merit of a just or generous retribution. To the university of
Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully
renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.
I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the
fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life: the
reader will pronounce between the school and the scholar; but I
cannot affect to believe that Nature had disqualified me for all
literary pursuits. The specious and ready excuse of my tender age,
imperfect preparation, and hasty departure, may doubtless be
alleged; nor do I wish to defraud such excuses of their proper
weight. Yet in my sixteenth year I was not devoid of capacity or
application; even my childish reading had displayed an early though
blind propensity for books; and the shallow flood might have been
taught to flow in a deep channel and a clear stream. In the
discipline of a well-constituted academy, under the guidance of
skilful and vigilant professors, I should gradually have risen from
translations to originals, from the Latin to the Greek classics,
from dead languages to living science: my hours would have been
occupied by useful and agreeable studies, the wanderings of fancy
would have been restrained, and I should have escaped the
temptations of idleness, which finally precipitated my departure
from Oxford.

Perhaps in a separate annotation I may coolly examine the fabulous
and real antiquities of our sister universities, a question which
has kindled such fierce and foolish disputes among their fanatic
sons. In the meanwhile it will be acknowledged that these venerable
bodies are sufficiently old to partake of all the prejudices and
infirmities of age. The schools of Oxford and Cambridge were
founded in a dark age of false and barbarous science; and they are