It is probable that a worse place could not have been found. The University of Oxford was at the nadir of her history and efficiency. The public professorial training of the middle ages had died away, and the intramural collegiate system of the present time had not begun. The University had ceased to be a teaching body, and had not yet become an examining body. ‘The professors,’ says Adam Smith, who had studied there, ‘have given up almost the pretence of lecturing.’ ‘The examination,’ said a great judge some years later, ‘was a farce in my time. I was asked who founded University College; and I said, though the fact is now doubted, that King Alfred founded it; and _that_ was the examination.’ The colleges, deprived of the superintendence and watchfulness of their natural sovereign, fell, as Gibbon remarks, into ‘port and prejudice.’ The Fellows were a close corporation; they were chosen from every conceivable motive—because they were respectable men, because they were good fellows, because they were brothers of other Fellows, because their fathers had patronage in the Church. Men so appointed could not be expected to be very diligent in the instruction of youth; many colleges did not even profess it; that of All Souls has continued down to our own time to deny that it has anything to do with it. Undoubtedly a person who came thither accurately and rigidly drilled in technical scholarship found many means and a few motives to pursue it. Some tutorial system probably existed at most colleges. Learning was not wholly useless in the Church. The English gentleman has ever loved a nice and classical scholarship. But these advantages were open only to persons who had received a very strict training, and who were voluntarily disposed to discipline themselves still more. To the mass of mankind the University was a ‘graduating machine;’ the colleges, monopolist residences,—hotels without bells.