Emmanuel College, Cambridge

“ Gell, the antiquary and explorer of Pompeii, who died in 1836, was also an Emmanuel man. But the present century, although the standard of work and scholarship has been high, is not prolific in eminent names. Our greatest living historian, Dr Creighton, held a fellowship at Emmanuel according to the terms of the Dixie Professorship, but Cambridge cannot count him as her own. At present, the college is rapidly increasing in numbers and emulates the modern popularity of Pembroke ”

“ There is one interesting feature in connection with the foundation of Emmanuel College which calls for special notice, as showing that the Puritan founder was fully conscious of the dangers attaching to a perpetual tenure of Fellowships, as affording undue facilities for evading those practical duties of learning and teaching, the efficient discharge of which he rightly considered it should be the main object of the University to demand, and the interest of the nation to secure. ”

“ Milton, whose life is very largely bound up with Cambridge, brings us to another critical point in University history. It is difficult to estimate the attitude of Cambridge as a whole to the Civil Wars. Oxford remained faithful to the King, but, while Cambridge possessed no college so unanimously loyal as St John’s at Oxford, there were one or two colleges, such as Sidney and Emmanuel, whose sympathies were undeniably Puritan. An University cannot help a certain amount of conservatism, and Cambridge sacrificed a great deal in the Stewart cause. ”

“ You are doubly rewarded, for not merely is Cambridge a perfect specimen of a colonial village, but in Harvard there breathes the true spirit of humane letters. Nor is the college a creation of yesterday. It is not far short of three centuries ago that John Harvard, once of Emmanuel College in England, endowed the university which bears his honoured name. The bequest was a poor £780, with 260 books, but it was sufficient to ensure an amiable immortality, and to bestow a just cause of pride upon the mother-college. ”

“ The characteristic peculiar to Cambridge and Oxford, and which distinguishes them not only from American but also from all other universities in England and elsewhere, is the college system. Thus Cambridge is a collection of eighteen colleges which, though nominally united to form one institution, are really distinct, inasmuch as each is a separate community with its own buildings and grounds, its own resident students, its own lecturers, and Fellows—a community which is supported by its own moneys without aid from the university exchequer, and which in most matters legislates for itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There is likely to be an extension of university education in the near future. The ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge with their great college system will be strengthened, as will be the universities which were established at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. The demand for the better training of teachers will result inevitably in the creation of more universities. The inadequate sum which this country has spent upon university education up to the present will be greatly increased. ”

“ We have said that, in modern times, universities as such have less influence than the aggregate of independent thinkers. This, however, hardly applies to England, for the mass of enlightened men in that country forms, practically, the true university. Cambridge, as a seat of equal learning, yet scarcely of equal brilliancy or influence, is of course included. The social and intellectual training of both is the same, the traditions practically so. ”

“ The general movement towards university education, on the other hand, begins with the inauguration of a series of lectures in Cambridge itself, somewhat like that already started in the north, but wider in scope and capable of being continued for the instruction of women far beyond the educational standard prescribed by the Local Examinations. ”

“ It has, in the chapel of King's College, a building of marvellous beauty; Oxford cannot match it, nor can it be matched anywhere in England save by that "miracle of the world," the Chapel of Henry VII., in Westminster Abbey. The roll of Cambridge's alumni is illustrious to a degree, having such names as Bacon, Erasmus, Newton, Milton, Cromwell, Macaulay, Byron, Thackeray, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Harvey (discoverer of the circulation of the blood) , Darwin, and many, many others equally well known.
Cambridge more Progressive than Oxford. ”

“ Of late, too, students with degrees from overseas and from other British Universities have come to Cambridge in increasing numbers to work for the recently established Research Certificates of the University. These students, with their wider interests and experience doing specialized advanced work in various subjects literary and scientific, some of them resident in the College, others living outside but connected with it, add a valuable element and form a link between the generations. ”

“ The University of London has no colleges directly connected with it, but confers degrees, upon examination, to students of nearly all the institutions of learning in the country. Oxford has twenty-three colleges and Cambridge eighteen. This college system distinguishes the universities of England from those of the continent. A student must connect himself with a college before he becomes a member of the university. The teaching in these colleges is done almost entirely by tutors, and the professors of the university only deliver lectures on special subjects once or twice a week. ”

“ Major scholarships are open to undergraduates, not being of standing to take the degree of bachelor of arts, as well as to non-members of the university under nineteen years of age, while minor scholarships and exhibitions are open only to the latter. There are valuable exhibitions appropriated to certain schools, of which the most important are those confined to Westminster school. Trinity College is entered from Trinity Street by the King’s Gateway (1518-1535) preserved from King’s Hall, but subsequently altered. The principal or Great Court is the largest in Cambridge and very fine. ”

“ The college the distinguishing characteristic of Cambridge and Oxford
It is the collegiate system which distinguishes the English universities from all others. Everywhere else in Europe students live in their own private lodgings and have complete control of their lives, subject to no supervision whatever; the university has no rights over them and no means of ensuring their good behaviour during the period in which they choose to attend its lectures. ”

“ Before, however, we offer any conjectures as to the probable effect of these yet untried changes, we must remind our readers of a certain characteristic of the Cambridge system, which is important in estimating the internal relations of the late reforms. The academic life of Cambridge circulates through two concurrent systems, which we may term the university and the collegiate system. The university is one corporation, and each individual college is altogether another. ”

“ The same desire which led to the foundation of Selwyn and Keble led to the passing of a grace by the Senate of both Universities, by which students were allowed to become members of the University without joining any particular college. Unattached students now form a considerable element at both Oxford and Cambridge. ”

“ In the case of every Cambridge college the founder is the man who endows it. A college may owe its existence (as certainly in Byngham’s case) to the energies of some one else, but its founder remains the man by whom it was built and endowed. A God’s House at Ewelme in Oxfordshire was founded about the same time by William de la Pole and Alice his wife, Earl and Countess of Suffolk. “It is still in being,” writes Tanner, “but the Mastership is annexed to the King’s professor of Physic in the university of Oxford.” ”

“ The Working Men’s College was largely, perhaps mainly, the product of Oxford and Cambridge, in the sense that most of its founders and first teachers had belonged to one or other of the two Universities, and their object was to impart to others the College spirit as they had felt and known it and realised its value; to give to poor men, to manual workers, something, if it were ever so little, of the atmosphere which had brightened and broadened and sweetened their own lives. The College, accordingly, has always taken Oxford and Cambridge for its models. ”

“ It has thus bound itself to compare the work of all tripos students irrespective of sex. While at Oxford there is no university recognition of the status of the candidate or of her hall, and no university certificate of the place obtained, Girton and Newnham are recognised colleges at Cambridge; the name of the successful candidate followed by that of the college is read aloud in the Senate House and published on the Senate House door; and only students presented by these colleges are admitted to the university examinations, as is the case with men. ”

“ This the young women cannot do. They have only the rights of all Cambridge ladies to attend the many public lectures and readings of the university.
The Harvard Annex is, then, to-day a woman’s college, with no degrees, no dormitories, no women instructors, and with a staff of teachers made up from volunteers of another college. The Fay House, 332 where offices, lecture and waiting rooms, library and laboratories are gathered, is in the heart of Old Cambridge, but at a little distance from the college buildings. This is the centre of the social and literary life of the students. ”

“ University extension is a movement intended to bring the people at large into closer communion with the college and the university. Though it had a lowly birth in England, it has become a great institution permanently wedded to Oxford and Cambridge. For some years the idea has been growing that our American colleges ought to be doing something in this same line. The world is full of students who are unable to attend the university ”

“ The past prosperity of the College has been in very great part due to a good understanding between governors and governed, and this is still, in a sense, to be regarded as the sheet anchor of the College in Cambridge. It seems to be recognised in the Colleges of the University that the only way to avoid excessive ebullitions of youthful spirit is to enlist on the side of law and order some popular and leading spirits among the undergraduates themselves. ”

“ And now, for centuries, founding at Cambridge ends. Puritanism has set the world astir. The church, reformed as she prided herself to be, had her hands full to look after the already educated ones, and so no more founding of colleges for a long time was to be done; and we bridge over the chasm of 121 years, till, in 1717, Sir George Downing qualifiedly devised several valuable estates for the founding of a college within the precincts of the University ”

“ THE TOWER OF ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL FROM THE RIVER
Trinity College Library lies on the right, through the trees. traditions carry on into Cambridge. The happy connexion between Cambridge and Eton established by Henry VI. has never ceased to link the most aristocratic English school with the more democratic of the English universities, and many boys come to the “light blue” university already wearing her favours. In football and golf the two universities have shown equal prowess ”

“ 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. ”

“ And indeed there is hardly perhaps another College in Cambridge which stirs the hearts of its members with a more passionate enthusiasm of loyalty than this, which yet never speaks of itself as a “College,” but always proudly as “The Hall.” It was founded by William Bateman, Bishop of Norwich, in 1350, but it had an earlier origin than this. On the southern part of the present site there stood an old house, which had been provided some thirty years earlier for the use of the student-monks of Ely attending the University by the then Prior. ”

“ The accounts of the institution remain, and point to a style of living which would not be very highly accounted of now, but was positively luxurious for medieval Cambridge. The scholars attended chapel at St Mary’s by the Market and All Saints’ in the Jewry, until, in Edward IV.’s reign, they obtained leave to found a chapel for themselves. King’s Hall naturally became the nucleus of Henry’s college, and the lesser buildings found their centre in its court, enlarged and beautified. John Redman, the last master of King’s Hall, became the first master of Trinity College. ”

“ 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. ”