more mature student, and his status as a gentleman commoner seemed
intended to class him among the idle and dissipated who are only
expected to waste their money and their time. A good education is
generally considered as reflecting no small credit on its possessor;
but in the majority of cases it reflects credit on the wise solicitude
of his parents or guardians rather than on himself. If Gibbon escaped
the peril of being an ignorant and frivolous lounger, the merit was
his own.

At no period in their history had the English universities sunk to a
lower condition as places of education than at the time when Gibbon
went up to Oxford. To speak of them as seats of learning seems like
irony; they were seats of nothing but coarse living and clownish
manners, the centres where all the faction, party spirit, and bigotry
of the country were gathered to a head. In this evil pre-eminence both
of the universities and all the colleges appear to have been upon a
level, though Lincoln College, Oxford, is mentioned as a bright
exception in John Wesley's day to the prevalent degeneracy. The
strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and
morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon
companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful
litigants, who spent their time in angry lawsuits. The indecent
contentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity were no
isolated scandal. They are best known and remembered on account of the
eminence of the chief disputants, and of the melancholy waste of
Bentley's genius which they occasioned. Hearne writes of Oxford in
1726, "There are such differences now in the University of Oxford
(hardly one college but where all the members are busied in law
business and quarrels not at all relating to the promotion of
learning), that good letters decay every day, insomuch that this
ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am
informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, which is the
more to be noted because our bishops, and those employed by them, are
themselves illiterate men."[3] The state of things had not much
improved twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but perhaps
it had improved a little. He does not mention lawsuits as a favourite
pastime of the Fellows. "The Fellows or monks of my time," he says,
"were decent, easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder:
their days were filled by a serie