them that we go for definitions of art, or for an output of artists. In Orlando Gibbons, indeed, Cambridge possessed a native musician whose compositions and unrivalled technique as an organist place him in the first rank of musical Englishmen; but while nearly every English artist owes something to a wanderjahr in Italy, scarcely one ever resided at a university.
Nevertheless if we were to take a short list of representative Englishmen, of the men who have influenced and shaped the national life, its religion, its politics, its thoughts, who have helped to realise the English genius and to make England what it is, we should find that a large proportion of those who could have been educated at Cambridge or Oxford were in fact university men. In the following list those who have had a preponderant influence on English education from the vii century onwards, are included:—
| vii-viii c. Bede.† | ||
| vii c. Hild.*†[380] | ||
| viii c. Alcuin.*† | ||
| ix c. Alfred.† | ||
| xii c. Stephen Langton | (Paris). | |
| " | Grosseteste* | Oxford (and Paris). |
| xiii c. Roger Bacon | (Paris) and Oxford. | |
| " | Edward I.† | |
| xiv c. Wyclif | Oxford. | |
| " | Chaucer | Cambridge. |
| " | William of Wykeham*[381] | none. |
| xiv-xv c. Lady Margaret.* † | ||
| xv-xvi c. | Colet* | Oxford. |
| " | Bishop Fisher* | Cambridge. |
| " | Wolsey | Oxford. |
| xvi c. | Sir Thomas More | Oxford. |
| " | Cranmer | Cambridge. |
| " | Ascham* | Cambridge. |
| " | Elizabeth† | |
| " | Drake | none. |
| " | Raleigh[382] | none. |
| " | Sir Philip Sidney | Oxford. |
| " | Lord Bacon | Cambridge. |
| xvi-xvii c. | Shakespeare | none. |
| " | Harvey | Cambridge. |
| " | Cromwell | Cambridge. |
| " | Milton | Cambridge. |
| " | Jeremy Taylor | Cambridge. |
| " | Bunyan | none. |
| " | Locke | Oxford. |
| " | Newton | Cambridge. |
| xvii-xviii c. | Marlborough | none. |
| xviii c. | Wesley | Oxford. |
| " | Clive | none. |
| xviii-xix c. | Nelson† | none. |
| " | Pitt | Cambridge. |
| xix c. | John Stuart Mill | none. |
| " | Darwin | Cambridge. |
| " | Gladstone[383] | Oxford. |
| " | Florence Nightingale†[384] |
Of these, 9 could not have been at a university and are marked †, but of the remaining 31, 23 were at a university; 12 at Cambridge, 10 at Oxford. Two were at both Paris and Oxford, and one was at Paris.
In this chapter, however, our concern is with the great men produced by the one university. There are two fields in which Cambridge is and always has been facile princeps. She has nurtured all the great scientists, and all the great poets. The discoveries of world-wide importance have been the work of Cambridge men—such were the three which revolutionised the science of the world, the laws of the circulation of the blood, of gravitation, of evolution. From Bacon the founder of experimental philosophy to Darwin and Kelvin, every great name is a Cambridge name, if we except indeed the few who like Wallace, Humphry Davy, Faraday, and the elder Herschell owe nothing to a university.
Literature.