ving, or if he had the
luck to act as tutor to a nobleman, he might soar to a deanery or a
bishopric. The fellows who stayed in their colleges were probably those
who had least ambition, or who had a taste for an easy bachelor's life.
The universities, therefore, did not form bodies of learned men
interested in intellectual pursuits; but at most, helped such men in
their start upon a more prosperous career. The studies flagged in
sympathy. Gray's letters sufficiently reveal the dulness which was felt
by a man of cultivation confined within the narrow society of college
dons of the day. The scholastic philosophy which had once found
enthusiastic cultivators in the great universities had more or less held
its own through the seventeenth century, though repudiated by all the
rising thinkers. Since the days of Locke and Berkeley, it had fallen
utterly out of credit. The bright common sense of the polished society
of the day looked upon the old doctrine with a contempt, which, if not
justified by familiarity, was an implicit judgment of the tree by its
fruits. Nobody could suppose the divines of the day to be the
depositaries of an esoteric wisdom which the vulgar were not worthy to
criticise. They were themselves chiefly anxious to prove that their
sacred mysteries were really not at all mysterious, but merely one way
of expressing plain common sense. At Oxford, indeed, the lads were still
crammed with Aldrich, and learned the technical terms of a philosophy
which had ceased to have any real life in it. At Cambridge, ardent young
radicals spoke with contempt of this 'horrid jargon--fit only to be
chattered by monkies in a wilderness.'[23] Even at Cambridge, they still
had disputations on the old form, but they argued theses from Locke's
essay, and thought that their mathematical studies were a check upon
metaphysical 'jargon.' It is indeed characteristic of the respect for
tradition that at Cambridge even mathematics long suffered from a
mistaken patriotism which resented any improvement upon the methods of
Newton. There were some signs of reviving activity. The fellowships were
being distributed with less regard to private interest. The mathematical
tripos founded at Cambridge in the middle of the century became the
prototype of all competitive examinations; and half a century later
Oxford followed the precedent by the Examination Statute of 1800. A
certain number of professorships of such modern studies as anatomy,
history