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of which the pupils should be taught the Articles of the Faith, the arts of handiwork, sewing and spinning. The head-mistress was statutably required to read, write, sum, and bake. This school was from the first intended to be under the guardianship of the University, and, in spite of storm and stress for both foundations, the close connexion has been preserved at no small sacrifice. At the end of each day the girls after supper said a prayer for the soul of the founder and the prosperity of the University. The University could in fact dismiss with or without reason the mistress, a widow or old maid of at least thirty-five years and of good character, and the chaste and virtuous maidservant. The staff consisted of a grave ecclesiastic, who acted as visitor, a doctor, a barber for bleeding purposes, and a porter of at least forty-five, unmarried or a widower, who lived in a separate lodge and opened and shut the college gates. The girls were admitted between the ages of seven and eleven, and could stay till twenty. Some were entered as exhibitioners free of cost, others as paying boarders, while the University could nominate candidates who were maintained at cost price. The girls all dressed in grey and white, and the senior student wore on her breast the founder's arms. This is an unusually early example of a care for women's education in Spain, and it is interesting to find the University not only undertaking this but forming a link between the higher and lower branches of learning. This link has never been snapped. The prettiest sight of the tercentenary ceremonies was the gathering of the primary schools in the University quadrangle, where prizes were awarded. As the little girls filed past the founder's statue on their outward way each threw a handful of flowers thereat. For the fierce old persecutor these flowers may serve the purpose of the Peri's tear.

In the march of university extension Oviedo has led the van. It began with lectures of the type well known in England, and much difficulty was experienced in keeping up the level of attendance. These have now been in great measure supplanted by the so-called clases populares. The number of students admitted is much smaller, and they

have not only to listen but to work. This very system is now in course of adoption at Oxford as the result of last year's conference with the representatives of the working classes. A lecturer is established at an important centre such as Rochdale, where it is already in being, and is to take a practical class once a week at different townships within a given radius. Just so the professors of Oviedo have been extending their operations for several years to every corner of Asturias, and even to neighbouring provinces. The University is poor, and this noble work has been gratuitously organized by its professors. Not only this, but they devote their vacations to giving the poorest children an educational holiday in the healthful pine-woods by the sea, to the advantage alike of morals, mind, and matter. These vacation colonies' are becoming more and more permanent, and canvas is in course of being replaced by barracoons, or termagant tentes,' as a Berkshire rustic once described the novel cricket pavilion.

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There is, after all, a truer basis of comparison in this class of work between our universities and that of Oviedo than could well exist as between England and other Continental countries. The Northern Spaniard has a spirit of enterprise crossed with a strain of idleness. These are respectively the hope and the despair alike of the seminar and of university extension. But in one respect the Spaniard, even the Northern Spaniard, has the advantage. Both teachers and learners are more obviously expansive, more unshamedly sympathetic. English professors or lecturers might well envy the enthusiasm with which their colleagues of Oviedo were welcomed at the wayside stations on the excursions which formed the interludes of the Tercentenary ceremonies. At one station there was a group of grown-up girls in their best white dresses awaiting in the dusk the return train in order to present bouquets to the lady guests whom they had espied in the early morning. At another the communal school was drawn up in line to salute the train with their miniature rifles wielded by children some of whom were not older than four or five All were dressed in the full uniform of Spanish soldiers,

while a tiny colonel on a tiny horse rode somewhat anxiously behind the lines, and three little short-skirted vivandières with revolvers and kegs of cognac at their waists were ready to apply bullets or restoratives to respectively appropriate recipients. In general sympathy also with this intellectual movement a naval brigade of infantile sailors detrained at Oviedo amid the plaudits of the crowd, though it must be confessed that the annual fair, which curiously resembles that of St. Giles at Oxford, contributed to the date of this strategic movement.

It is probable that one of the more material reasons for the success of Oviedo in the cause of university extension has been its smallness and the college-like intimacy of its staff. There has been no need for interminable committees, for inconsequent debates, for elaborate statutes and regulations. All has been simple, opportunist, elastic, the result in great measure of informal conversation as in a college common-room. It is true, of course, that the sphere of action is adapted to this informal method. If abstraction be made of the influence of Oviedo on Bilbao and Santander, it has in its own province to meet the needs of smaller industrial centres than is the case with Oxford and Cambridge. Personal intercourse can thus be closer; experiments are less costly, and their failure is not so flaring.

The festivals of the Tercentenary will never be forgotten by those who had the good fortune to be present. On the foundation day, September 21, the admirable statue of Cardinal Valdés was unveiled in the centre of the quadrangle. This ceremony was preceded by the presentation of addresses. One by one the senior representative of other universities spoke or read the congratulatory messages in Spanish, in French, or, in the case of Oxford and Cambridge, in Latin. It was a wonderful scene of colour under the bright sunshine. In the cloister facing the gateway sat the Rector guarded by the bedels with their handsome lantern-shaped silver maces. On either side of him were the highest officials of the province, the Bishop of the diocese, and the President of the Academy, D. Alejandro Pidal, who acted as the King's representative. The President

wore the collar of the Golden Fleece, and hard by him was a portly figure in the resplendent uniform of the Knights of Calatrava. The Spanish doctors and the representatives of foreign universities were ranged, bench by bench, at right angles to the rectorial chair. The sober colours of Oxford, Cambridge, and Columbia, even the scarlet of a doctor of divinity and a doctor of law, were dulled by the glowing orange robes of the Frenchmen and the brilliant hoods and caps of the Spaniards. In Spain not only the colour of the hood but that of the cap denotes the facultya deep cherry for law, blue for arts, green for canonists, white for theologians, and yellow for science. The cap has developed in a different direction from that of the English and American mortar-board.' The button and tassel are in Spain also the essential features, but here the flat board disappears, and the tassel is drawn down closely, like a pinge all round the body of the round cap. The hood, moreover, is in effect a cape, resembling in shape that of an English coachman. In England it is an academic solecism to wear gloves with cap and gown, but in Spain it is de rigueur, and, indeed, the presentation of gloves used, at all events, to rank among the symbols of degree. The present Rector in his admirable history of the University rightly regrets the abolition of the old undergraduate's gown. This was cheap and useful, and gave a sense of democratic equality. The frock-coat and dress-coat, which have replaced it for ceremonial purposes, betray in material and cut the depth of the wearer's purse and the height of his social aspirations.

Almost more effective than the ceremony in the quadrangle was that in the Cathedral, where the professors and delegates were ranked on either side of the long coro, their rich robes standing out brightly from the congregation which thronged the nave and aisles. The High Mass in commemoration of the foundation of this most progressive University gave a pleasing impression of the harmony which should always be possible between science and religion, and this indeed was the text of the Bishop of Tuy's earnest sermon. In the public Press there were signs of friction and temperament and incompatibility of ideal, but

in the University gatherings there was at most one jarring note, and at the banquet the bishops cheerily smoked the same phenomenally long cigars as the most advanced professors and the Socialist prodigy from extension circles.

Functions and festivals offered precious opportunities for the study of Spanish oratory. The main types were two, the restrained and the rhetorical. The Minister of Public Instruction spoke with deliberation, terseness, and gravity: he resembled an English peer addressing the House of Lords on a non-political topic. The Rector of the University was brisker, more incisive, but also short and greatly to the point he might be compared to a good speaker in Convocation with a touch of the chairman of a company. The very antithesis was the ex-Rector D. Felix de Aramburu, now Senator for the Province of Asturias, and with him may be associated D. Alejandro Pidal. To English ears their oratory was rather perfervid than persuasive. Storms of passion swept across the most peaceful topics. They seemed to strive to divest themselves of all superfluous limbs, so that the heart might have the freer play. In his afterdinner speech the President of the Academy shook himself into moments of exhaustion in which he appeared to gasp for life; but this was only the calm before a fresh storm of eloquence. It was interesting to notice that the two young speakers who played a public part reproduced the self-same types. The aristocratic undergraduate, who welcomed, in French, it is true, the foreign delegates, was fluent and impressive, but there was an entire absence of mannerism or gesticulation. He was indeed in the quadrangle and later in the ball-room, as a young English lady said, just like an Oxford undergraduate, only, if possible, nicer still. On the other hand, the really eloquent representative of the university extension whirled his arms round like the sails of a windmill, and roared himself hoarse over the praises of the present and the delinquencies or futilities of the past. It was remarkable that none of the orators of the rhetorical type appeared to realize how greatly persuasion, which is the real aim of rhetoric, depends on flexibility of tone, for this is necessarily lost when the voice is

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