“‘Shutting the doors of the universities against us, and keeping the means of learning to yourselves, you may think to keep us in ignorance and so less capable to give you disturbance. But though ignominiously and unjustly excluded from the seats of learning, and driven to the expedient of providing at a great expense for scientific education among ourselves, we have had this advantage, that our institutions, being formed in a more enlightened age, are more liberal and therefore better calculated to answer the purpose of a truly liberal education. Thus while your universities resemble pools of stagnant water secured by dams and mounds, ours are like rivers which, taking their natural course, fertilise a whole country.’” The manner in which he occupied his time, the range of his studies, and the miscellaneous nature of his reading at Daventry, may be seen from his following extract from his journal for 1755:— BUSINESS DONE IN JANUARY, FEBRUARY AND MARCH _Practical_ Howe’s Blessedness of the Righteous; Bennel’s Pastoral Care; Norris’s Letters and Some Sermons. _Controversial_ Taylor on Atonement; Hampton’s Answer; Sherlock’s Discourse, vol. i.; Christianity not founded in Argument; Doddridge’s Answer; Warburton’s Divine Legation; Benson on the First Planting of Christianity; King’s Constitution of the Primitive Church. _Classics_ Josephus, vol. i. from p. 39 to 770; Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to p. 139; Tacitus’s History, Life of Agricola, and Manners of the Germans. _Scriptures_ John the Evangelist; The Acts of the Apostles; The Epistles to the Romans, Galatians, Ephesians; 1 and 2 Corinthians, in Greek; Isaiah to the 8th chapter, in Hebrew. _Mathematics_ Maclaurin’s Algebra, to part ii. _Entertaining_ Irene; Prince Arthur; Ecclesiastical Characters; Dryden’s Fables; Peruvian Tales; Voyage round the World; Oriental Tales; Massey’s Travels; Life of Hai Ebn Yokdam; History of Abdallah. _Composition_ A Sermon on the Wisdom of God; An Oration on the Means of Virtue; 1st vol. of the Institutes of Natural and Revealed Religion. With one of his classmates he engaged to rise early and so “dispatched many articles of business every day. One of them, which continued all the time we were at the academy, was to read every day ten folio pages in some Greek author, and generally a Greek play in the course of the week besides. By this means we became very well acquainted with that language and with the most valuable authors in it.... My attention was always more drawn to mathematical and philosophical studies than his was.”