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arlisle, had been tutor to the sons of the third duke of Portland and was connected with Addington; William Lort Mansel, bishop of Bristol, had been tutor to Perceval at Cambridge, and owed to Perceval the mastership of Trinity; Walter King, bishop of Rochester, had been secretary to the duke of Portland; and Bowyer Edward Sparke, bishop of Ely, had been tutor to the duke of Rutland. The two remaining bishops were Herbert Marsh, bishop of Peterborough, who had established a claim by defending Pitt's financial measures in an important pamphlet; and William Van Mildert, bishop of Llandaff, who had been chaplain to the Grocers' Company and became known as a preacher in London. [20] _Travels in France_ (1892), p. 327. [21] See _A Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century_ (Thomas Twining), 1882, for a pleasant picture of the class. VI. THE UNIVERSITIES The effect of these conditions is perhaps best marked in the state of the universities. Universities have at different periods been great centres of intellectual life. The English universities of the eighteenth century are generally noted only as embodiments of sloth and prejudice. The judgments of Wesley and Gibbon and Adam Smith and Bentham coincide in regard to Oxford; and Johnson's love of his university is an equivocal testimony to its intellectual merits. We generally think of it as of a sleepy hollow, in which portly fellows of colleges, like the convivial Warton, imbibed port wine and sneered at Methodists, though few indeed rivalled Warton's services to literature. The universities in fact had become, as they long continued to be, high schools chiefly for the use of the clergy, and if they still aimed at some wider intellectual training, were sinking to be institutions where the pupils of the public schools might, if they pleased, put a little extra polish upon their classical and mathematical knowledge. The colleges preserved their mediaeval constitution; and no serious changes of their statutes were made until the middle of the present century. The clergy had an almost exclusive part in the management, and dissenters were excluded even from entering Oxford as students.[22] But the clergyman did not as a rule devote himself to a life of study. He could not marry as a fellow, but he made no vows of celibacy. The college, therefore, was merely a stepping-stone on the way to the usual course of preferment. A fellow looked forwards to settling in a college li
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