To Alexander Gill, Jr. (Familiar Letters, No. III.)
... Indeed, every time I recollect your almost constant conversations with me (which even in this Athens, the University itself, I long after and miss), I think immediately, and not without grief, what a quantity of benefit my absence from you has cheated me of,—me who never left your company without a manifest increase and ἐπίδοσις of literary knowledge, just as if I had been to some emporium of learning. Truly, amongst us here, as far as I know, there are hardly one or two that do not fly off unfeathered to Theology while all but rude and uninitiated in either Philology or Philosophy,—content also with the slightest possible touch of Theology itself, just as much as may suffice for sticking together a little sermon anyhow, and stitching it over with worn patches obtained promiscuously: a fact giving reason for the dread that by degrees there may break in among our clergy the priestly ignorance of a former age. For myself, finding almost no real companions in study here, I should certainly be looking straight back to London, were I not meditating a retirement during this summer vacation into a deep literary leisure and a period of hiding, so to speak, in the bowers of the Muses. But, as this is your own daily practice, I think it almost a crime to interrupt you longer with my din at present. Farewell.
Cambridge, July 2, 1628.