Though the university as a teaching body pined before the rising colleges, and for centuries lay in a swoon, it was not dead. It was kept alive by certain endowments for lecturers. But so thoroughly did the college tutors supply all undergraduate needs that, unless walls indeed have ears, the lectures were never heard. The professors gradually abandoned the university schools and gave the unattended lectures in their own houses. Such lectures were known as "study lectures." Even these gave way to silence. An odd situation was caused by the fact that there were also salaries paid to university proctors, a part of whose duty it was to see that the professorial lectures were properly given. When a proctor appeared, the learned professor would snatch up his manuscript and read until his auditor got tired and left. This was one case in which a thief was not the person to catch a thief; such energy on the part of the proctor was unusual, and was regarded as in extremely bad form. The abuse proceeded so far that in some cases, when hearers appeared at the appointed hour, the professors refused point blank to read their lectures. The climax of the farce was that at graduation students were fined for having cut these lectures that had never been given. When Samuel Johnson was fined for neglecting a college lecture to go "sliding on Christ Church Meadow," he exclaimed, "Sir, you have fined me twopence for missing a lecture that was not worth a penny!" His untimely departure from Oxford has lamentably left us to conjecture what he would have said upon paying the university fines at graduation for cutting lectures that had never been given.