Lord Dufferin delivered his Rectorial address to the students of
St. Andrews University on Monday. It was full of interest, significance, and force, with occasional flashes of humour. Lord Dufferin addressed himself, he said, to the majority of the students, "young men who are now, what I myself was at your age, neither particularly brilliant nor ex- ceptionally dull, but gifted with ordinary ability and with power of memory and habits of industry common to the bulk of all University students." We fear Lord Dufferin's conception of the average St. Andrews student is rather like Lord Macaulay's conception of the average "fifth-form boy," —what most men would call a prodigy of memory and capacity for labour. It came out incidentally in the course of his address, that Lord Dufferin thought nothing of learning by heart a speech which it took him an hour and a half to deliver, and which he did deliver witheut a single pause of hesitation. If the average St. Andrews student can do that, we shall hear of the present generation of St. Andrews students during the next twenty years or so, as making their way to all the high positions which English officials are allowed to fill. A reten- tive memory does not, it is true, necessarily imply either sagacity or capacity or daring. But a powerful memory is far oftener found in combination with a mind of general power, than in combination with a mind of average strength. It is at least one of the chief constituents of intellectual strength.
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