The official first stone of Selwyn College, at Cambridge, was
laid on Wednesday,—the real first stone having been laid some months previously, for the walls are already rising fast,—and the .occasion was, of course, used to say all the graceful and grateful things that it was appropriate to say of Bishop Selwyn, in whose memory the College is founded, and of the system of plain living and high thinking that the new College is intended to promote. The Bishop of Durham made a remarkable little speech, in which he said that the late Bishop Selwyn illustrated just the opposite of the saying about a Russian, " Scratch the surface, and you come to the barbarian ;" his art had always been so to scratch the surface, that you come to the true man beneath. In his hands, such a College as this would have been an instrument of rare power. That is quite true ; and yet Bishop Selwyn was in some respects more of a formalist, as a Churchman,—we speak of the days of his Lichfield. bishopric and his Convocation speeches,—than the frank, manly, simple, and perfectly open- minded man chosen for the head of the new College. In Mr. Lyttelton, we believe that the Selwyn College has secured the promise of a fair start, and a popularity that will be all the deeper laid for springing from a religious root. Under no man, perhaps, could " religion, simplicity of life, and discipline "- which are intended to be the characteristics of the Selwyn College life—be rendered more genuinely prepossessing, less didactic, prim, and rigid.
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