THE COLLEGIAN'S GUIDE.
THE professed object of this book is to furnish information to parents and guardians respecting the proper mode of placing youth at the Universi- ties, especially Oxford; as well as to instruct young men in the right mode of proceeding when there, to stimulate their studies, and to warn them against the temptations that beset them. None of these purposes are very well achieved ; nor does the author appear capable of achieving them. We may deduce from his pages that a University education is not so valuable for the learning it furnishes as for the character it forms ; that persons who are idle at Oxford would be idle, perhaps more idle, any- where else ; that in so large a collection of young bloods some irregu- larities will be committed, but that in no other assemblage of equal numbers with equal raeqns will there be found so little vice or dissipation; together with some other novelties of a similar kind. The necessity of an introduction to get a name on the books of a crack college, and some scattered information of a practical character, may be picked out of its pages ; but the staple of the book consists of descriptions of University eating, drinking, pranks, and modes of cramming, embodied in the cha- racters of sundry " fast " and foolish fellows, and clothed in college slang with importations from London. This matter is occasionally gar- nished with serious exhortations, and tales of imprudence and extrava- gance ruined, designed to point a moral, but so evidently concocted for the occasion as to fail of their effect ; the spirit by which they are ani- mated very much resembling that of a middle-aged man upon town when he is maudlin.
All this is exhibited in the guise of a fiction. There are a couple of parsons, such as Theodore Hook would have described in good faith,— though we doubt whether he would have put the word " tin " (meaning money) in the mouth of his model divines ; and they are acquainted with a country squire about t2) send his son to the University. The old gentleman has been somewhat frightened by the tales he has heard of the extrava- gance and wildness of under-graduates. He consequently applies to his two reverend acquaintances ; who give their advice in a number of after- dinner dialogues, professing to exhibit college life in a series of "graphic" scenes, from the first entrance to the attainment of honours. With this didactic purpose, several incidents are used up ; and as it seems that the regular life of the steady student is not well adapted for the purposes of fiction, the " fast " men are selected : so that if the reader form a judg- ment of the University from what is shown in action, he will receive but an indifferent opinion of it.
The author is so full and satisfactory on the subject of cramming,— expounding the principles on which it is based, exhibiting the characters of some of the professors, and tracing the progress of three or four gen- tlemen during their career of working up for examination,—that one would think he had procured his own degree of "M. A." by some such means. There is, however, a good deal of misapprehension about what is called cranuning. The "grinder," as he is termed in London, is very often merely a skilful private teacher, necessary to stimulate the pupil, guide him in selecting the branches of the subjects he should study, and possess him with that living or floating knowledge which in business constitutes practice as opposed to theory—in law, for example, where judges and juries have to be considered. This necessity becomes more ob- vious when we look at the vast range of subjects required from students, and the small time they are allowed, or at least required, to give to them—in three or four years assumed to be proficient in many sciences, a thorough knowledge of one of which makes a distinguished man. The necessity of cramming, and in a measure its practice, arises from the folly of examiners in raising the standard so high that, rigidly enforced, no one could pass it. If the range were narrowed and the examination thorough, what is called "cramming" would be a species of study of itself: and it may perhaps be laid down as a rule that greater proficiency should be required in a practical art than in " learning." If grammar is the subject, the examiner may rightly require a knowledge of all the elements and rules : an idea of the principles of their application is absolutely ne- cessary, but an occasional mistake in the application is nothing. Again, in language, the student ought to be able to undertake to construe any book as difficult as the proficiency proposed, though more complete mastery will be looked for in such as he himself may offer. But in history, or any general science, or even the critical illustration of any book, it is absurd to propose an unlimited range ; because the student must either cram or run a risk. Besides more or less of classics, logic, mathematics, morals, and general literature, an university examination embraces the Old and New Testament, a competent knowledge of which, in manners, history, and doctrine, is the work of a life. The consequence, according to this author, is these kind of short cuts. "It is found from observation, that in the Old Testament the examinations ton chiefly on the more familiar biographies and parts of Jewish history, as well Luken types and prophecies. The crammer, therefore, teaches a brief outline of Old Testament history. The types and chief prophecies are published with the corresponding fulfil- 'cents in opposite columns. . A few pages of this unconnected dialogue, together with short accounts of Daniel, Ezekiel, and the other Prophets, in about six lines each, will often enable a candidate, who has not read one of the prophets nor fifty chapters of the Old Testament in all, to answer with as much readiness as if he possessed well-digested knowledge. If, in addition to this, the tutor has time to call attention to about twenty examiners' crotchets and likely parts, the candi- date may expect to make stair appearance, and answer with a degree of prompti- tude highly satisfactory to an examiner; who supposes that the candidate is as well acquainted with the other parts of the Bible as with those in which he is trying him.
"Again, as to the Articles, one appropriate text for each point of doctrine ist crammed, (for I call all knowledge crammed which is crude and undigested,)from a shilling book, which, like the book of types and prophecies, are commonly called Divinity Crams.'"
Another mode, not, however, peculiar to Oxford or Cambridge, is to study the examiners and learn the questions they propose. It is thus described in a dialogue.
"'Well, Lipsley, how does Tufton say you are getting on? and did he say what he thought of my chance ? ' he says, I need not trouble myself much more with either types, pre- dicables, or prophecies and that I have got a sort of slovenly notion of the Old Testament history. I told him that seemed hardest of all; for I did not see my way, and there appeared no end of it. However, he encouraged me by explain- ing a little of his plan: he sap he has got all this history drawn out on one sheet of foolscap. In this epitome he has made so lucky a hit that he has not had a pupil for a long time examined in a single point which that sheet does not contain. I'll tell you how he made it. Every pupil, after his examination, comes to thank him, as s matter of course; and as every man, you know, is loquacious enough on such occasions, Tufton gets out of him all the questions he was asked in the schools; and according to these questions he has moulded his cram-papers. He will take us through this part both together: he says it is much easier than it seems.' "
THE RATIONALE OF CRAMMING.
" The first point, therefore, in which a crammer differs from other tutors, is in the selection of subjects. While another tutor would teach every part of the books2 given up, he virtually reduces their quantity, dwelling chiefly on the likely "The second point in which a crammer excels is in fixing the attention, and reducing subjects to the comprehension of ill-formed and undisciplined minds. "The third qualification of a crammer is a happy manner and address, to en- courage the desponding, to animate the idle and to make the exertions of the pupil continually Increase in such a ratio that he shall be wound up to concert- pitch by the day of entering the schools. "In each of these three points, as in all other matters, practice makes perfect. Besides, there is ample scope for genius and invention; and, doubtless, the most successful tutors have had high natural endowments."
AN OXFORD CRAMMER.
"There was for some years, and perhaps still is, in Oxford, a professor of the art of cramming of great notoriety. He was once a fellow of one of the colleges, and some say he lost his fellowship by his irregularities and low propensities. Those who condescended to apply to him had to seek him not uncommonly at some low public-house. "This classic lecturer was described to me by one who had seen him exercising his vocation in terms which! should prejudice the University if I were to repeat. Imagine a man of forty years of age, unwashed and unshorn, redolent of tobacco, and flushed and bloated with the last night's beer, sitting in a college-room, display- ing a wondrous volubility and power of memory in classical, logical, and scri literature, without a book or any other assistance than a cigar between his
and his thumb and a tankard of college-ale. Of course, the kind of technical me- mory and illustrations which a man of this degraded taste would introduce are of too painful a nature for any feeling mind to think of; though well, too well suited, unhappily, to the perverted tastes of that small portion of under-graduates who are so shameless as to countenance him."
It may be inferred from these examples that there is considerable talent of a low kind displayed in The Collegian's Guide. The variety of subjects, vividness of the scenes, and character of the dialogues, would have made an
effective book published as a set of sketches. But the avowed didactic and moral objects of the work, contrasted with its slang and coarseness, produce disappointment.
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