I profited little at the University, as you will easily suppose. The system of education pursued there appeared to me the result of a deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, a mighty effort of political and ecclesiastical machiavelism, to turn the energies of inquiring minds into channels, where they will either stagnate in disgust, or waste themselves in nugatory labour. To discover or even to illustrate a single moral truth, to shake the empire of a single prejudice, to apply a single blow of the axe of philosophy to the wide-spreading roots of superstition and political imposture, is to render a real service to the best hopes of mankind; but all this is diametrically opposed to the selfish interests of the hired misleaders of society, the chosen few, as they are called, before whom the wretched multitude grovel in the dust as before The children of a race, Mightier than they, and wiser, and by heaven Beloved and favoured more. Moral science, therefore, moral improvement, the doctrines of benevolence, the amelioration of the general condition of mankind, will not only never form a part of any public institution for the performance of that ridiculous and mischievous farce called the _Finishing of Education_; but every art of clerical chicanery and fraudulent misrepresentation will be practised, to render odious the very names of philosophy and philanthropy, and to extinguish, by ridicule and persecution, that enthusiastic love of truth, which never fails to conduct its votaries to conclusions very little compatible with the views of those who have built, or intend to build, their own worldly prosperity on the foundation of hypocrisy and servility in themselves, and ignorance and credulity in others. The study of morals and of mind occupied my exclusive attention. I had little taste for the science of lines and numbers, and still less for verbal criticism, the pinnacle of academical glory. I delighted in the poets of Greece and Rome, but I thought that the _igneus vigor et coelestis origo_ of their conceptions and expressions was often utterly lost sight of in the microscopic inspection of philological minutiae. I studied Greek, as the means of understanding Homer and Aeschylus: I did not look on them as mere secondary instruments to the attainment of a knowledge of their language. I had no conception of the taste that could prefer Lycophron to Sophocles because he had the singular advantage of being obscure; and should have been utterly at a loss to account for such a phenomenon, if I had not seen that the whole system of public education was purposely calculated to make inferior minds recoil in disgust and terror from the vestibule of knowledge, and superior minds consume their dangerous energies in the _difficiles nugae_ and _labor ineptiarum_ of its adytum.