Laureate

“ If his utterances as Laureate—except perhaps the Wellington Ode—do not take a foremost place among his compositions, that is simply because the English nation during his laureateship has been happy in having no dramatic episodes in its history. You cannot be strikingly effective in dealing with a slow and unconscious development. ”

“ Yet the world has always got on after this fashion. The laureate's reflection on nature, that of fifty seeds she often brings but one to bear, is an under-statement. She summons a thousand talesmen to get even a petty juror. ”

“ LAUREATE, adj. Crowned with leaves of the laurel. In England the Poet Laureate is an officer of the sovereign's court, acting as dancing skeleton at every royal feast and singing-mute at every royal funeral. ”

“ The term probably arose from a custom in the English universities of presenting a laurel wreath to graduates in rhetoric and versification. In England the poet laureate's office is filled by appointment of the lord chamberlain. The salary is quite small, and the office is valued chiefly as one of honor. ”

“ The Laureate.
by a--- t---.
Who would not be
The Laureate bold,
With his butt of sherry
To keep him merry,
And nothing to do but to pocket his gold?
p. 174’Tis I would be the Laureate bold!
When the days are hot, and the sun is strong,
I’d lounge in the gateway all the day long,
With her Majesty’s footmen in crimson and gold. ”

“ John Skelton was poet-laureate to King Henry VIII. He was the last who bore the title in its primary signification as a University degree, the last whose qualification for the office was skill in Latin versification.
The little we know of this singular writer only serves to provoke our curiosity. A jesting priest, with coarse humour, his rough laugh tingled rudely in the ear of Wolsey, and cowled monks waxed wroth at his strange and caustic satire. ”

“ I have a letter, by order of the Prince Regent, offering me the laureateship in the most flattering terms. Were I my own man, as you call it, I would refuse this offer (with all gratitude) ; but, as I am situated, £300 or £400 a year is not to be sneezed at upon a point of poetical honor—and it makes me a better man to that extent. ”

“ Our latest innovation is a laureateship for the best home-printed paper, which will excite keen rivalry among our younger members, and bring out some careful specimens of the typographical art. Besides the laureateships there are other honours and prizes awarded by individual publishers within the United, many of the amateur journals offering excellent books for the best stories, reviews, or reports submitted to them. ”

“ Your present responsibility is of another, though not less serious, kind. Institutions do not make men, any more than organisation makes life; and even the ideal University we have been dreaming about will be but a superior piece of mechanism, unless each student strive after the ideal of the Scholar. And that ideal, it seems to me, has never been better embodied than by the great Poet, who, though lapped in luxury, the favourite of a Court, and the idol of his countrymen, remained through all the length of his honoured years a Scholar in Art, in Science, and in Life. ”

“ Even to become an academic professor need not be an unattainable aim of your ambition. And if, in spite of all that, I should still continue, in my heart, to look upon you as a born dilettante, you could smile down upon me graciously, and heap coals of fire upon my head by proposing me as an honorary member of your academy. Ah! my dear boy, I tell you, if you should make a close examination of many of our most famous great men, you would bring to light little else than a disguised and beautiful dilettantism, made up of humbug, elegant trappings, and perhaps a few so-called ideas. ”

“ Many of those who have reflected deeply on the subject of college education have declared that its ultimate object should be to give in the highest degree the power of expression. Some have said that a sense of honor and the power of expression should be its objects. But there are few who will dispute the proposition that a collegian who receives his diploma without receiving with it more of the art of expression than most men possess has spent his time and his money in vain. ”

“ Scholarship was, in short, regarded as an honourable profession, something which almost conferred on its possessor a patent of nobility; the new master of arts had lighted flambeaux carried before him in the public streets, and the conferring of a doctor’s degree was an event which caused as much stir as the dubbing of a knight. Nay, in those days, so permeated with the romantic spirit of chivalry, scholars were not unfrequently spoken of as “the knights of science,” and the disputation at which some youthful aspirant contended for the doctor’s cap was regarded as the intellectual tournament. ”

“ If the theory of college rank were correct, the highest marks should indicate the men who are to be hereafter most conspicuous, and leaders in the various walks of life. This is not the case,—not so much so now as in former years. Of the present chief lights of American literature and science, how many, if graduates of Harvard, took the first honors of the University here? Or, to put the question in another form, Of those who took the first honors at Harvard, within the last thirty years, how many are now conspicuous among the great lights of American literature and science? ”

“ Three of our leading collegiate institutions will be in competition with each other to administer these scholarships in the spirit in which they have been founded, to maintain their high-class character, which will be evinced by the quality of the men they turn out, and who, by their accomplishments, will do lasting honor to the illustrious scientist whose name and fame are treasured in the hearts of many thousands of the American people. ”

“ We honor the successful teacher, we honor the investigator of Nature's laws, we honor the upright director of affairs—and our late associate had all these claims to our regard; but we honor most of all the noble manhood—and of such make are the founders of great institutions. In comparison, how empty are the ordinary titles of distinction of which most men are proud! It seems now almost trivial to add that our associate was decorated with a Doctor's degree, both by his own university and also by the University at Cambridge ”

“ A representation was made by my master, that he saw in me, indications of qualities and talents which pointed to some better station, than that of a village apothecary, and he recommended the sphere of my education to be enlarged; that I should be removed to a great school, and finally to the university. Whether I should have been more useful to the world, or intrinsically more happy in myself, if the humbler path had been pursued which was first chalked out for me, He only knows from whom no secrets are hid. ”

“ The University was governed, the University was taught, by the graduates at large. Professor, Master, Doctor, were originally synonymous. Every graduate had an equal right of teaching publicly in the University the subjects competent to his faculty, and to the rank of his degree; nay, every graduate incurred the obligation of teaching publicly, for a certain period, the subjects of his faculty, for such was the condition involved in the grant of the degree itself." Sir William Hamilton, Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, etc.: Education, chapter 4. EDUCATION: Modern: European Countries. ”

“ A man degrading for any other reason cannot go out afterwards in honors."—Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 98.
I could choose the year below without formally degrading.—Ibid., p. 157.
DEGREE. A mark of distinction conferred on students, as a testimony of their proficiency in arts and sciences; giving them a kind of rank, and entitling them to certain privileges. This is usually evidenced by a diploma. Degrees are conferred pro meritis on the alumni of a college; or they are honorary tokens of respect, conferred on strangers of distinguished reputation. ”

“ From every college comes the Dean in his Master's gown and hood, or if he be a Doctor, in the scarlet and grey of one of the new Doctorates, in the dignified scarlet and black of Divinity, or in the bold blending of scarlet and crimson which marks Medicine and Law. College servants, with their arms full of gowns and hoods, will be seen in the background, waiting to assist in the academic robing of their former masters, and to pocket the 'tips' which time-honoured custom prescribes. ”

“ That done, the student, armed cap-à-pie in his intellectual armour, goes forth to face something infinitely sterner and more pitiless than tutors or proctors, ay, even than Masters and Chancellors themselves—the presiding genius of that infinitely greater University called the World, where taking your degree means anything that human fortune can give you, and where being plucked may mean anything from a clerkship in an office to selling matches in the gutter. ”

“ In the university, noblemen are exempted from the public exercises for the degree, &c., by which they attain a degree called honorary. At the same time, the fees they have to pay for matriculation, and on all other occasions, are much higher. ”

“ I need not inform your excellency, how contrary such a practice is to that of all the universities in Europe. Your excellency well knows how many learned men, of the two last ages, have been invited by princes to be professors in some art or science for which they were renowned; and that the like rule has been followed in Oxford and Cambridge. I hope your excellency will show no regard to so narrow and partial an opinion, which can only tend to mend fellowships, and spoil professorships ”

“ He fires the youthful ambition with glowing descriptions of the honors that await the successful, and opens to his eager view the dazzling prospect of college fame. Nor does he fail to please the youthful aspirant with assurances of the kindly notice of the Faculty; he informs him of the satisfactory examination he has passed, and the gratification of the President at his uncommon proficiency ”

“ Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much, will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.
"A keen and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard University, "is the finest result of college life." The graduate who has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education can impart. ”

“ They are distinguished by fervid and impressive eloquence, and set forth the dignity and duties of the Scholar, as deduced from the idea of his vocation, with clear, but sublime and spirit-stirring earnestness. He leaves no place for low motives or degrading propensities, but fills up his picture of the Scholar-life with the purest and most disinterested virtues of our nature. These lectures, and his own personal influence among the students, were attended with the happiest effects. ”

“ Whether in course or by indirection, whether by a cramming tutor or by examiners with prizes and foundation scholarships, education according to the English notion of it is arrived at. I looked over the Examination Papers of the year 1848, for the various scholarships and fellowships, the Lusby, the Hertford, the Dean-Ireland, and the University, (copies of which were kindly given me by a Greek professor,) containing the tasks which many competitors had victoriously performed, and I believed they would prove too severe tests for the candidates for a Bachelor's degree in Yale or Harvard. ”

“ The Master of the College, or "Head of the House," is a D.D., who has been a Fellow. He is the supreme ruler within the college Trails, and moves about like an Undergraduate's deity, keeping at an awful distance from the students, and not letting himself be seen too frequently even at chapel. Besides his fat salary and house, he enjoys many perquisites and privileges, not the least of which is that of committing matrimony.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. ”

“ The Graduate School was established; and of all the influences which have contributed to raise the standard of scholarship at Harvard, both for teachers and taught, that graduate work seems to me the greatest. Every professor now must be the master of a field of knowledge, and not of a few paths running through it.
But the ideal teacher will accumulate wealth, not merely for his pupils’ sake, but for his own. ”

“ To this succeeded a very solemn and interesting charge, in which the Provost addressed himself chiefly to the graduates in the arts, adding, with respect to the graduates in Physic, that he had prevailed on a gentleman of their own Profession, whose precepts would receive Dignity from his years and experience, to lay before them what he thought requisite as well for the honour of the College, as for promoting their own future honour and usefulness in life. ”

“ Here many of the examiners (as they are called,) are not unfrequently persons destitute of literature and science themselves, who still boldly certify to the quantum of each possessed by those whom they are supposed to examine; and their awards go forth to the world, as satisfactory proofs of the excellence of particular schools, and the proficiency of the scholars in them, when in fact, such testimonials are proofs of nothing but the inexcusable vanity or thoughtlessness of the certifiers. ”

“ The king has lately been pleased to make me Professor of Ancient History in the Royal Academy of Painting which he has just established, but there is no salary annexed; and I took it rather as a compliment to the institution than any benefit to myself. Honors to one in my situation are something like ruffles to one that wants a shirt. ”