THE OWENS COLLEGE.*

"Tux University of the busy," as the Owens College has been named by the Spectator, has not had to wait for its tercentenary before finding its historian. Forty years only have elapsed since the death of the founder, and thirty-six from the opening of the College ; yet it has not merely taken root and flourished as the leading educational institution of the North of England, with Faculties of arts, science, law, and medicine, with seven hundred students, and more than sixty Professors and teachers, but it has blossomed into a University, and has borne abundant fruit in the distinctions gained by some of its students, and the successful careers on which others have entered. The rapidity of its success has been almost without example. Opened in 1851 with sixty-two students, and with altogether inadequate funds for its establishment and maintenance, it languished, and even declined for several years, until in the session 1856.57, the eight Professors and Lecturers had only thirty-three students to whom to devote their attention. This session formed the nadir of the history of the College. The Manchester Guardian pronounced it to be a " mortifying failure ; " it sneered at the efforts of the founder, the trustees, and the Professors, to give to the young men of Manchester a University education, the advantages of which the editor thought were much overrated, and he predicted that if the decrease went on at the same rate, " which seems by no means improbable, the Professors will soon find their lecture- rooms vacant, and their influence as rapidly destroyed as that of the descendants of the Great Mogul." The Professors and trustees were more than disheartened ; and the question was seriously entertained of turning the College into an ordinary school, or into an institution for training elementary school- masters. Happily, neither of these courses was adopted. What- ever may have been the deficiencies of the first Principal as an administrator, he was a man of the loftiest ideals, and he deserves the praise of having at all times maintained the highest standard of education, and the importance of putting this before the citizens of Manchester, even though there were hardly any students to profit by it. The causes of the failure were, in fact, twofold,— one, the deplorably low standard of middle-class education in and about Manchester ; the other, certain faults in the organisa- tion and administration of the College which, in starting a new institution, the trustees and Professors had not unnaturally fallen into. Steps were taken to remedy these ; the education given became more systematic, and about the same time an improvement in the middle-class schools commenced. With the session 1858-59, the number of students began to increase, the education offered became more appreciated, and the successful career was commenced which, in the short space of less than thirty years, has brought about the remarkable results which we have just indicated.

But it is not by its material progress that the College should be judged. It deserves the credit of having at all times maintained that high standard of education which its first Principal so strongly advocated, and though, as was to be expected, the success of the scientific has surpassed that of the literary side, yet the College has never confused science with mere scientific information, and has never degraded its education into a teaching of merely material useful knowledge.

• The Owens College : its Foundation and Growth: and its Connection with the Vittoria University, Manchester, By Joseph Thompson. Manchester: J. E. Cornish.

It has been fortunate both in its Governing Body and in its Pro- fessors, and as an instance of the position of the latter, we may note that, of the sixteen members of the Council of the Royal Society elected in November last, no less than four are present or past Professors of the Owens College, whilst another is one of its most distinguished Associates. In the portly volume before us, Mr. Thompson has put together everything that any one can want to know respecting the founda-

tion and history of the College, and he has in addition given us a most interesting account of the early efforts—as far back as the year 1641—to establish a University at Manchester, as well as notices of the founder and original trustees ; and he has shown us that he possesses, where he allows himself to make

use of it, an agreeable narrative style, and much more literary ability and literary knowledge than we expect to find in a local historian. But there are two serious defects in the book, —a deficiency in proportion, and a too great prolixity through- out. Much of the early chapters will be read with interest; but even here, and still more in the latter part of the volume, we are irritated by the incessant insertion of memorials, addresses, resolutions, and minutes, many of which might without detri- ment have been omitted altogether, while there is hardly one of which all that is material could not have been compressed into two or three lines. A work that is to be used as a mere book of reference may be stuffed full of official documents; but a book that is to be read should never give these in extenso, but should incorporate a summary of them with the narrative, and any that are necessary to be given in full should be relegated to an appendix.

The founder of the College, John Owens, had as little as possible in common with the received idea of " the pions founder," though, indeed, very little seems known of his character, his habits, or his appearance. That he was a keen man of business, apparently thinking of and caring for nothing else, of reserved manners and retiring habits, is all that we can gather respecting him, and almost the single personal anecdote which Mr. Thompson has been able to give us is not one to con- vey a very high notion of his character :—

" It is said that in later days he occupied a large square pew [in Dr. M'All's chapel], and when Dr. M'All'e popularity caused the chapel to be crowded, John Owens was asked to allow strangers to sit with him or take a smaller pew, and, being offended at the sug- gestion, he left the place."

Nor does his personal appearance seem to have been attractive. No portrait of him is in existence, and the beautiful medallion by Woolner, placed in the College, does not, according to the only witness whom Mr. Thompson cites, well represent John Owens's features. We should be surprised if it did. When we

saw it, we took it for a medallion of Goethe ! Owens wished to leave his fortune to his only intimate friend, George Faulkner;

the latter, with rare disinterestedness, refused to accept it His attention had lately been called by his friend Samuel Fletcher to the facilities for obtaining a liberal education at a small expense afforded by the colleges existing in many large towns in Germany and Switzerland, and to the want of such an institution in Manchester. Faulkner urged Owens to leave his fortune to found a college or educational institute. The advice was taken, and the result has been the Owens College and the Victoria University.

The first Principal, A. J. Scott, the friend of Erskine of Linlathen, of Campbell of Row, of Story of Roseneath, of F.

D. Maurice, and George MacDonald, the colleague, and at once disciple and teacher of Irving, was a really remarkable man, almost a man of genius. He had a marvellous, and as it were electrical effect, on many of those who came in contact with him as his pupils or hearers ; but his few printed works are quite in- adequate as representations of the man or his spoken addresses. Eminently mystical, though not in the technical sense of the word a mystic, it was he who first anticipated the return of the Pentecostal gifts, and unless we are mistaken, it was in his presence that the gift of tongues was first vouchsafed :—

" He was profoundly impressed with the life and work of the early Church. He found as an element of that life certain unusual gifts— those of speaking and healing. As in the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit was conceived as a supernatural power which descended tem- porarily upon individuals, and produced extraordinary effects for definite purposes, so likewise in the first Church he conceived it was the supernatural divine power which called forth extraordinary effects of a remarkable kind. There had been the ecstatic condition of Braking with tongues, the apocalyptic gift of prophecy, the indi- vidual gift of the word of wisdom, the special power of faith for miraculous cures and similar extraordinary charismata, which were

looked upon as a sign of the Messianic spirit so it might be to-day, he thought, if there was similar faith, earnestness, and prayer."

In Irving's " Facts connected with Recent Manifesta- tions of Spiritual Gifts," he distinctly states that to Scott " it was reserved to sow the seed which has borne this precious fruit." What Scott's view of the tongues, and the other supernatural gifts and manifestations was in his later life, we do not know. He never voluntarily referred to them. But certainly long after he had separated from Irving, the impres- sion which he made upon many of the most highly cultivated of his bearers was neither less impressive nor less remarkable than that which had so strangely affected his hearers at Ferni- carry and Port Glasgow. Maurice, Sterling, and George MacDonald were among his warmest friends, and have borne the highest testimony to his moral and mental gifts. But he was essentially a prophet. To cultivated hearers of a certain class, and especially to those young minds which were filled with vague aspirations after the true, the beautiful, and the ideal, he was able, if not to satisfy, at least to advance and

encourage these aspirations, and to make his hearers feel that " if what reached them was good and great, there was something greater and better still unreached and there, if it only could be uttered," and there can be no doubt that his lectures on " The Relations of Religion to the Life of the Scholar" gave to many young minds a stimulus for carrying out under other masters a more definite educational course. A man less fit for organising and administering a new institution could hardly be found. Kindly and courteous to his colleagues, he was not only without the power of organisation and adminis- tration, but he was not able to see that such things were necessary ; while an indolence, perhaps produced, and certainly increased by declining health, rendered the transaction of the most ordinary business distasteful to him ; and it could not surprise any one who knew the man or his character, that during his Principalship the new institution was by no means a success, though its friends will never forget the value of his services in maintaining that lofty ideal of education which we have before noticed. We should be glad to see the chapter on A. J. Scott, somewhat amplified, appear as a separate monograph, for though we cannot think it germane to the sub- ject, giving as it does hardly a sentence to Scott's connection with Owens College, or his work there, yet it is certainly, taken by itself, the most interesting part of the book, and shows that Mr. Thompson possesses many of the gifts which we look for, but do not always find, in a biographer. Yet we are sorry to. see that he has followed the views of Queen Elizabeth rather than those of the more robust nature of Oliver Cromwell. His portrait of Scott is entirely without shadows, and no wart or excrescence is allowed to appear.

With the appointment of the present popular and successful Principal—Dr. Greenwood—in 1857, the College commenced that career of progress which has ever since continued. Systematic courses of study were instituted, improvements in many matters of organisation and administration were intro- duced, the number of students increased, while benefactions came in which enabled the authorities of the College to add to the number of the Professors, and to found scholarships and exhibitions. In Dr. Roscoe the College obtained not only one of the leading scientific men of the day as its Professor of Chemistry,. but one whose genial qualities and personal popularity rivalled his scientific attainments ; so that at an early period,. the Chemical Department acquired a reputation second to none in Europe, while in other branches of study no incon- siderable success was achieved. By the year 1865 it had be- come obvious that the work of the College could not be carried on in the confined and unsuitable building in which it had com- menced its existence. The Extension movement was started,. and a committee formed for obtaining subscriptions and erecting a new college. The public of Manchester and the neighbour- hood liberally responded to the appeal, and in the fifteen years which followed more than £200,000 was raised, with which the College buildings were erected, a Medical School built and endowed, and large additions made to the teaching staff. Nor has this been all. Numerous testamentary bequests have been received, including one of more than £100,000 from Mr. C. F. Beyer, C.E.; many scholarships have been founded by private benefactors; and a further effort is now being made to defray the cost of the additional buildings—in- cluding a museum and biological laboratory—now in course of erection. For these, we note, £27,000 has been raised ; but more than double this sum is required, and even then the College will be by no means complete. Mr. Thompson reminds us that it yet lacks a sufficient room for the library, a large lecture

theatre, and dining-rooms for the students, and that in many points its income is wholly inadequate to its wants. We cannot doubt that these will all before long be supplied ; and we can offer no better wish, no more earnest hope for the future of the College, than that its progress for the next quarter of a century may equal that of the past, a progress not exclusively, or, indeed, principally, material, and not only marked by the high intelli- gence and reputation of the Professors, but also by the in- tellectual progress of the students.