your Majesty’s own most wise and princely maxims, “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.”  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’s 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 premeditation 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.  The truth whereof is not obscure, when scholars come to the practices of professions, or other actions of civil life; which when they set into, this want is soon found by themselves, and sooner by others.  But this part, touching the amendment of the institutions and orders of universities, I will conclude with the clause of Caesar’s letter to Oppius and Balbus, “Hoc quem admodum fieri possit, nonnulla mihi in mentem veniunt, et multa reperiri possunt:  de iis rebus rogo vos ut cogitationem suscipiatis.” [How this may be done, some ways come to my mind and many may be devised; I ask you to take these things into consideration.]