His father, Daniel Malthus, was born in 1730, and went to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1747,[944] the year when Adam Smith went home from Balliol to Scotland. He left without a degree, not because of the Articles, for he subscribed them at matriculation,[945] or from Dr. Johnson’s reason of poverty, for he was a gentleman commoner, but probably from a contempt for the distinction itself.[946] His mind was active and open, and he seems to have formed literary friendships that stood his son in good stead afterwards. He liked to stay up in Oxford in vacation, working hard at his own studies in his own ways, and seeing none but chosen friends. He wrote to his son in later years, “I used to think Oxford none the less pleasant and certainly not the less useful for being disburdened of some of its society; I imagine you will say the same of Cambridge.”[947] On leaving the university he married and went to live in Surrey at a quiet country house on the way from Dorking to Guildford, still known by its old name of the Rookery. Of his eldest son, who took his grandfather’s name of Sydenham,[948] we know little except that in due time he married, and had two sons, Sydenham and Charles, and a daughter Mary. Mary died single in 1881 in her eighty-second year, Charles in 1821 in his fifteenth, their father in 1821 in his sixty-eighth. Sydenham, our author’s nephew, who died in 1869, was proprietor of Dalton Hill, Albury, where members of his family were, till recently, still living; his son, Lieut.-Col. Sydenham Malthus, C.B., of the 94th Regiment, served with distinction in the Zulu war a few years ago.