"You say there is a complaint that '_as the students cannot be got to prepare their work_ the lessons _have come to be_ mere prelections from the professors.' I am not aware of any change in the pupils since I have been here, except that my classes are smaller, in part owing to the removal of Coward College and the rivalry of the new institution in which it is now comprised; in part (I happen to know) from dread of my personal ... influence; in part, I suspect, from the working of London University, which I think bad; and others must add, whether worst of all is, my own want of judgment in selecting subjects, and the mode of the treatment. Undeniable it is that my classes are smaller, that my half-dozen best scholars are decidedly below the half-dozen best I had in the first year or two. But if I am myself to blame, it is, I think, _from the very reverse process_ of that implied in the words above quoted, viz. I often question whether it would not be at once wiser and more right to raise my teaching to the small minority of my best pupils, and ignore the many who come in on my classes unprepared. I have of late suspected that I allow the University so to drag me down into school teaching that the abler and advanced students are driven away from me. Moreover, I am getting quite sick of going again and again over elementary books in mere school fashion. "To vary this, I have this term given one day a week in my senior class to lecture _on_ books, viz. 1st, on Horace's _Odes_, which nine out of ten have already read, and which I myself read with the junior class last session (having engaged to do this before I guessed that the University would select the same year for B.A.), and many of the junior class being this year in my senior class. 2nd, on the _Epistles_ of Cicero, which are enormously too long and too difficult for pupils to read, and in which, nevertheless, candidates for honours at B.A. are liable to be examined. I conjecture that somebody has seen this announcement of mine in our prospectus, and imputes it to a _relaxation of discipline_ in my pupils (indeed there is little enough, and always was, in the majority of mine; they only want to scrape through their degree, and the University kindly keeps its real demands at a minimum). On the contrary, it is an effort of mine to make the lectures less unworthy of my more advanced pupils. I may add that I have _always_ lectured more or less in this way on Cicero's _Letters_.... At the same time I avow my entire dissatisfaction with things as I have them. In June I have to print and publish the books in which I will lecture from October to June next, _while I have not the slightest idea who will be in the classes_. In August, out comes the statement of University books for the following year, which often increases my confusion. It is easier to complain of this than to remedy it."