So lately as the eighteenth century, when the monastic or collegiate
system which has now so totally disappeared from the Scottish
universities yet lingered about them, the censor was a more important,
or at least more laborious officer, and, oddly enough, he corresponded
in some measure with the character into which, in England, the Proctor
had been so strangely diverted. In a regulation adopted in Glasgow, in
1725, it is provided “that all students be obliged, after the bells
ring, immediately to repair to their classes, and to keep within them,
and a censor be appointed to every class, to attend from the ringing of
the bells till the several masters come to their classes, and observe
any, either of his own class or of any other, who shall be found walking
in the courts during the above time, or standing on the stairs, or
looking out at the windows, or making noise.”—_Munimenta Univ.
Glasguensis_, ii. 429. This has something of the mere schoolroom
characteristic of our modern university discipline, but this other
paragraph, from the same set of regulations, is indicative both of more
mature vices among the precocious youth of Glasgow, and a more
inquisitorial corrective organisation:—
“That for keeping order without the College, a censor be appointed to
observe any who shall be in the streets before the bells ring, and to go
now and then to the billiard-tables, and to the other gaming-places, to
observe if any be playing at the times when they ought to be in their
chambers; and that this censor be taken from the poor scholars of the
several classes alternately, as they shall be thought most fit for that
office, and that some reward be thought of for their pains.” (_Ibid._,
425). In the fierce street-conflicts, to which we may have occasion to
refer, the poor censors had a more perilous service.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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