“The discourse of the new Lord Rector squared very well with the occasion.  There was no novelty in it.  New truths are not the gifts which the old offer the young; the lesson we learn last is but the fulness of the meaning of what was only partially apprehended at first.  Mr. Carlyle brought out things familiar enough to everyone who has read his works; there were the old platitudes and the old truths, and, it must be owned, mingled here and there with them the old errors.  Time has, however, its recompenses, and if the freshness of youth seemed to be wanting in the address of the Rector, so also was its crudity.  There was a singular mellowness in Mr. Carlyle’s speech, which was reflected in the homely language in which it was couched.  The chief lessons he had to enforce were to avoid cram, and to be painstaking, diligent, and patient in the acquisition of knowledge.  Students are not to try to make themselves acquainted with the outsides of as many things as possible, and ‘to go flourishing about’ upon the strength of their acquisitions, but to count a thing as known only when it is stamped on their mind.  The doctrine is only a new reading of the old maxim, non multa sed multum, but it is as much needed now as ever it was.  Still more appropriate to the present day was Mr. Carlyle’s protest against the notion that a University is the place where a man is to be fitted for the special work of a profession.  A University, as he puts it, teaches a man how to read, or, as we may say more generally, how to learn.  It is not the function of such a place to offer particular and technical knowledge, but to prepare a man for mastering any science by teaching him the method of all.  A child learns the use of his body, not the art of a carpenter or smith, and the University student learns the use of his mind, not the professional lore of a lawyer or a physician.  It is pleasant to meet with a strong reassertion of doctrines which the utilitarianism of a commercial and manufacturing age is too apt to make us all forget.  Mr. Carlyle is essentially conservative in his notions on academic functions.  Accuracy, discrimination, judgment, are with him the be-all and end-all of educational training.  If a man has learnt to know a thing in itself, and in its relation to surrounding phenomena, he has got from a University what it is its proper duty to teach.  Accordingly, we find him bestowing a good word on poor old Arthur Collins, who showed that he possessed these valuable qualities in the humble work of compiling a Peerage.

“The new Lord Rector is, however, as conservative in his choice of the implements of study as he is in the determination of its objects.  The languages and the history of the great nations of antiquity he puts foremost, like any other pedagogue.  The Greeks and the Romans are, he tells the Edinburgh students, ’a pair of nations shining in the records left by themselves as a kind of pillar to light up life in the darkness of the past ages;’ and