Page:Thomas Reid (Fraser 1898).djvu/52

 vitality which original research is apt to communicate to his lectures. The development of a university, it has been remarked, is prompt and easy when each department of its cyclopædia is separately taught by an able professor; whereas a university which abandons instruction to regent-tutors must be content not only to teach little, and that little ill, but to continue to teach what is elsewhere obsolete and exploded.

In a letter of Reid’s in 1755, an account is given of the reformed, if somewhat officious, academical discipline which then prevailed:—

'The students here,' he says, 'have lately been compelled to live within the College. We need but look out at our windows to see when they rise and when they go to bed. They are seen nine or ten times throughout the day statedly, by one or other of the Masters—at public prayers, school-hours, meals, in their rooms, besides occasional visits which we can make with little trouble to ourselves. They are shut up within walls at nine at night. This discipline hath indeed taken some pains and resolution, as well as some expense, to establish it. The board of the first table is 50 marks per quarter, i.e. 54s. 2d., and the second 40. The rent of a room is from 7 shillings to 20 shillings in the session. There is no furniture in their rooms but a bedstead, tables, chimney-grate, and fender; the rest they must buy for themselves. All other perquisites from 12 to 17 shillings.’

This discipline was more or less in vogue during the remainder of last century. Nearly twenty years after the date of Reid’s letter, when Johnson and Boswell visited Aberdeen, Johnson says that 'in King’s College there is kept a public table, but the scholars in the Marischal College are boarded in the town.' 'The abandonment of this custom,' Mr. Rait tells us, 'seems to have been a gradual process, and to have taken place during the first