rm the scandal charged upon the
universities of learning chiefly to smoke and to drink."

At Oxford in early Georgian days a profound calm--so far as study was
concerned--appears to have prevailed. Little work was done, but much
tobacco was smoked. In 1733 a satire was published, violently
attacking the Fellows of various colleges. According to this satirist
the occupation of the Magdalen Fellow was to

_drink, look big,
Smoke much, think little, curse the freeborn Whig--_

from which it may not unreasonably be surmised that the author was a
Tory; and however little enthusiasm there may have been at Oxford in
those days for learning and study, there was plenty of life in
political animosities.

Another witness to the dons' love of tobacco is Thomas Warton. In his
"Progress of Discontent," written in 1746, he plaintively sang:

_Return, ye days when endless pleasure
I found in reading or in leisure!
When calm around the Common Room
I puff'd my daily pipe's perfume!
Rode for a stomach, and inspected,
At annual bottlings, corks selected:
And dined untax'd, untroubled, under
The portrait of our pious Founder!_

Warton and another Oxford smoker of some distinction--the Rev. William
Crowe, who was Public Orator from 1784 to 1829--are both said to have
been, like Prior, rather fond of frequenting the company of persons of
humble rank and little education, with whom they would drink their ale
and smoke their pipes.

Mr. A.D. Godley, in his "Oxford in the Eighteenth Century," gives an
excellent English version of the Latin original of one of the Christ
Church "Carmina Quadragesmalia," which affords much the same picture
of the daily life of an Oxford Fellow in the days when George I was
king. This good man lives strictly by rule, and each returning day--

_Ne'er swerves a hairbreadth from the same old way.
Always within the memory of men
He's risen at eight and gone to bed at ten:
The same old cat his College room partakes,
The same old scout his bed each morning makes:
On mutton roast he daily dines in state
(Whole flocks have perished to supply his plate),
Takes just one turn to catch the westering sun,
Then reads the paper, as he's always done;
Soon cracks in Common-room the same old jokes,
Drinking three glasses ere three pipes he smokes:--
And what he did while Charles our throne did fill
'