THE SECOND BOOK. 65 



12. Another defect which I note is an intermission or 

 neglect in those which are governors in universities, of con 

 sultation, and in princes or superior persons, of visitation : to 

 enter into account and consideration, whether the readings, 

 exercises, and other customs appertaining unto learning, 

 anciently begun and since continued, be well instituted or no ; 

 and thereupon to ground an amendment or reformation in 

 that which shall be found inconvenient. For it is one of your 

 Majesty s own most wise and princely maxims, &quot;That in all 

 usages and precedents, the times be considered wherein they 

 first began ; which if they were weak or ignorant, it derogateth 

 from the authority of the usage, and leaveth it for suspect.&quot; 

 And therefore inasmuch as most of the usages and orders of 

 the universities were derived from more obscure times, it is the 

 more requisite they be re-examined. In this kind I will give 

 an instance or two, for example sake, of things that are the 

 most obvious and familiar. The one is a matter, which though 

 it be ancient and general, yet I hold to be an error ; which is, 

 that scholars in universities come too soon and too unripe to 

 logic and rhetoric, arts fitter for graduates than children and 

 novices. For these two, rightly taken, are the gravest of 

 sciences, being the arts of arts; the one for judgment, the 

 other for ornament. And they be the rules and directions 

 how to set forth and dispose matter : and therefore for minds 

 empty and unfraught with matter, and which have not 

 gathered that which Cicero calleth sylva and supellex, stuff 

 and variety, to begin with those arts (as if one should learn to 

 weigh, or to measure, or to paint the wind) doth work but 

 this effect, that the wisdom of those arts, which is great and 

 universal, is almost made contemptible, and is degenerate into 

 childish sophistry and ridiculous affectation. And further, 

 the untimely learning of them hath drawn on by consequence 

 the superficial and unprofitable teaching and writing of them, 

 as fitteth indeed to the capacity of children. Another is a 

 lack I find in the exercises used in the universities, which do 

 make too great a divorce between invention and memory. For 

 their speeches are either premeditate, in verbis conceptis, where 

 nothing is left to invention, or merely extemporal, where little 

 is left to memory. Whereas in life and action there is least 

 use of either of these, but rather of intermixtures of premedi 

 tation and invention, notes and memory. So as the exercise 

 fitteth not the practice, nor the image the life ; and it is ever 

 a true rule in exercises, that they be framed as near as may be 

 to the life of practice ; for otherwise they do pervert the 

 motions and faculties of the mind, and not prepare them 

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