be evidence of something to hope for. But the system of dissuasion
from all good learning is brought here to a pitch of perfection
that baffles the keenest aspirant. I run over to myself the names
of the scholars of Germany, a glorious catalogue: but ask for
those of Oxford,--Where are they? The echoes of their courts, as
vacant as their heads, will answer, Where are they? The tree shall
be known by its fruit: and seeing that this great tree, with all
its specious seeming, brings forth no fruit, I do denounce it as a
barren fig.

MR. MAC QUEDY. I shall set you right on this point. We do nothing
without motives. If learning get nothing but honour, and very
little of that; and if the good things of this world, which ought
to be the rewards of learning, become the mere gifts of self-
interested patronage; you must not wonder if, in the finishing of
education, the science which takes precedence of all others, should
be the science of currying favour.

REV. DR. FOLLIOTT. Very true, sir. Education is well finished,
for all worldly purposes, when the head is brought into the state
whereinto I am accustomed to bring a marrow-bone, when it has been
set before me on a toast, with a white napkin wrapped round it.
Nothing trundles along the high road of preferment so trimly as a
well-biassed sconce, picked clean within and polished without;
totus teres atque rotundus. The perfection of the finishing lies
in the bias, which keeps it trundling in the given direction.
There is good and sufficient reason for the fig being barren, but
it is not therefore the less a barren fig.

At Godstow, they gathered hazel on the grave of Rosamond; and,