“_To the Author of Terrae Filius._ “SIR,--I hope you intend to acquaint the world, amongst other abuses in what manner the pious designs of those good men, who left us all our publick lectures, are answered. Yesterday morning at nine a clock the bell went as usually for a lecture; whether a rhetorical or logical one, I cannot tell; but I went to the schools, big with hopes of being instructed in one or the other, and having saunter’d a pretty while along the quadrangle, impatient of the lecturer’s delay, I ask’d the major (who is an officer belonging to the schools) whether it was usual now and then to slip a lecture or so: his answer was that he had not seen the face of any lecturer in any faculty, except in poetry and musick, for three years past; that all lectures besides were entirely neglected.... Every morning in term time there ought to be a divinity lecture in the divinity school; two gentlemen of our house went one day to hear what the learned professor had to say upon that subject: these two were join’d by another master of arts, who without arrogance might think that they understood divinity enough to be his auditors; and that consequently his lecture would not have been lost upon them: but the doctor thought otherwise, who came at last, and was very much surprized to find that there was an audience. He took two or three turns about the school, and then said, ‘Magistri vos non estis idonei auditores; praeterea, juxta legis doctorem Boucher, tres non faciunt collegium--valete;’ and so went away. Now it is monstrous, that notwithstanding these publick lectures are so much neglected, we are, all of us, when we take our degrees, charg’d with and punish’d for non-appearance at the reading of many of them; a formal dispensation is read by our respective deans, at the time our grace is proposed, for our non-appearance at these lectures, and it is with difficulty that some grave ones of the congregation are induced to grant it. Strange order! that each lecturer should have his fifty, his hundred, or two hundred pounds a year for doing nothing, and that we (the young fry) should be obliged to pay money for not hearing such lectures as were never read, nor ever composed....”