During the five or six years which the Jesuits employed in teaching, many of them obtained renown, and all, it may be presumed, had acquired the ready use of the Latin language; had discovered the bent of their talents; and had attained maturity of judgment and love of application. At the end of their course these masters, aged from twenty-five to thirty years, were now once more remanded to the benches, and applied, during four years, to the study of theology, under able professors, in the principal city and college of their province; thus forming a perpetual colony of forty or fifty mature and improved students, such as rival colleges could seldom equal. "At Paris," says cardinal de Maury, "the great college of the Jesuits was a central point, which attracted the attention of all the best writers, and of persons {208} of distinction in every rank. It was a kind of permanent literary tribunal, which the celebrated Piron, in his emphatic language, used to style _La chambre ardente des reputations literaires_; always dreaded by men of letters, as the principal source and focus of public opinion in the capital[70]." What the cardinal asserts of Paris, was equally true of Rome, Vienna, Lisbon, and other great cities, which possessed the colleges of higher studies of the society. I conclude with remarking, that, if any part of what is prescribed in the institute had been retrenched from the education of Jesuits, their society would not have deserved such commendations from Piron and cardinal de Maury[71].