It has been said that attendance at professorial lectures was theoretically obligatory; but it is hardly necessary to point out that even serious students have occasionally dispensed with the duty of attending lectures; and it is more than whispered there have been occasions in recent centuries when it was not an audience only that was wanting. There are, of course, instances of both extremes. Rumour tells of a certain professor of anatomy, who, lacking a quorum, bade his servant ’bring out the skeleton, in order that I may be able to address you as "gentle*men*;"’ but all professors have not been so conscientious. Gibbon goes so far as to assert that ’in the University of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether the pretence of teaching,’ and the Reverend James Hurdie does not much improve the matter, when he prepares to refute the historian’s charge in his ’Vindication of Magdalen College.’ So far as the College is concerned, the reverend gentleman has something of a case; but his defence of the University is not altogether satisfying. Some of the professors, no doubt, do lecture in a statutable manner. But ’the late noble but unfortunate Professor of Civil Law began his office with reading lectures, and only desisted for want of an audience’ (a plausible excuse, were it not that some lecturers seem to have entertained peculiar ideas as to the constitution of an audience). ’Terrae Filius’ has a story of a Professor of Divinity who came to his lecture-room, found to his surprise and displeasure, a band of intending hearers, and dismissed them straightway with the summary remark: ’Domini, vos non estis idonei auditores!’ ’The present Professor, newly appointed (the author has heard it from the highest authority), means to read.’ Moreover, ’the late Professor of Botany at one time _did_ read.’ In fact, as the ’Oxford Spy’ observes in 1818:-- ’Yet here the rays of Modern Science spread: Professors are appointed, lectures read. If none attend, or hear: not ours the blame, Theirs is the folly--and be theirs the shame.’ It is evident that professorial lectures were not a wholly unbearable burden. ’It is recorded in the veracious chronicle of Herodotus that Sandoces, a Persian judge, had been crucified by Darius, on the charge of taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly; but while he yet hung on the cross, Darius found by calculation that the good deeds of Sandoces towards the king’s house were more numerous than his evil deeds, and so, confessing that he had acted with more haste than wisdom, he ordered him to be taken down and set at large.’ [Illustration: _THE LIBRARY, MERTON COLLEGE. Drawn by Ernest Stamp._]