The Session Was Begun; For It Commences
On The Tenth Of October And Continues To The Tenth Of June, But The
Students Appeared Not Numerous, Being, I Suppose, Not Yet Returned
From Their Several Homes.
The division of the academical year into
one session, and one recess, seems to me better accommodated to the
present state of life, than that variegation of time by terms and
vacations derived from distant centuries, in which it was probably
convenient, and still continued in the English universities.
So
many solid months as the Scotch scheme of education joins together,
allow and encourage a plan for each part of the year; but with us,
he that has settled himself to study in the college is soon tempted
into the country, and he that has adjusted his life in the country,
is summoned back to his college.
Yet when I have allowed to the universities of Scotland a more
rational distribution of time, I have given them, so far as my
inquiries have informed me, all that they can claim. The students,
for the most part, go thither boys, and depart before they are men;
they carry with them little fundamental knowledge, and therefore
the superstructure cannot be lofty. The grammar schools are not
generally well supplied; for the character of a school-master being
there less honourable than in England, is seldom accepted by men
who are capable to adorn it, and where the school has been
deficient, the college can effect little.
Men bred in the universities of Scotland cannot be expected to be
often decorated with the splendours of ornamental erudition, but
they obtain a mediocrity of knowledge, between learning and
ignorance, not inadequate to the purposes of common life, which is,
I believe, very widely diffused among them, and which countenanced
in general by a national combination so invidious, that their
friends cannot defend it, and actuated in particulars by a spirit
of enterprise, so vigorous, that their enemies are constrained to
praise it, enables them to find, or to make their way to
employment, riches, and distinction.
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