ABSTRACT
Like many an economic theory, the idea of giving London its own university cropped up regularly across the years until the time was right for it to take hold. It was proposed by Sir Humphrey Gilbert in the sixteenth century; by Abraham Cowley in the seventeenth; and by Defoe, in a tract ambitiously entitled Augusta Triumphant: Or, the Way to Make London the Most Flourishing City in the Universe, in 1728. It was, however, a minor literary light who succeeded where Cowley and Defoe had failed: the poet Thomas Campbell, who in 1820 visited Bonn in the course of collecting material for a general survey of European literature.
