How is it then that any man emerged from the Oxford of this period and succeeded in inscribing his name on the roll of fame? The reason is that Oxford was a mirror in which was reflected London life. The metropolis was simply Oxford on a larger scale, so that the Undergraduates were learning at the university to do the things which would be expected of them in after life; and the men who distinguished themselves at college were bound to achieve renown later. The fame of such men as Charles Fox, the pre-eminent statesman; Edward Gibbon, the historian; Malmesbury, the diplomat; John Wesley, the founder of Methodism; Collins, the poet; and the immortal Dr Johnson, is written down in the pages of history. Charles James Fox, one of the greatest statesmen England has ever seen, came up from Eton to Hertford College[30] in 1764, where he was the leading spirit in a little coterie which included James Harris, Earl of Malmesbury, and William Eden, Baron Auckland. By his father he had been initiated, while still at Eton, into the vice of gaming, by which he was very deeply bitten. A still more curious fact is that although Fox as a young man had no inclinations towards loose living he was taken over to Paris and laughed into it by his otherwise doting parent. His innate force of character, however, enabled him to resist what might have wrecked the life of another man less strong, and although outwardly he was at Oxford an idle gamester, yet in secret, in the small hours of the morning, he worked exceedingly hard. Malmesbury has described this circle of friends as a non-working, pleasure-loving body. Fox, as the leader of them, fell, of course, under this category; but the results of his hours of private grinding were quite extraordinary. He read “Aristotle’s ‘Ethics and Politics,’ with an ease uncommon in those who have principally cultivated the study of the Greek writers. His favourite authors were Longinus and Homer, with the latter of whom he was particularly conversant; he could discuss the works of the Ionian bard, not only as a man of exquisite taste, and as a philosophical critic, which might be expected from a mind like his, but also as a grammarian. He was indeed capable of conversing with Longinus, on the beauty, sublimity, and pathos of Homer; with Aristotle on his delineations of man, with a pedagogue on dactyls, spondees, anapaests, and all the arcana of language. History, ethics, politics, were, however, his particular studies.”