TO C. J. MONRO, Esq.
Glenlair, 5th June 1857.
I have not seen article
seven, but I agree
with your dissent from it entirely. On the vested interest principle, I
think the men who intended to keep their fellowships
by celibacy and ordination, and got them on that footing,
should
not be allowed to desert the virgin choir or neglect the priestly
office,
but on those principles should be allowed to live out
their days, provided the whole amount of souls cured annually does not
amount to £20 in the King's Book.
But my doctrine is that the various grades
of College officers should be set on such a basis that, although
chance
lecturers might be sometimes chosen from among fresh fellows who are
going
away soon, the reliable assistant tutors, and those that
have
a plain calling that way, should after a few years be elected permanent
officers of the College, and be tutors and deans in their
time,
and seniors also, with leave to marry, or rather, never prohibited
or
asked any questions on that head, and with leave to retire after
so many years' service as seniors. As for the men of
the world, we should have a limited term of existence, and that
independent
of marriage or "parsonage."
I saw a paragraph about the Female' Artists
Exhibition, and that Mrs. Hugh Blackburn had her Phaethon there. . .
. She has done a very small picture of a haystack making,
somewhat
pre-Raphaelite in pose, but graceful withal, and such
that the Moidart natives know every lass on the stack, whether seen
behind
or before. It was at the Edinburgh Academy of Painters.
I have done a screed of
introduction to optics,
and am at a sort of general summary of mechanical
principles—doctrines
relating to absolute and relative motion, analysis of the doctrine of
Force
into the smallest number of independent truths,
theory
of angular momentum and couples of work done, and vis viva, of actual
and
potential energy, with continual jaw on the doctrine of measurement by
units all through.
