That they are too rich is certainly not true; for they have nothing good
enough to keep a man of eminent learning with them for his life. In
the foreign Universities a professorship is a high thing. It is as much
almost as a man can make by his learning; and therefore we find the most
learned men abroad are in the Universities. It is not so with us.
Our Universities are impoverished of learning, by the penury of their
provisions. I wish there were many places of a thousand a-year
at Oxford, to keep first-rate men of learning from quitting the
University.'
I mentioned Mr. Maclaurin's uneasiness on account of a degree of
ridicule carelessly thrown on his deceased father, in Goldsmith's
History of Animated Nature, in which that celebrated mathematician is
represented as being subject to fits of yawning so violent as to
render him incapable of proceeding in his lecture; a story altogether
unfounded, but for the publication of which the law would give no
reparation. This led us to agitate the question, whether legal redress
could be obtained, even when a man's deceased relation was calumniated
in a publication.
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