In the early part of the eighteenth century there was some intellectual life in Christ Church, to which Westminster still sent up good scholars, and which was the resort of the nobility, in whom youthful ambition and desire for improvement might be stirred by the influences of political homes, and the prospects of a public life. Dean Aldrich was a scholar and a virtuoso. The spire of All Saints' Church is a soaring monument of his taste, if not of his genius, for architecture. In the controversy with Bentley about the Epistles of Phalaris, Christ Church, though she was hopelessly in the wrong, showed that she had some learning and some interest in classical studies. Otherwise the eighteenth century is a blank, or worse than a blank, in the history of the University. The very portraits on the College walls disclose the void of any but ecclesiastical eminence. That tendency to torpor, which, as Adam Smith and Turgot have maintained, is inherent in the system of endowments, fell upon Oxford in full measure. The Colleges had now, by the increase in value of their estates, become rich, some of them very rich. The estates of Magdalen, Gibbon tells us, were thought to be worth thirty thousand pounds a year, equivalent to double that sum now. Instead of being confined to their original Commons and Livery, the Heads and Fellows, as administrators of the estate, were now dividing among themselves annually large rentals, though they failed to increase in equal proportion the stipends of the Scholars and others who had no share in the administration. The statutes of mediæval Founders had become utterly obsolete, and were disregarded, notwithstanding the oath taken to observe them, or observed only so far as they guarded the interest of sinecurists against the public. Nor were any other duties assumed. A few of the Fellows in each College added to their income by holding the tutorships, the functions of which they usually performed in the most slovenly way, each Tutor professing to teach all subjects, while most of them knew none. In the Common Room, with which each of the Colleges now provided itself, the Fellows spent lives of Trulliberian luxury, drinking, smoking, playing at bowls, and, as Gibbon said, by their deep but dull potations excusing the brisk intemperance of youth. Even the obligation to residence was relaxed, and at last practically annulled, so that a great part of the Fellowships became sinecure stipends held by men unconnected with the University. About the only restriction which remained was that on marriage. Out of this the Heads had managed to slip their necks, and from the time of Elizabeth downwards there had been married Heads, to the great scandal of Anthony Wood and other academical precisians, to whom, in truth, one lady, at least, the wife of Warden Clayton of Merton, seems to have afforded some grounds for criticism by her usurpations. But in the case of the