* * * * *

Of university education at this time let Miss Wedgwood speak:

We can hardly wonder that the time spent at Oxford was, to a man
like Gibbon, "the most idle and unprofitable period of his life," to
use his own words. Even under the very different system which
prevailed in the early portion of the present century, one of the
most fertile thinkers of our day has been heard to speak of his
university career as the only completely idle interval of his life.
How often it may have proved not a mere episode, but the foundation
of a life of idleness, no human being can tell. Nor was the evil
merely negative. While the student lounged away his time in the
coffeehouse and the tavern, whilst the dice-box supplied him with a
serious pursuit, and the bottle a relaxation, he was called upon at
every successive step to his degree to take a solemn oath of
observance to the academical statutes which his behavior infringed
in every particular. While the public professors received a thousand
pounds a year for giving no lectures, the candidates for degrees
were obliged to ask and pay for a dispensation for not having
attended the lectures that never were given.

The system in every public declaration solemnly recognized and
accepted was in every private action utterly defied. Whatever the
Oxford graduate omitted to learn, he would not fail to acquire a
ready facility in subscribing, with solemn attestations, professions
which he violated without hesitation or regret. The Thirty-nine
Articles were signed on matriculation, without any attempt to
understand them. "Our venerable mother," says the great historian