ed in the novel of the
hour. Gibbon, who resided there not long after Smith, tells that his
tutor neither gave nor sought to give him more than one lesson, and
that the conversation of the common-room, to which as a gentleman
commoner he was privileged to listen, never touched any point of
literature or scholarship, but "stagnated in a round of College
business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal."
Bentham, a few years after Gibbon, has the same tale to tell; it was
absolutely impossible to learn anything at Oxford, and the years he
spent there were the most barren and unprofitable of his life. Smith's
own account of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_,
though only published in 1776, was substantially true of Oxford during
his residence there thirty years before. Every word of it is endorsed
by Gibbon as the word of "a moral and political sage who had himself
resided at Oxford." Now, according to that account, nobody was then
taught, or could so much as find "the proper means of being taught,
the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to
teach." The lecturers had ceased lecturing; "the tutors contented
themselves with teaching a few unconnected shreds and parcels" of the
old unimproved traditionary course, "and even these they commonly
taught very negligently and superficially"; being paid independently
of their personal industry, and being responsible only to one another,
"every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty
provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own"; and the general
consequence was a culpable dislike to improvement and indifference to
all new ideas, which made a rich and well-endowed university the
"sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find
shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner
of the world." Coming up from a small university in the North, which
was cultivating letters with such remarkable spirit on its little
oatmeal wisely dispensed, Smith concluded that the stagnation of
learning which prevailed in the wealthy universities of England was
due at bottom to nothing but their wealth, because it was distributed
on a bad system.

Severely, however, as Smith has censured the order of things he found
prevailing at Oxford, it is worthy of notice that he never, like
Gibbon and Bentham, thought of the six years he spent there as being
wasted. Boswell and others have pronounce