Every American college is "old" So-and-So; but age, like everything else, is relative. A centennial or semi-centennial commemoration fills us with piety and a sense--of antiquity. Some college old folks on the other side have a different standard of age. In 1922 the University of Padua kept the anniversary of its seven hundredth birthday. This month the University of Naples has been doing the same. St. Thomas Aquinas, a student there for six years, is its most illustrious graduate. On the six hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his death, which happened to be the two hundredth of Kant's, Cardinal Mercier delivered the oration in the Church of San Domenico Maggiore, where Aquinas used to lecture.

Aquinas, pupil of Plate and Aristotle, undisputed master for so many centuries of Catholic philosophy and theology, is glory enough for any university; one of the greatest glories of the Middle Age. In philosophy, law, history, medicine and anatomy the list of famous Neapolitans, is long. Remembering Parthenope, the clearest absent vision of her university is the quadrangle where stand the statues of those curious associates, two of whom came through martyrdom and exile to this peace--St. Thomas, Pietro della Vigna, Giordano Bruno. Pietro, Chancellor, of the Emperor Frederick II., and like him a poet, delivered his master's character to the university. Blinded by the Emperor, who trusted to forged letters, the work of onvy, "the harlot, who ne'er turned her gloating eyes from Caesar's household," he dashed, his head against a wall, according to his legend. Dante finds him in the Harpy-haunted Wood of suicides and lets him defend his honor and good faith.

The fate of Giordano Bruno, Dominican pantheist, smiter of scholastic Aristotelianism, philosophical ancestor, in some regards, of Spinoza, is known "to every schoolboy," at least in the Macaulay School. The blind self-slain Chancellor, the great Dominican heretic, Copernican, metaphysician, the supreme schoolman, are strange comrades, vivid to the imagination. Two of them are instinct with the Virgilian tenderness, in that city of Virgil, of "mentem mortalia tangunt." --New York Times.