and the occasional questions of the teacher; the most idle will
carry something away; and the more diligent will compare the
instructions, which they have heard in the school, with the volumes,
which they peruse in their chamber. The advice of a skilful
professor will adapt a course of reading to every mind and every
situation; his authority will discover, admonish, and at last
chastise the negligence of his disciples; and his vigilant inquiries
will ascertain the steps of their literary progress. Whatever
science he professes he may illustrate in a series of discourses,
composed in the leisure of his closet, pronounced on public
occasions, and finally delivered to the press. I observe with
pleasure, that in the university of Oxford Dr. Lowth, with equal
eloquence and erudition, has executed this task in his incomparable
Praelections on the Poetry of the Hebrews.

The college of St. Mary Magdalen was founded in the fifteenth
century by Wainfleet, bishop of Winchester; and now consists of a
president, forty fellows, and a number of inferior students. It is
esteemed one of the largest and most wealthy of our academical
corporations, which may be compared to the Benedictine abbeys of
Catholic countries; and I have loosely heard that the estates
belonging to Magdalen College, which are leased by those indulgent
landlords at small quit-rents and occasional fines, might be raised,
in the hands of private avarice, to an annual revenue of nearly
thirty thousand pounds. Our colleges are supposed to be schools of
science, as well as of education; nor is it unreasonable to expect
that a body of literary men, devoted to a life of celibacy, exempt
from the care of their own subsistence, and amply provided with
books, should devote their leisure to the prosecution of study, and
that some effects of their studies should be manifested to the