Gibbon | Page 3

fifteenth year (1752, April 3). This was perhaps the most unwise step
he could have taken under the circumstances. Gibbon was too young
and too ignorant to profit by the advantages offered by Oxford to a
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 series 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 Terræ 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 Terræ 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