Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to judge by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the eighteenth century was excessively rough. Manners were rather primitive: a big fire burned in the centre of Balliol Hall, and round this fire, one night in every year, it is said that all the world was welcome to a feast of ale and bread and cheese. Every guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling a story; and one can fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality. ‘What learning can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil behaviour?’ says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746) Southey has made some extracts. The diarist was a Puritan of the old leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson’s period, and who speaks of ‘a power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly prevailing in that place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and most mischievous.’ But this strange and unfriendly critic was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their piety by wrecking chapels and ‘rabbling’ ministers. In our days only the Davenport Brothers and similar professors of strange creeds suffer from the manly piety of the undergraduates. Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish assailants of _Alma Mater_, the author of _Terræ Filius_ was the most persistent. The first little volume which contains the numbers of this bi-weekly periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom’s Coffee-house, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and is well worth a desultory reading. What strikes one most in _Terræ Filius_ is the religious discontent of the bilious author. One thinks, foolishly of course, of even Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at least in their undergraduate days. The mere aspect of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s work on the philosophers of the eighteenth century is enough to banish this pleasing delusion. The Deists and Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson’s day among the undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery, was unpopular, and might be punished. Johnson says, that when he was a boy he was a lax _talker_, rather than a lax _thinker_, against religion; ‘but lax talking against religion at Oxford would not be suffered.’ The author of _Terræ Filius_, however, never omits a chance of sneering at our faith, and at the Church of England as by law established. In his description of the exercises of the Club of Wits, only one respectably clever epigram is quoted, beginning,— ‘Since in religion all men disagree, And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.’