arlisle, had been tutor to the sons of the third duke of
Portland and was connected with Addington; William Lort Mansel, bishop
of Bristol, had been tutor to Perceval at Cambridge, and owed to
Perceval the mastership of Trinity; Walter King, bishop of Rochester,
had been secretary to the duke of Portland; and Bowyer Edward Sparke,
bishop of Ely, had been tutor to the duke of Rutland. The two remaining
bishops were Herbert Marsh, bishop of Peterborough, who had established
a claim by defending Pitt's financial measures in an important pamphlet;
and William Van Mildert, bishop of Llandaff, who had been chaplain to
the Grocers' Company and became known as a preacher in London.

[20] _Travels in France_ (1892), p. 327.

[21] See _A Country Clergyman of the Eighteenth Century_ (Thomas
Twining), 1882, for a pleasant picture of the class.

VI. THE UNIVERSITIES

The effect of these conditions is perhaps best marked in the state of
the universities. Universities have at different periods been great
centres of intellectual life. The English universities of the eighteenth
century are generally noted only as embodiments of sloth and prejudice.
The judgments of Wesley and Gibbon and Adam Smith and Bentham coincide
in regard to Oxford; and Johnson's love of his university is an
equivocal testimony to its intellectual merits. We generally think of it
as of a sleepy hollow, in which portly fellows of colleges, like the
convivial Warton, imbibed port wine and sneered at Methodists, though
few indeed rivalled Warton's services to literature. The universities in
fact had become, as they long continued to be, high schools chiefly for
the use of the clergy, and if they still aimed at some wider
intellectual training, were sinking to be institutions where the pupils
of the public schools might, if they pleased, put a little extra polish
upon their classical and mathematical knowledge. The colleges preserved
their mediaeval constitution; and no serious changes of their statutes
were made until the middle of the present century. The clergy had an
almost exclusive part in the management, and dissenters were excluded
even from entering Oxford as students.[22] But the clergyman did not as
a rule devote himself to a life of study. He could not marry as a
fellow, but he made no vows of celibacy. The college, therefore, was
merely a stepping-stone on the way to the usual course of preferment. A
fellow looked forwards to settling in a college li