The Convocation of the University of London must be careful
what it is about, or it will lose caste as a body of learned men. Anything more puerile than the debate of last Tuesday as to the motto that would best suit the University, can hardly be
imagined. Nor had the Committee of Convocation done its work welL We cannot easily imagine a motto less suited to a mere examining body,—which is what the University is at present at least,—and not only a mere examining body, but a body not even empowered to examine in theology or religious belief, than the. motto from Virgil,—Spiritus intus alit,—suggested for the adop- tion of Convocation. A University so ostentatiously secular can scarcely be said to have that interior life which gives nourishment from within at all. Even a much better suggestion (which the Committee had discarded) taken from the Poet-Laureate,—" Let knowledge grow from more to more,"—does not very happily hit the past history of the University, though it may describe the aspirations of the future. If the University is really to become a "Teaching University," however, that motto might do,—all the more that it suggests, perhaps, the chief want of the University by recalling the line which immediately succeeds it in Tennyson's poem,—" And more of reverence in us dwell."
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