It is not easy to gather from this confession whether Prideaux had or had not read the books he ‘coated.’ It is certain that Dean Aldrich (and here again we recognise the eternal criticism of modern Oxford) held a poor opinion of Humphrey Prideaux. Aldrich said Prideaux was ‘incorrect,’ ‘muddy-headed,’ ‘he would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes’; ‘as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any, but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former editors.’ This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the air. Oxford is a discouraging place. College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness. They have only the waste odds-and-ends of time for their own labours. They live in an atmosphere of criticism. They collect notes, they wait, they dream; their youth goes by, and the night comes when no man can work. The more praise to the tutors and lecturers who decipher the records of Assyria, or patiently collate the manuscripts of the _Iliad_, who not only teach what is already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and advance the boundaries of scholarship and science. One lesson may be learned from Prideaux’s cynical letters, which is still worth the attention of every young Oxford student who is conscious of ambition, of power, and of real interest in letters. He can best serve his University by coming out of her, by declining college work, and by devoting himself to original study in some less exhausted air, in some less critical society. Among the aversions of Humphrey Prideaux were the ‘gentlemen of All Souls.’ They certainly showed extraordinary impudence when they secretly employed the University Press to print off copies of Marc Antonio’s engravings after Giulio Romano’s drawings. It chanced that Fell visited the press rather late one evening, and found ‘his press working at such an imployment. The prints and plates he hath seased, and threatened the owners of them with expulsion.’ ‘All Souls,’ adds Prideaux, ‘is a scandalous place.’ Yet All Souls was the college of young Mr. Guise, an Arabic scholar, ‘the greatest miracle in the knowledge of that I ever heard of.’ Guise died of smallpox while still very young.