We

labor about the dramatic writers too much, to the exclusion of the rest. weary ourselves with adjusting iambics, and trochaics, and anapæsts, and twisting monostrophics into choruses and dochmiacs, and almost seem to neglect the sense for the sake of the sound."

Where did Eubulus learn this? What single instance can he produce to countenance this bare-faced assertion? I must, in candor, suppose that he is really ignorant of the matter on which he writes: but had he made the least inquiry, he would have found that the dramatists occupy no larger share of attention than their excellence and their extent demand; and that the study of the poets and the prose authors is equally encouraged. I have always heard it re marked, that the peculiar merit of our classical examinations consists in the care taken that no department of literature should be neglected by allowing full credit to all, they encourage the youth in the free pursuit of those models, which can best form the taste, enlarge the mind, and purify the judgment. Eubulus recommends other authors, which he complains are excluded, and specifies Plato, Xenophon, Thucydides, Polybius and Demosthenes; fixing upon books which do happen to be as frequently, or possibly more so, than any others, the subjects of examination!!! As for his sentence about metre, (which sounds as if it were taken from the Edinburgh Review,) I shall not stop to conjecture what his own conceptions may be of monostrophics,' or of choruses, and dochmiacs;' but I will ask him, whether ever he heard that at any classical examination (and of such he is speaking) the students were called upon to exercise their ingenuity in twisting compositions of that description? Or, if this be a sheer piece of invention, how can he reconcile to any honorable feeling, the having put forth such groundless and pitiful insinuations; which he thinks will be discreditable to the University, and to which he means that his character of one of its members should give currency?

There are, in Eubulus's pamphlet, two or three sentences respecting the pursuit of Christian knowledge, which I so cordially approve, and which appear so honorable to the writer, that I would have forborne to notice the weakness of the rest of his performance, had he not called for this mention of him, by such unparalleled misrepresentations of our University; for which it is difficult to imagine either provocation or apology.

LETTER

ΤΟ

PHILOGRANTUS,

BY EUBULUS:

BEING

A SEQUEL TO A PAMPHLET,

ENTITLED

THOUGHTS

ON

THE PRESENT SYSTEM OF ACADEMIC EDUCATION

IN THE

UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE.

me lectori credere malo

Quam Professoris fastidia ferre superbi.

"A false quantity, a direct insult to all the laws of prosody! But we cannot expect gentlemen who do not weigh their words, to be very exact in measuring their syllables."

"Take physic, Pomp."

LONDON:

TO THE

VERY REVEREND

JAMES HENRY MONK, D.D.

DEAN OF PETerborough, &c. &c. &c.

MR. DEAN,

I DO myself the honor of inscribing the following pages to you, knowing the ardor with which you advocate the same cause I have myself, however feebly, attempted to promote. A second reason, which has induced me to take this step, is the reputation you have obtained, of being an occasional contributor to the Quarterly Review. Every writer, in a work of such importance, as one of our first Literary Journals, must be above all unfair and illiberal arts of criticism,

Cum tabulis animum censoris sumet HONESTI. He will not spare the lash, where dulness and folly, much more where wickedness and immorality require that it should be inflicted; neither will he give unnecessary pain to the unoffending, or treat the mistaken, but well-meaning, with wanton severity; still less will he superciliously sneer at what he cannot refute, or wilfully misrepresent the words or arguments of the author submitted to his judgment, to gain any triumph, or serve any purpose of his own. These are some of the requisites, among many others, essential for a man to possess, who undertakes so respectable an office as that to which I have alluded, and which, I hope, it is no offence to say, that you are reported sometimes to have discharged. Whether there be truth or not in those reports, I trust your indignation, as a scholar and as a man, will be excited at the disengenuous conduct which a writer, who calls himself Philograntus, has manifested towards me; and I therefore beg leave to dedicate the following pages to you.

I am, Mr. Dean,
Your very obedient Servant,

London, March, 1822.

EUBULUS.

A LETTER,

&c.

SIR,

IN the Appendix to your Pamphlet, on the Present State of Cambridge Examinations, I find some strictures, written with a good deal of asperity, upon a recent publication of mine, on the same subject. I lament this, not indeed for my own sake, because I perceive that your observations are founded in misconception; but because I fear this strongly avowed hostility may injure a cause, in which I am quite as ardent as you can be, and because I see no reason why men of literary pursuits should express themselves contemptuously of each other, even when they happen to differ, much less when, in many respects, and in all main points, they agree in opinion.

You may possibly be incredulous on the subject; but, were I disposed to retaliate, and especially to make short and unfair selections, without the context, I am convinced I could point out more and greater faults and blunders in your pamphlet than in my own. You have fastened on a word, in defence of which, I might say more than appears to occur to you, but which I will at once admit I might as well not have used in this instance, I mean examinant, which, I presume, you, deriving it from the present participle, consider as equivalent to examiner, not to one who is under examination; or, if I may be allowed for a moment to coin a word, without being criticised for it, to one who is an examinand. Let me allow it to be a slip of the pen, which you and I, and men much greater than either of us, are, and always have been, liable to. The general language of my pamphlet, I am sure, is not so coarse and rude as to justify your producing this one word as a fair specimen of the whole. I could, and if your reply to this letter is

what it should be, I will show you a much greater slip of Dr. Richard Bentley, whom, I trust, you will not be offended at my placing a few degrees higher than you or myself, or any score of our equals. But to take only one word of your own pamphlet, let me ask you, by what possible analogy you justify even the name you assume? Is Philo-Grantus a lover of Granta? Then, I suppose, Philo-Romus is a lover of Rome, and Phil-Athenus a lover of Athens. I mention this, not with any motive of ill-will, nor with any view to snatch a paltry triumph; but merely to show you that every writer, however practised (and perhaps I have had some experience myself) is liable to occasional slips of the pen--the pauca maculæ

Quas aut incuria fudit

Aut humana parum cavit natura.

My wish being to promote the same objects with yourself, my present address to you is written with a view to show you wherein you have totally misunderstood and misrepresented, I might rather say perverted, my meaning; and I shall rejoice if I succeed in bringing that conviction to your mind, because I am quite sure that such a conviction ought to be there, and think it also very material to the interests of the great cause which we both have at heart, that its advocates should not quarrel among themselves. Before I proceed, however, on the subject, allow me to say, (and I assure you Ι mean no offence in it) that I am wholly at a loss to account for the apparent warnith and hostility with which you have attacked me, unless it be that you have understood my pamphlet has given offence to some of our principal opponents, and think to propitiate them by sacrificing me. I can hardly imagine any other grounds than some view of policy like this, for so much warmth and so much misapprehension.

You state that I condemn with vehemence the exclusive attention paid to mathematics. I am at a loss to know what greater vehemence is in my language than your own. I put it to your own candor, to read my language in the two paragraphs, p. 4.

"The inquiry which I wish to make, and to see pursued, is this, Why is the examination for degrees, why are the honors, and, generally speaking, the rewards and patronage of the University, confined so exclusively to mathematical pursuit ?

"Mathematics are, no doubt, a high and important branch of study. They are a science closely concerned in the investigation of abstract truth, requiring intensity of attention, accuracy of research, acuteness of application, and severity of judgment; they are intimately connected with the most useful arts, and with the sublimest speculations; with those inventions which give man power over the world in which he is placed, and with those discoveries which