from whom we have already quoted, "had contrived to unite the
opposite extremes of bigotry and indifference"; and these blended
influences, which led Gibbon first to Rome, and then to skepticism,
proved no doubt to the average mind a mere narcotic to all spiritual
life. Gibbon is not the only great writer who has recorded his
testimony against Hanoverian Oxford. Adam Smith in that work which
has been called, with pardonable exaggeration, "the most important
book that ever was written," the "Wealth of Nations," has, in the
following remarks on universities, evidently incorporated his
anything but loving recollections of the seven years which he spent
at Baliol College. "In the University of Oxford the greater part of
the professors have for these many years given up even the pretense
of teaching. The discipline is in general contrived not for the
benefit of students, but for the interest, or, more properly
speaking, for the ease of the masters. In England the public schools
are less corrupted than the universities; the youth there are, or at
least may be, taught Greek and Latin, which is everything the
masters pretend to teach. In the university the youth neither are,
nor can be, taught the sciences which it is the business of those
incorporated bodies to teach." It is the last statement to which
attention is here directed. It is not that the university drew up a
bad program, nor even that this scheme was badly carried out. That
might be the case also; but the radical vice of the system was not
that it was essentially incomplete in theory or faulty in practise,
but that it was false. Its worst result was not poor scholars, but
insincere and venal men.

I believe Europe can not produce parallels to Oxford and Cambridge
in opulence, buildings, libraries, professorships, scholarships, and
all the external dignity and mechanical apparatus of learning. If