‘It is a very sad evening of my College life, to have the College pulled in pieces and ruined by a set of schoolboys. It is very nearly that kind of work. The Act of Parliament gives all our Fellows equal weight for certain purposes, and the younger part of them all vote the same way, and against the Seniors. Several of these juveniles are really boys, several others only Bachelors of Arts, so we have crazy work, as I think it[13].’
As regards the University, as distinct from the College, he deserves recognition as having effected important educational changes. These range over the whole of his life, commencing with the novelties which he introduced, in conjunction with Herschel, Peacock, and Babbage, into the study of mathematics, so early as 1819. It was his constant endeavour, whatever office he held—whether Moderator, Examiner, or College lecturer—to keep the improvement and development of the Mathematical Tripos constantly before the University. But, before we enumerate the special improvements or developments with which he may be credited, let us consider what was his leading idea. He held that every man who was worth educating at all, had within him various faculties, such as the mathematical, the philological, the critical, the poetical, and the like; and that the truly liberal education was that which would develop all of these, some more, some less, according to the individual nature. A devotion to ‘favourite and selected pursuits’ was a proof, according to him, of ‘effeminacy of mind.’ We are not sure that he would have been prepared to introduce one or more classical papers into the Mathematical Tripos, though he held that a mere mathematician was not an educated man; but he was emphatic in wishing to preserve the provisions by which classical men were obliged to pass certain mathematical examinations. He did not want ‘_much_ mathematics’ from them, he said, writing to Archdeacon Hare in 1842; ‘but a man who either cannot or will not understand Euclid, is a man whom we lose nothing by not keeping among us.’ He was no friend to examinations. He ‘repudiated emulation as the sole spring of action in our education,’ but did not see his way to reducing it. It was probably this feeling that made him object to private tuition so strongly as he always did. In opposition to private tutors, he wished to increase attendance at Professors’ lectures; and succeeded in ‘connecting them with examinations,’ as he called it; in other words, in making attendance at them compulsory for precisely those men who were least capable of deriving benefit from the highest teaching which the University can give, namely, the candidates for the Ordinary Degree.