The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

187

LETTERS ON UNIVERSITY REFORM,
1846-1848.
To R. R. W. LINGEN.
BEAUMARIS, September 5, I846.. I am very glad you have made acquaintance with
Horsman, of whom I have heard Stanley speak highly. If he
is up to the speaking part of it I should think he was a very
fit person to take up University reform. The Universities
seem to me a more promising nucleus for education, if we
could but educate them first, than Dr. Kay-Shuttleworth and
Privy Council schemes. If you and I and Stanley were Canons
of Christ Church, I wonder what difference it would make
in the perspective of our view. In what increased ratio, think
you, should we feel the responsibility of change? Not of
course in the gross palpable form of as 200: I200-but in some
remote corner of the mind a maturer wisdom would spring up,
and we should say of the efforts of the juveniles, 'This also
is vanity.' After all, men not systems might seem to be
wanted. Quid ultra tendis. Here are we....
To R. R. W. LINGEN.
BEAUMARIS, September, I846... About University reform, I fully agree in the necessity
of getting practical suggestions ready for the opportunity when
it occurs. The greatest change within, the least without,
nothing unprecedented, nothing without regard to the better
spirit of the place, seems the conservative side of the question.
What is the feeling among lawyers respecting Corporation
property? I suppose to save additional theories as much as
possible and class it all with private property. If so, to assert
a constitutional against the legal view is the indoctrination
to be instilled. Something may be made of the anomalous