Cambridge

“ Out of the hard soil of the Puritan thought, out of the sterile rocks of the New England conscience, spring flowers of poetry. This story of the planting of Cambridge has—if I might linger on it—a wealth of dramatic interest, not indeed in its antiquity,—it is but a story of yesterday,—but in the human associations that belong to it and the patriotic memories it stirs. The Cambridge dust is eloquent of the long procession of saints and sages, scholars and poets, whose works and words have made the renown of the place. ”

“ I bow down to you, O Cambridge, for upon me was conferred the honour of eating on the dais among the learned masters in a hall so vast and old that I felt as if I were only dreaming about it; I greet you with both hands, O Cambridge, for I was vouchsafed the joy of eating with students, masters and other young people from earthenware dishes in the Half Moon; and happy I was among them. And I have seen lawns where only the masters and not the undergraduates may walk, and staircases where only the graduates and not the students may play billiards ”

“ Yet in spite of its municipal expansion and business enterprises, Cambridge is still pre-eminently the place where the lamp of learning is kept lighted. Though the college waxes great in numbers and its buildings multiply, and the jar of business invades the academic quiet, yet the purposes and habits of the scholar’s life still distinguish the community. ”

“ In science, at any rate, and in all branches of science, Cambridge stands alone. Not even Oxford can be considered for a moment as in the same class with her. And of all the sciences it is undoubtedly in mathematics and astronomy that the supremacy of Cambridge is most pronounced. ”

“ It is not for a moment suggested that the modern growth of the place is ideal, but what is new and unsightly is so placed that it does not interfere with the old and beautiful. The real Cambridge is so effectively girdled with greens and commons, and college grounds shaded with stately limes, elms, and chestnuts, that there are never any jarring backgrounds to destroy the sense of aloofness from the ugly and untidy elements of nineteenth-century individualism which are so often conspicuous at Oxford. ”

“ If Oxford were not the finest thing in England, Cambridge would certainly be. Cambridge was so, for that matter, to my imagination, for thirty-six hours. To the barbaric mind, ambitious of culture, Oxford is the usual image of the happy reconciliation between research and acceptance. It typifies, to an American, the union of science and sense—of aspiration and ease. A German university gives a greater impression of science, and an English country-house or an Italian villa a greater impression of idle enjoyment ”

“ And not less appropriately, perhaps, may I end, not only this chapter, but this whole sketch of the story of Cambridge and its colleges—for to the memory of what more kindly, more sound-hearted, more pious soul could any Sidney man more fitly dedicate his book than to his—with the prayer in which, in closing his own History, he gracefully connects the name of Cambridge with that of the sister university, and commends them both to the charitable devotion of all good men. ”

“ To a young man of his cosmopolitan experience the youth of Cambridge, with its sports and rags and naïve excursions into philosophy o' nights, must have seemed unbelievably childish. You all, from your own recollections of your Alma Mater, can reconstruct Denis Cathcart's life at Cambridge, its outward gaiety, its inner emptiness. ”

“ These words sounded like the language which the minstrel of the old Serbian ballads would have used, to convey the meaning which she wished to convey. Whenever I saw one of the great dons of Cambridge, like the famous mathematician Cayley, or the still more famous mathematical physicist George Gabriel Stokes, the discoverer of fluorescence, I asked myself: “Are they the saints of Cambridge?” The answer was in the negative; most of these men were too mobile to pass for saints. ”

“ Perhaps the old associations had something to do with it; they have with most of the things men value in Cambridge. A great past seems to meet one at every college gate. Every inch of ground has its own sacred memories, and the path beneath the trees had echoed to the tread of generations of poets, sages, and scholars since the old philosopher walked there. ”

“ CAMBRIDGE Dr Caius’ ingenious contention that Cambridge was founded in 3538 B.C. by Cantaber, a Spanish prince, has never received the support which its audacity deserves. The town cannot pretend to so great an antiquity, nor is its Roman origin even certain. It stood in the middle of a country intersected by Roman lines of road; in no part of England are Roman and British remains more plentiful and more interesting. ”

“ In Cambridge, at least, there is no fear that it should ever be obliterated altogether, for we have effected a happy alliance between the present and the past, by which neither is neglected, neither is unduly prominent. ”

“ The end of the xv century found Cambridge very happily situated. It met the dawn of the religious awakening with a galaxy of men representing the noblest spirit of the time: Fisher, Fox, Thomas Langton, Alcock, Rotherham, even Lady Margaret herself and Erasmus, belonged to Cambridge in a sense which did not apply to Colet and More at Oxford. They constitute a group of Cambridge ‘reformers before the Reformation’ who were eager patrons of the New Learning; and the epoch was marked there by the rise of important college foundations. ”

“ In Cambridge is intelligence, culture, traditionalism, civilisation, some intellectualism, even some imagination, much scholarship, ability, and good sense, above all a high idealism, a limitless fund of generous chivalry, that would be at war with the world's ills, the true crusading spirit, that can never fit in with the commercial. ”

“ The life of a University is a peculiar life, which does not suit everybody, and certainly did not suit him. He felt ‘cabined, cribbed, confined,’ in it; and he said afterwards that ‘he never really began to live till he was emancipated from academic trammels.’ Our wonder is, not that he left Cambridge when he did, but that he remained so long connected with it. ”

“ I see at Cambridge nothing which does not gain my respect for her present state and hope for her future. Increased sympathy between the old and young, increased intercourse between the teacher and the taught, increased freedom and charity of thought, and a steady purpose of internal self-reform and progress, seem to me already bearing good fruit, by making the young men regard their University with content and respect. ”

“ The dawn of the coming renascence shone upon the walls at which we have been looking. The modern world has been born of the birth-pangs which have since convulsed Europe, and the walls which were then big with the future are now big with the past. But it is the greatness of Cambridge that amidst the multiple suggestiveness of its ancient halls of learning, tyranny of the past has no place. ”

“ The ‘Sketches of Cambridge’ have exceptional merits. They are true to nature, when they approach her, and have a subtle tenderness for humanity, a longing for something nobler than the every-day life. ”

“ For the women are already in Cambridge. They have their own colleges, and if they have not yet their own lecturers, they make very good use of ours. And, strange to say, nobody takes much notice of them, or realises that they are there at all, except when they form their little groups round the college doorways, or when their names are read out before those of the men in the Senate House, or when they want something which Cambridge with all its chivalry is not quite prepared to give them. ”

“ But the chief difference between Cambridge and Oxford is in the spirit and influence of the two upon the nation and the world, and here the glory of Cambridge excelleth. It used to be said in the fourteenth century, "What Oxford thinks to-day, England thinks to-morrow." But, as a matter of fact, it is Cambridge which has represented the true progress of England and her modern political and intellectual development, in such men as Milton and Cromwell, Isaac Newton and William Pitt, Darwin and Tennyson. Oxford has stood chiefly for the reactionary ideas of the High Church Anglicans. ”

“ Geographical and commercial importance of the city site—Map of the county a palimpsest—Glamour of the Fenland—Cambridge the gateway of East Anglia—The Roman roads—The Roman station—The Castle Hill—Stourbridge Fair—Cambridge a chief centre of English commerce.
ONE could wish perhaps that the story of Cambridge should begin, as so many good stories of men and cities have begun, in the antique realm of poetry and romance. ”

“ On the religious side of the question, however, Cambridge has a good deal to show. Some of the most eminent Caroline divines are hers. Lancelot Andrewes, John Cosin, Jeremy Taylor, Peter Gunning, to mention no other names, were all Cambridge men. George Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar were men of some academical distinction. But, if it is true that architecture is the best witness to history, no town in England shows more trace of the Puritan spirit than Cambridge. ”

“ The town owes its existence mainly to the university, which overshadows it in importance. In this respect Cambridge and Oxford differ from all other universities, which are generally absorbed in the town in which they are situated. Cambridge, like Oxford, is of a singularly unique character, and affords examples of architecture from the dawnings of authentic history to the more modern structures designed to meet the wants of our own day. The original Cambridge was the ancient Roman Camboritum, a small settlement on the left or north bank of the Cam or Granta. ”

“ Not the least important feature of modern Cambridge is the unobtrusive red-brick building in Mill Lane, occupied by the University Extension Syndicate. Not remarkable in itself, it is the visible sign of the aim of the modern University not to keep its cherished learning to itself, but to distribute its advantages to others. Whether or no the idea expressed by a far-sighted don in the last century, when he said that each town ought to have its university, will be realised, is a possibility that rests on the knees of the gods ”

“ Conversation about undergraduates always bored him, for it was not they, to his mind, whom Cambridge connoted. Cambridge meant to him the life lived by himself and his colleagues, the mild scholarly discussion, the gentle, ignorant patronization or criticism of the outer world, the leisure, the port, the dignity of the community of teachers. Naturally his life was concerned also with undergraduates, but only to the extent that he taught and lectured them at fixed hours, and when necessary rebuked. ”

“ Such Gilds became common in Cambridge as in every town during the Middle Ages; they were the great aids to municipal life, and we shall find that some of them grew rich and powerful enough to found a College on their own account.
Our business is, however, with the University. One cannot fix a deliberate date of foundation. Universities, like every other great design, have small beginnings, and the origin of schools at Cambridge was probably insignificant. Cambridge is on the border of the Fenland, and the [3] Fenland contained the richest abbeys in England. ”

“ When Queen Elizabeth visited Cambridge, in August 1564, the public orator (William Masters) asserted, in a speech, that Cambridge was a more ancient university than Oxford. A friend of Thomas Caius reported the speech to him, and he wrote within a week a little treatise entitled ‘Assertio Antiquitatis Oxoniensis Academiæ,’ to disprove the Cambridge orator's statement. Two copies were made of the manuscript, one of which found its way into the Earl of Leicester's library. ”

“ 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. ”

“ This is in part due to Oxford's situation on a great artery leading from the Metropolis to large centres of population in the west; while Cambridge, although it grew up on a Roman road of some importance, is on the verge of the wide fenlands of East Anglia, and, being thus situated off the trade-ways of England, has managed to preserve more of that genial and scholarly repose we would always wish to find in the centres of learning, than has the other university. ”

“ The seminary is now affiliated with Harvard University, though it remains independent and autonomous.
Cambridge is a typical New England city, built up in detached residences, with irregular streets pleasantly shaded, and a considerable wealth of historic and literary associations. There are many reminders of the long history of Harvard, and of the War of Independence. Cambridge was the site of the camp of the first American army, at the outbreak of the war, and from it went the detachment which intrenched on Bunker’s Hill. ”

“ The University of Cambridge was severely criticised in these communications by some Cambridge dons themselves on account of the alleged entire absence of the scientific research stimulus. One of these criticisms is so characteristic of the feeling of Cambridge in 1873 that it deserves a special reference. It is in volume VIII of Nature and is entitled: “A Voice from Cambridge.” A very brief abstract follows:
It is known all over the world that science is all but dead in England. ”