It appears that the old-time fresher, having been admitted to a college, was at once recommended to a tutor whom he interviewed in his rooms. The Hoxton man, who came up with his mother and his dad, found himself called upon by his prospective tutor to sit down and make small work of several quarts of liquid refreshment to the healths of various “traitors.” Being somewhat flurried at this boisterous reception, the lad was assured that he did not come to the university to pray, and that in any case, he, the tutor, would look after him like a father. Of being called upon to do any work with him there was no whisper. Gibbon, on the other hand, on being placed under the tutorship of Dr Waldegrave, was desired to attend that gentleman’s rooms each morning from ten to eleven and read the _Comedies of Terence_. This he accordingly did, but with so little advantage to himself that, after a few weeks, he quietly dropped away and saw his tutor no more. To counterbalance the accusation of slackness against Dr Waldegrave, Gibbon described him as having been a “learned and pious man of a mild disposition, strict morals and abstemious life, who seldom mingled in the politics or jollity of the college.” This worthy man departed from the precincts of Magdalen, and Gibbon had nothing good to say for his successor. “The second tutor,” wrote Gibbon, “whose literary character did not command the respect of the college, well remembered that he had a salary to receive, and only forgot that he had a duty to perform.... Excepting one voluntary visit to his rooms during the titular months of his office, the tutor and pupil lived in the same college as strangers to each other.” The vindicator of Magdalen leaped into the breach on behalf of the tutors against Gibbon, and gave a hundred reasons why Gibbon was in the wrong. But there are numberless other instances of utter laziness among that section of the Don world. Malmesbury, for instance, related in his usual cheery and optimistic manner, that his tutor, “an excellent and worthy man, according to the practice of all tutors at that moment, gave himself no concern about his pupils. I never saw him but during a fortnight, when I took it into my head to do trigonometry.” This witness matriculated at Merton thirteen years after Gibbon’s time. Another example of bad tutorship may be quoted from William Fitzmaurice, second Earl of Shelburne, who went up in 1753. “At sixteen, I went to Christ Church, where I had again the misfortune to fall under a narrow-minded tutor.... He was not without learning, and certainly laid himself out to be serviceable to me in point of reading.... I came full of prejudices. My tutor added to those prejudices by connecting me with the anti-Westminsters, who were far from the most fashionable part of the college, and a small minority.”[24]