Book v.—Winter Morning's Walk.
[534] The Bishop of Peterborough.
[535] Private correspondence.
[536] The sportive title generally bestowed by Cowper on his amiable friends the Throckmortons.
[537] The residence of the Throckmorton family in Berkshire.
[538] Lady Hesketh suggested the appointment of the office of Poet Laureat to Cowper, which had become vacant by the death of Warton in 1790. The poet declined the offer of her services, and Henry James Pye, Esq. was nominated the successor.
[539] To Cowper's strictures on the University of Cambridge, and his remark that the fame there acquired is not worth having, we by no means subscribe. We think no youth ought to be insensible to the honourable ambition of obtaining its distinctions, and that they are not unfrequently the precursors of subsequent eminence in the Church, the Senate, and at the Bar. We have been informed that, out of fifteen judges recently on the bench, eleven had obtained honours at our two Universities. Whether the system of education is not susceptible of much improvement is a subject worthy of deep consideration. There seems to be a growing persuasion that, at the University of Cambridge, the mode of study is too exclusively mathematical; and that a more comprehensive plan, embracing the various departments of general knowledge and literature, would be an accession to the cause of learning. We admit that the University fully affords the means of acquiring this general information, but there is a penalty attached to the acquisition which operates as a prohibition, because the prospect of obtaining honours must, in that case, be renounced. By adopting a more comprehensive system, the stimulants to exertion would be multiplied, and the end of education apparently more fully attained.
When we reflect on the singular character of the present times, the instability of governments, and the disorganized state of society, arising from conflicting principles and opinions, the question of education assumes a momentous interest. We are firmly persuaded that, unless the minds of youth be enlarged by useful knowledge, and fortified by right principles of religion, they will not be fitted to sustain the duties and responsibilities that must soon devolve upon them; nor will they be qualified to meet the storms that now threaten the political and moral horizon of Europe.
Dr. Johnson, in enumerating the advantages resulting from a university education, specifies the following as calculated to operate powerfully on the mind of the student.
"There is at least one very powerful incentive to learning; I mean the Genius of the place. It is a sort of inspiring Deity, which every youth of quick sensibility and ingenuous disposition creates to himself, by reflecting that he is placed under those venerable walls, where a Hooker and a Hammond, a Bacon and a Newton, once pursued the same course of science, and from whence they soared to the most elevated heights of literary fame."—The Idler, No. 33.