e of personal expenses, for
which he was allowed 6s. 8d. a day.[11] Now Smith out of his L40 a
year had to pay about L30 for his food; Mr. Rogers mentions that his
first quarter's maintenance came to L7:5s., about the usual cost of
living, he adds, at Oxford at that period. Then the tutors, though
they seem to have ceased to do any tutoring, still took their fees of
20s. a quarter all the same, and Smith's remaining L5 would be little
enough to meet other items of necessary expenditure. It appears from
Salmon's _Present State of the Universities_, published in 1744,
during Smith's residence at Oxford, that an Oxford education then cost
L32 a year as a minimum, but that there was scarce a commoner in the
University who spent less than L60.

Smith's name does not appear in Bliss's list of Oxford graduates, and
although in Mr. Foster's recent _Alumni Oxonienses_ other particulars
are given about him, no mention is made of his graduation; but
Professor Rogers has discovered evidence in the Buttery Books of
Balliol which seems conclusively to prove that Smith actually took the
degree of B.A., whatever may be the explanation of the apparent
omission of his name from the official graduation records. In those
Buttery Books he is always styled Dominus from and after the week
ending 13th April 1744. Now Dominus was the usual designation of a
B.A., and in April 1744 Smith would have kept the sixteen terms that
were then, we may say, the only qualification practically necessary
for that degree. He had possibly omitted some step requisite for the
formal completion of the graduation.

Smith's residence at Oxford fell in a time when learning lay there
under a long and almost total eclipse. This dark time seems to have
lasted most of that century. Crousaz visited Oxford about the
beginning of the century and found the dons as ignorant of the new
philosophy as the savages of the South Sea. Bishop Butler came there
as a student twenty years afterwards, and could get nothing to satisfy
his young thirst for knowledge except "frivolous lectures" and
"unintelligible disputations." A generation later he could not even
have got that; for Smith tells us in the _Wealth of Nations_ that the
lecturers had then given up all pretence of lecturing, and a foreign
traveller, who describes a public disputation he attended at Oxford in
1788, says the Praeses Respondent and three Opponents all sat consuming
the statutory time in profound silence, absorb