Liberal, accessible, and utilitarian, it might have been expected that the example ...

Liberal, accessible, and utilitarian, it might have been expected that the example of the Londoners would have been widely and speedily followed. That it was not, that the northern colleges emerged late and slowly from their original obscurity, shows how alien to the middle classes was the idea of higher education not connected with practical utility or social distinction, and how much was lost with the disappearance of the Nonconformist academies of the eighteenth century.' A feeble effort to provide the north with inexpensive culture was made by the Dean and Chapter of the richest of English cathedrals, but the historian of Victorian England will not often have occasion to mention the University of Durham.

Both at Oxford and at Cambridge the career of the pass-man was little more than the prolongation of his school days without the discipline.

In fact, as Freeman put it, prospective parsons and prospective lawyers, young men of rank and fortune, were provided for; if they had any intellectual ambitions they were admirably provided for; if they had not, the Universities had little to give them, and outside the circle of the Church, the Bar, and the landed gentry, they had nothing to give at all.