17 MAY 1884, Page 3

In the absence of Lord Granville, Sir James Paget, Vice-

'Chancellor of the University of London, distributed the diplomas, and medals, and prizes of the University of London on Wednesday, in Burlington Gardens, to the young women and men who had gained those distinctions during the last year, in the theatre of the University, and afterwards delivered a most able address, in which he warned the students against imagining that in passing their examinations and gaining their degrees they had surmounted the pass of life, instead of having merely entered on the beginning of the ascent. Nevertheless, he .declared his belief that those who had succeeded by their earnestness as students would almost always succeed as men, and that those who had failed from want of resolution as students would almost always fail as men. He had some time ago taken the pains to trace the history of no less than a thousand of his own pupils, and had found, in the very great majority of cases, that the student-life was a fair criterion of the character .of the subsequent career. Whether that would apply equally to the career of the women whom the University admitted, the Tice-Chancellor did not venture to assert. And we think it would be hardly safe to maintain that what is essentially a criterion of personal force and, to some extent, of personal independence, would necessarily prove a safe criterion either of success or of failure in the most common of feminine careers,—the winning of confidence and affection from those who ply the labouring oar.