Stonyhurst College

“ In October 1804 he was removed to Stonyhurst college, Lancashire, and in November 1807 entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he specially distinguished himself in the debates of the Historical Society. ”

“ He is quick in the regions of education and literature; knows much about old and new books; has a lively regard for ancient classical and religions works; is perhaps better acquainted with the 26,000 volumes in Stonyhurst College library than anybody else; likes to preach on tuitional questions; has a mortal dislike of secular education. ”

“ Omer's, France, where Father Parsons founded the college in 1592. At the suppression of the Order in France, 1762, the college moved to Bruges in Belgium; thence, in 1773, to Liége; whence, under the stress of the French Revolution, it took refuge in England, and opened its courses at Stonyhurst, Lancashire, in 1794. ”

“ CLARA AT STONYBROOK COLLEGE. “Stonybrook College” would have been more appropriately, as well as more modestly, termed Stonybrook School at the time Clara entered it, for it was hardly more than a high-school for girls, though it stood well among institutions for the education of young ladies at a time when the equal education of the sexes was deemed an utopian idea among most people. It ranks much higher now that preparatory schools of a nobler order have furnished a more advanced class of students, and so more truly deserves the name, college. ”

“ What with football practise and visiting the freshman class in the interest of his society, he found he was able to keep awake long enough to get a smattering of the next day's work and no more.
The class had scattered and groups with clear tendencies had formed, Hunter and Tommy Bain the center of little camps serious and ambitious, while off the campus in a private dormitory another element was pursuing mannish delights with the least annoyance from the curriculum.
The opposition to the sophomore societies had now grown to a college issue. Protests from the alumni began to come in ”

“ D.Sc. of Queen's University in Ireland in 1879, and hon. Sc.D. of the University of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1902. Stoney's work received recognition from learned societies at home and abroad. He was a foreign member of the Academy of Science at Washington, and of the Philosophical Society of America and a corresponding member of the Accademia di scienze, lettere ed arti di Benevento. He regularly attended the meetings of the British Association, served on several committees, and acted as president of section A at the meeting at Sheffield in 1879. ”

“ It is now the problem of educating masses and not individuals. To-day it is a question of perfecting a high average. That's what happens everywhere in college: we all tend toward the average; what some lose others gain. We go out, not as individuals, but as a type—a Yale type, Harvard type, Princeton type, five hundred strong, proportionately more powerful in our influence on the country."
"Just what does our type take from here to the nation?" said Stover ”

“ Skull and Bones, Keys, Wolf's-Head—but I guess that's all I do know."
"You'll hear a good deal of talk inside the college, and out of it, too, about the system. It has its faults. But it's the best system there is, and it makes Yale what it is to-day. It makes fellows get out and work; it gives them ambitions, stops loafing and going to seed, and keeps a pretty good, clean, temperate atmosphere about the place."
"I know nothing at all about it," said Stover, perplexed.
"The seniors have fifteen in each; they give out their elections end of junior year, end of May. ”

“ Jean Story abruptly turned from the piano, where her fingers had been absent-mindedly running over the keys.
"Frankly, I haven't made up my mind just yet," said Stover. "There are a great many sides to it. I've listened to a good many opinions, but haven't yet chosen mine. Every one is talking about the effect on the college, but what has impressed me most is the effect on the [Pg 265] sophomore society men themselves. If the outsiders only knew the danger and handicap they are to us!" ”

“ This is the tendency—development away from the campus at the expense of the campus. That's why, when you ask me would I wipe out our business athletics and our professional musical and traveling dramatic clubs, I say, yes, absolutely. I would have the limits of college to be the walls of the campus itself, and we'd see, when men cease to be drafted for one grind or another, whether they couldn't begin to meet to think and to converse. However, that brings up the whole pet problem of education, and, I'm through talking. Go on, Pike; tell us that we are, after all, only schools for character. ”

“ As if all this intellectual complication had not been enough, they were obliged to divide their energies externally, giving to their daily tasks as professors and pedagogues what duty demanded, and only the remainder to scholarship, reflection, and literary work. Even this distracting circumstance, however, had its compensations. College work was a human bond, a common practical interest; it helped to keep up that circulation of the blood which made the whole Harvard school of philosophy a vital unit, and co-operative in its freedom. ”

“ Where he's wrong is, he thinks the society system here keeps a man wrapped in cotton, smothering him and separating him from the class. Now, I'm an example to the contrary. It's all a question of the individual. I thought it wasn't at one moment, but now I know that it is. You can do just what you want—find what you want.
"But we do get so interested in outside things that we forget the real; that's true. Brockhurst says we [Pg 256] ought to bring the college back to the campus, and the more I think of it the more I see what he means. ”

“ It's a sort of college bug that multiplies rapidly. Will politics 'queer' me—keep me out of societies? Probably; but then, I couldn't make 'em anyway. So I'm going to have my fun. And I'll tell you now, Stover, I'm going to get a good deal more out of my college career than a lot of you fellows."
"Why include me?"
"Well, Stover, you're going to make a sophomore society, and go sailing along."
"Oh, I don't know."
"Yes, you do. We don't object to such men as you, who have the right. It's the lame ducks we object to." ”

“ Princeton doesn't do it, Harvard doesn't do it. We're over-organized away from the vital thing—the knowledge of ourselves."
"Then you'd abolish the sophomore societies?" said Hunter, crowding him to the wall.
"I don't know. Sometimes I've felt it's the system that is wrong," said Stover frankly. "Lately, I've changed my mind. I think we can do what we want—at least I know I've gone out and met whom I wanted to without my being in a sophomore society making the slightest difference. ”

“ Sometimes it seems to me I'm missing all the fun of college life." [Pg 318] He made a gesture toward the billiard room. "Even fellows like McNab, good for nothing, jovial little loafers, according to Yale standards, do seem to be getting something wonderful out of these years. I don't. It's been all work or fighting."
"That's because they are going different ways in life than you are," she said quickly. "Tell me more about this new organization. It seems a big idea. Whom will you take in?" She added suddenly: "Take charge yourself, do it all yourself. It's just what you should do." ”

“ What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder [Pg 244] than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual."
"What would you do?" said Brown. "Abolish all organizations?"
"Absolutely," said Brockhurst, who never recoiled.
"What! Do you mean to say that the college of 1870 was a bigger thing than the college of to-day?" ”

“ I'm—"
"I'm no more a freshman than you are," retorted Peter John warmly.
"Right you are. But you don't want to make a bad matter worse. If you keep out you'll be a marked man and everybody in college will hear about it. It'll be a great deal better for you to go in quietly, and whatever you think about it, just keep your thoughts to yourself, and don't call the attention of the whole college to you by your foolishness. It'll be simply a challenge for the sophs, if you don't do it, and you'll be the one to suffer." ”

“ Their superiority over the national lyceums leads to the fact of their being as well attended as the latter, although pupils at the Jesuits' colleges pay three times as much as at the government schools. The large college of the Jesuits in the Rue des Postes at Paris furnishes a heavy contingent to St. Cyr and the polytechnic schools. The Stanislas College, although a private institution, has its corps of professors appointed by the Minister of Public Instruction, and its pupils are privileged to take part in the general examinations of the lyceum pupils. ”

“ Susan was soon rejoicing at the prospect of meeting Lucy Stone and Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune. Mrs. Stanton had invited her to Seneca Falls to discuss with them and other influential men and women the founding of a people's college. Unhesitatingly she joined forces with Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone to insist that the people's college be opened to women on the same terms as men. Lucy had proved the practicability of this as a student at Oberlin, the first college to admit women, and was one of the first women to receive a college degree. ”

“ The harm is that this mumbo-jumbo, fee-fi-fo-fum, high cockalorum business is taken seriously. It's the effect on the young imagination that comes here that is harmful. Dink, I tell you, and I mean it solemnly, that when a boy comes here to Yale, or any other American college, and gets the flummery in his system, believes in it—surrenders to it—so that he trembles in the shadow of a tomblike building, doesn't dare to look at a pin that stares him in the face, is afraid to pronounce the holy, sacred names ”

“ The undue excitement and spirit of rivalry fostered is foreign to the true idea of an earnest student life. The college is no monastery to make the student a recluse, but it should be a place of solitude, a modern cloister, where the student may be kept in partial isolation and away from the turbulent stream of public life and distracting social influences. The student may keep in the midst of the current of actual modern thought and life without sacrificing the quiet seclusion which is an essential requirement for the best scholarship. ”

“ Stanton received the usual school training of a country boy, became a student of Kenyon College, in 1833, but366 only remained a year and left. This was the end of his scholastic education. It is easy, to those who know the decisive, impetuous, self-reliant nature of the man, and who remember the rough, plain, independent atmosphere of the backwoods country where he grew up, to imagine how easily any supposed indignity from his instructors would drive him out of their precincts, or how readily he would give up the idea of further studies as unnecessary, if his supply of money failed. ”

“ A little later (May 1853) , all his spare time is being spent on a poem, which he thinks by far the best thing he has yet done, to wit, Sohrab and Rustum. And he “never felt so sure of himself or so really and truly at ease as to criticism.” He stays in barracks at the depot of the 17th Lancers with a brother-in-law, and we regret to find that “Death or Glory” manners do not please him. The instance is a cornet spinning his rings on the table after dinner. “College does civilise a boy,” he ejaculates, which is true—always providing that it is a good college. ”

“ The number of these professional schools might have been enlarged, as has been actually done later, until training in all the professions had been provided. But it happens that the descriptive sciences, languages, mathematics, and philosophy are not studies useful for any profession, except that of teaching these very subjects over again; and there was no practical way of introducing them into the Harvard system except to graft them upon the curriculum of the college; otherwise neither money nor students could have been found for so much ornamental learning. ”

“ It is wholly removed from the busy world, and all the surroundings give an involuntary impression of harmony and quiet. Stonyhurst was probably always a home of Catholics at heart, though the Sir Richard Sherburne who was one of Harry VIII.’s Commissioners at the dissolution of religious houses did contrive to be a favourite with young Edward, Mary, and, after her, Elizabeth. He it was who built part of the mansion on the site of an older baronial edifice ”

“ And yet his election had brought him at once into a certain prominence, and doubtless Will was duly appreciative of the honor bestowed upon him.
The member of the junior class to whom had been entrusted the organizing of the freshmen now rose to give some general words of advice before the meeting was adjourned. "There are some things in college," he was saying, "that have the force of laws. Some of them will appear foolish to you, it may be, and yet it will be more foolish to disregard them. ”

“ The grand bronze entrance gates to these "vestal precincts," inscribed with the name of the first Principal of the College, Miss Anne Jemima Clough (sister to the poet Arthur Clough) are hard by the more modest entrance to Ridley, and admit the visitor to a scene which reminds us of those in Tennyson's "Princess." And there are almost as many maidens here as he has assigned to his imaginary College, for Newnham is surpassed in the number of its students by Trinity only. Each has her own room, in which the bed becomes by day a sofa. ”