The Master of the Rolls, in distributing the prizes to
the students of University College, London, on Wednesday, remarked on the fact that the opening of the older Universities to Dissenters had not only not injured the Colleges founded especially for Dissenters, but had apparently not in any way interfered with their advancing prosperity. This is certainly true of University College, which has a rapidly increasing number of students and much larger receipts' han it had in the days when Dissenters were shut out from both Oxford and Cambridge. The reason we take to be that the more education there is in the country, the more demand there is for different varieties of it, and especially for certain varieties which Cambridge and Oxford will never, in spite of all their modernising tendencies, supply so well as newer institutions. University College, London, teaches the ancient languages, and teaches them well, but it teaches them differently from Oxford and Cambridge ; not in a way so well adapted for scholars, but in a way much better adapted for a general middle-class education. And so it is with other subjects. The Colleges of the London University are places of rather more miscellaneous learning than the older Universities, and for that very reason better adapted to persons who do want to know something of the world of letters, but have not the chance of giving up two or three years to one or two subjects.
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