“A total neglect of all learning, an unseemly turbulence, the most monstrous irregularities, open and habitual drunkenness, vice, and violence, were tolerated or encouraged, with the basest sycophancy, that the prospect of perpetual licentiousness might fill the colleges with young men of fortune; whenever the rarely exercised power of coercion was exerted, it demonstrated the utter incapacity of our unworthy rulers by coarseness, ignorance, and injustice.” Terrae Filius devoted one chapter, peculiarly conspicuous for its lack of satirical venom, to the dissection of Fellows. His article was occasioned by a report in all the papers of the death of Dr Pudsey, one of the senior Fellows of “Maudlin College (who) died there last week aged near an hundred years.” “This,” said Amhurst, “gives me an opportunity of discoursing upon what I have always thought one great error in the constitution of most colleges; which I will do with only this preface, that I hope no body will think I design, in what I shall say, to reflect on the deceas’d old gentleman before mention’d. The original design of endowing colleges was undoubtedly this, to support such persons as could not bear the charges of a learned education themselves, till they were able to shift in the world, and become serviceable to their country; for this reason all scholars and fellows (of most colleges at least) are obliged to take an oath, that they are not worth so much per annum _de proprio_, in some colleges more, and in some less; but in all colleges the meaning of the oath is the same, that no person shall benefit of the foundation who can live without it; but this oath, like other oaths, is commented away, and interpreted so loosely, that, at present it does not exclude persons of four or five hundred pounds a year.... When any person is chosen fellow of a college, he immediately becomes a freeholder, and is settled for life in ease and plenty; provided only that he conforms himself to the ceremonies and caprices of the place, which very few will stick at, who delight in such an indolent and recluse state; at first, indeed, he is obliged to perform some insignificant, superficial exercises, and to get a few questions and answers in the sciences by rote, to qualify him for his degrees; but when these are obtain’d, he wastes the rest of his days in luxury and idleness; he enjoys himself, and is dead to the world; for a senior fellow of a college lives and moulders away in a supine and regular course of eating, drinking, sleeping, and cheating the juniors.... In many colleges the fellowships are so considerable, that no preferment can tempt some persons to leave them; they prefer this monastic, and (as they call it) retired life to any employment, in which they would be obliged to take some pains, and do some good.”