It should be stressed that the abolition of the chair was planned with the firm intention of proposing it, immediately and firmly, for a scheme which was then believed to be imminent for saving a number of small departments by funding them directly on a national level, or something on these lines. So I see a distinct possibility that any saving measures will be too late and that after fifty years of fruitful existence the Leiden chair, the only substantial one in our country, will quite soon be extinct. Inevitably there is a certain sadness in thus looking back on my twenty-five years. This has contributed to the fact that my teaching has settled down to a fairly constant routine. The second hour is palaeography, mainly book scripts, focused on the late Middle Ages and the Netherlands, since that is the principal area of interest to most students, but it can be adapted to the needs of the year's crop.
Most precarolingian scripts get rather brief mentions.
The third hour is for reading and transcription - the students get a photograph, which they transcribe and hand in next week, and the week after that we discuss the corrected work, especially the more interesting errors. This takes a great amount of time, both of the students and of me, but I think it is much better than class-room reading. The fourth hour, finally, is for looking at manuscripts - for that we move to the library. Of course it is a problem to have fifteen or twenty people look at one manuscript. Maybe if I told them less, they would absorb it better.