XVII.] THE 'SEMINAR'. 429 sound work in our own as well as in the other departments of clerical education, and where he has already enlisted the help of one of the most successful and zealous of the younger men who have followed our line here. Of our dear friend Laing, whose absence wè feel more and more every term, what can I say, but that we trust and hope that one day he may be restored to us and to the studies that he was so wonderfully qualified to develop and adorn? Well, with these home losses we have counterbalancing gains in the enlisting of new men. The continued vigour of our veterans is hardly to be called a gain, but it is a matter of profound congratulation: I rejoice to think that the Chichele Professor, Mr. Owen, and Mr. Boase are as young, and zealous and kind, and sympathetic as they ever were, and that is as much as the best and kindest of men can be; seventeen years of a very trying Regius Professor have not worn out their goodwill. Another point I will mention, though I need not tell too much of the secrets of the Seminar : there is a great gain to us in the spontaneous working of the little clubs of Historical debate which have sprung up within the last few years, collegiate and inter-collegiate. I will not talk of comparing great things with small, but I rejoice to see in these a continuity, with differentiation, of the old circles which I remember when I was an undergraduate and a bachelor: I was always proud of having been for a little time secretary of the Hermes, which Archdeacon Palmer, and, alas ! how few besides, must recollect as a very small and earnest and affectionate literary brotherhood, well to be remembered as a seed-bed in the sowing time, not only of germinating ideas that spring and die with or without fruit-bearing, but of high sympathies and dear friendships that grow stronger and immortal by age. I would augur for our little History clubs as fair a future.