The restriction of the right to teach, and the mode of testing a man’s qualifications to teach, have come to us from the same source. The former is probably a result of the fact which has been mentioned above, that the teachers of liberal arts were privileged and endowed. The State guarded against the abuse of the privilege, as in subsequent times for similar reasons it put limitations upon the appointment of the Christian clergy. In the case of some of the professors at Athens who were endowed from the imperial chest, the Emperors seem to have exercised a certain right of nomination, as in our own country the Crown nominates a “Regius Professor;”[51] but in the case of others of those professors, the nomination was in the hands of “the best and oldest and wisest in the city,” that is, either the Areopagus, or the City Council, or, as some have thought, a special Board.[52] Elsewhere, and apparently without exception in later times, the right of approval of a teacher was in the hands of the City Council, the ordinary body for the administration of municipal affairs.[53] The authority which conferred the right might also take it away: a teacher who proved incompetent might have his licence withdrawn.[54] The testing of qualifications preceded the admission to office. It was sometimes superseded by a sort of _congé d’élire_ from the Emperor;[55] but in ordinary cases it consisted in the candidate’s giving a lecture or taking part in a discussion before either the Emperor’s representative or the City Council.[56] It was the small beginning of that system of “examination” which in our own country and time has grown to enormous proportions. The successful candidate was sometimes escorted to his house, as a mark of honour, by the proconsul and the “examiners,” just as in Oxford, until the present generation, a “grand compounder” might claim to be escorted home by the Vice-chancellor and Proctors.[57] In the fourth century appear to have come restrictions not only upon teaching, but also upon studying: a student might probably go to a lecture, but he might not formally announce his devotion to learning by putting on the student’s gown without the leave of the professors, as in a modern University a student must be formally enrolled before he can assume the academical dress.[58] The survival of these terms and usages, as indicating the strength of the system to which they originally belonged, is emphasized by the fact that for a long interval of time there are few, if any, traces of them.[59] They are found in full force in Gaul in the fifth and sixth centuries: they are found again when education began to revive on a large scale in the tenth century; they then appear, not as new creations, but as terms and usages which had lasted all through what has been called “the Benedictine era,”[60] without special nurture and without literary expression, by the sheer persistency of their original roots. * * * * *