Oxford reform and Oxford professors : a reply to certain objections urged against the report of the Queen's Commissioners / by Henry Halford Vaughan.

  • Halford, Henry, 1766-1844.
Date:
1854
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Oxford reform and Oxford professors : a reply to certain objections urged against the report of the Queen's Commissioners / by Henry Halford Vaughan. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    I ! I the habits of students in Germany, has thus expressed himself:—‘ Any comparison witli other Universities, ‘ such as those of Germany, which are looked upon ‘ as scenes of the most unbridled folly and coarse ‘ licentiousness, would be regaixled by persons of this ‘ opinion (in alluding to a particular school of opinion) ‘ as highly insulting to these sanctuaries of piety and ‘ morahty. But unless we suppose that in this [view] ‘ much habitual self-deception, and much ignorance or ‘ forgetfulness, are mixed up, we cannot acquit them ‘ of what, in our language, could scarcely be called ‘ anything but the most disgusting hypocrisy. As it ‘ is, however, this mixture of hypocrisy and self- ‘ deception, of not seeing and not choosing to see, &c. ‘ In truth, the facts which concern the moral state ‘ of the English Universities are so notorious, that we ‘ cannot but fancy that these University panegyrists ‘ must meet each other in their confidential moments, ‘ with the like inability to preserve their gravity as ‘ the Eoman Augurs of old. ‘ The real moral difference between the Eng-lish ‘ and the German Universities is not worth tafking- of. ‘ The kind of excess is not the same; but the real ‘ system is in fact the same in both countries.’* These words are penned by an author whom com- mon reputation has characterized as leaning with a constant bias in general to the Enghsh institutions, and they have now been written for some years. But I learn, from the most recent and authentic informa- tion, that the morality of students in the German Universities, on those points particularly on which the l' * Hubei’’s English Universities, vol. ii. p. 313.