second year he exchanged his Scholarship for a Fellowship. From that time
on he never cost his father a farthing, and he paid a considerable debt for
his younger brother Courtenay, though, as he justly remarks, "a hundred
pounds a year was very difficult to spread over the wants of a College
life." Ten years later he wrote--"I got in debt by buying books. I never
borrowed a farthing of anybody, and never received much; and have lived in
poverty and economy all my life."

His career at Oxford is buried in even deeper obscurity than his schooltime
at Winchester. This is no doubt to be explained, on the intellectual side,
by the fact that members of New College were at that time exempt from
public examination; and, on the social side, by the straitened
circumstances which prevented him from showing hospitality, and the pride
which made him unwilling to accept what he could not return. We are left to
gather his feelings about Oxford and the system pursued there, from casual
references in his critical writings; and these are uncomplimentary enough.
When he wishes to stigmatize a proposition as enormously and preposterously
absurd, he says that there is "no authority on earth (always excepting the
Dean of Christ Church), which could make it credible to me." When stirred
to the liveliest indignation by the iniquities which a Tory Government is
practising in Ireland, he exclaims--"A Senior Proctor of the University of
Oxford, the Head of a House, or the examining chaplain to a Bishop, may
believe these things can last; but every man of the world, whose
understanding has been exercised in the business of life, must see (and see
with a breaking heart) that they will soon come to a fearful termination."
He praised a comparison of the Universities to "enormous hulks confined
with mooring-chains, everything flowing and progressing around them," while
they themselves stood still.

When pleading for a wider and more reasonable course of studies at Oxford,