s of uniform employments--the chapel,
the hall, the coffee-house, and the common room--till they retired
weary and well satisfied to a long slumber. From the toil of reading,
writing, or thinking they had absolved their consciences. Their
conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics,
personal anecdotes, and private scandal. Their dull and deep potations
excused the brisk intemperance of youth, and their constitutional
toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty to the House of
Hanover." Some Oxonians perhaps could still partly realise the truth
of this original picture by their recollections of faint and feeble
copies of it drawn from their experience in youthful days. It seems to
be certain that the universities, far from setting a model of good
living, were really below the average standard of the morals and
manners of the age, and the standard was not high. Such a satire as
the _Terrae Filius_ of Amhurst cannot be accepted without large
deductions; but the caricaturist is compelled by the conditions of his
craft to aim at the _true seeming_, if he neglects the true, and with
the benefit of this limitation the _Terrae Filius_ reveals a deplorable
and revolting picture of vulgarity, insolence, and licence. The
universities are spoken of in terms of disparagement by men of all
classes. Lord Chesterfield speaks of the "rust" of Cambridge as
something of which a polished man should promptly rid himself. Adam
Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of
the _Wealth of Nations_, written twenty years after he had left the
place. Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express
themselves with contempt for their respective universities. "Consider
me," says the latter, writing from Christ Church, "very seriously,
here is a strange country, inhabited by things that call themselves
Doctors and Masters of Arts, a country flowing with syllogisms and
ale; where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown." Gray, answering
from Peterhouse, can only do justice to his feelings by quoting the
words of the Hebrew prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cambridge
equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of the wild beasts and wild
asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a
court for owls.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 3: _Social Life at the English Universities_. By Christopher
Wordsworth. Page 57.]

Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by his care