combination with a peculiar structure of mind--offered one explanation
of the very remarkable and unsocial habits which I adopted at college;
but there was another not less powerful, and not less unusual. In
stating this, I shall seem, to some persons, covertly designing an
affront to Oxford. But that is far from my intention. It is noways
peculiar to Oxford, but will, doubtless, be found in every university
throughout the world, that the younger part of the members--the
undergraduates, I mean, generally, whose chief business must have lain
amongst the great writers of Greece and Rome--cannot have found leisure
to cultivate extensively their own domestic literature. Not so much
that time will have been wanting; but that the whole energy of the
mind, and the main course of the subsidiary studies and researches,
will naturally have been directed to those difficult languages amongst
which lie their daily tasks. I make it no subject of complaint or
scorn, therefore, but simply state it as a fact, that few or none of
the Oxford undergraduates, with whom parity of standing threw me into
collision at my first outset, knew anything at all of English
literature. The _Spectator_ seemed to me the only English book of
a classical rank which they had read; and even this less for its
inimitable delicacy, humor, and refined pleasantry in dealing with
manners and characters, than for its insipid and meagre essays, ethical
or critical. This was no fault of theirs: they had been sent to the
book chiefly as a subject for Latin translations, or of other
exercises; and, in such a view, the vague generalities of superficial
morality were more useful and more manageable than sketches of manner
or character, steeped in national peculiarities. To translate the terms
of whig politics into classical Latin, would be as difficult as it
might be for a whig himself to give a consistent account of those
politics from the year 1688. Natural, however, and excusable, as this
ignorance might be, to myself it was intolerable and incomprehensible.