The private tutors, of whom I have just spoken, do a considerable part of the work of tuition; but they are, in an official point of view, mere excrescences upon our system. They are rather volunteers than soldiers in the regular organized army. The college esprit de corps, which is the mainspring of an English University, centres round the master, fellows, and scholars of those learned and religious foundations for which, “as in private duty bound,” our preachers weekly entreat our prayers. Without the colleges the University would sink to the level of the institution profanely known (I never could guess why) as Stincomalee. We love the University as an American loves the Union, with a reflective passion bred rather in the head than in the heart; for our college we feel the warm personal enthusiasm that the Southern planter bears to South Carolina or the “old dominion.” Patriotism is sometimes warmer and less intelligent, as its object becomes more limited. A general is said to have bid his troops “remember that they were Portuguese” (not, one would have thought, a very stirring reminiscence); an inhabitant of Jersey considers that the chief jewel in the British crown is represented by the Channel Islands; and, on the same principle, every undergraduate always assumes that the members of his own college are a special breed of men, possessing an amount of pluck, good manners, and good feeling unknown elsewhere.