or me to imitate; since I must not
confess an imaginary debt, to assume the 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 still tainted with the vices
of their origin. Their primitive discipline was adapted to the education
of priests and monks; and the government still remains in the hands of
the clergy, an order of men whose manners are remote from the present
world, and whose eyes are dazzled by the light of philosophy. The legal
incorporation of these societies by the charters of popes and kings
had given them a monopoly of the public instruction; and the spirit of
monopolists is narrow, lazy, and oppressive; their work is more costly
and less productive than that of ind