To this the critics promptly make answer: Those who are to lecture in future are either such as are now beginning their career of Professorship, or such as are long accustomed to dictation. For those who are now beginning, previous exercise is to be recommended in the most approved form of lecture, or _prælectio_. And they sketch the form. As to the others who are long habituated to dictating, the critics ask such Professors to give this form of lecturing the benefit of a trial. If they despair of being able to adopt it, let them go their own way, until another generation of Professors is ready to take their places. Dictation can also be permitted, where our Professors have often tried to give it up, but with the consequence that the students took fright, and abandoned the classes. "Yet," continue the Fathers, "they would not be apt to abandon the courses, nor complain so much, if all the Professors would devote themselves to brilliant lecturing,[268] and would put away dictation. For, if one dictates and nurses the lazy folks, and another does not, who doubts but that sloth will still be dearer to the slothful than the labors and thorns of study? Yea, by dictation they are made daily more and more lazy, so as to be always asking for more and more time; whereas, without dictation, they become daily more prompt, and need less time for everything."[269] The final _Ratio_ of 1599 embodies these suggestions, without being absolute in excluding all dictation, for which it suggests the form most useful and in accord with the spirit of true lecturing. It deprecates the dictation of what may be found in authors within reach of the students. "Let the Professor refer his hearers to those authors who have been copious and accurate in their treatment of any matter." As to what the critics of 1586 recommend, that, if dictation be given, the lecture should extend to five quarters of an hour, the _Ratio_ says nothing about it.[270] Possevino, in his _Bibliotheca Selecta_, has a chapter on this question, "Whether mental culture suffers by the dictation of lectures?" He answers in the affirmative, and he speaks on the subject with his usual erudition. He refers to the Pythagorean "acoustic" disciples, who were never copyists, and not even talkers, until, by a prolonged silence for years, they had thought enough to be able to talk well, to put questions, and make comments. He quotes the cynicism of Diogenes, about writing at the expense of true exercise. He notes the plan of Xeniades the Corinthian, who gave a written compendium to the young people, but one so short that they had to have the best part of their learning in their heads. The Socratic method was eminently one of living speech. And, as to Aristotle's "peripatetic" school, which was conducted while _walking about_ the Lyceum, that was certainly neither in practice nor in principle favorable to writing. Coming to speak expressly of dictation and citing a pleasant old rhyme:--