These were reservoirs of theoretic wisdom, whence issued streams that being guided by practical skill and experience, produced most important benefits to society. Here our hero recalled to his mind a reflection he had made at Cambridge, of the benefit that arose from the commixture of religious with literary institutions. He mentioned this remark to his intelligent fellow travellers, and finding a copy of Newte’s tour, read to them a very striking passage on the subject. “Oxford and Cambridge,” says that very able writer, “may be justly considered not only as venerable monuments of ancient times, but as a kind of garrison, established by public authority, for the preservation of loyalty, literature, and religion. If our universities may be thought, in some respects, to check and retard the progress of knowledge, by means of fixed forms, laws, and customs, it is at least equally certain, that they are salutary bulwarks against the precipitate and desolating spirit of innovation. The reverence paid by our ancestors to piety and to learning, strikes us in Oxford as by a sensation, and shews how fit objects these are of esteem and veneration, to the common sense of mankind. For different nations, and races of princes and kings, have concurred, in the course of many centuries, to pay homage to the shrine of saints and the seats of the muses. It is not an easy matter to prevent or shake off a respect for any noble or royal family, whose antient representatives, the founders and benefactors of the different colleges and halls, are brought to remembrance by pictures, statues, charters, and stately edifices. These take fast hold of the ductile mind of the students, and are associated in their memory with many of the most pleasing ideas that have ever occupied their minds. From impressions of this kind, a love of their early haunts and companions, naturally associated together in their imaginations, is nourished in the breasts of the generous youth, and also an attachment to their king and country. Take away these memorials of antiquity, those noble and royal testimonies of respect to sanctity of life, and proficiency in learning, remove every sensible object, by which sentiments of early friendship, loyalty, and patriotism are kindled and inflamed in young minds, and disperse our young gentlemen in other countries for their education, or even in separate little academies and schools in our own, and you weaken one of the great pillars by which the constitution and spirit of England is supported and perpetuated.”