“And now, if he aspires at higher honours (and what emulous spirit can sit down without aspiring at them?) new labours and new difficulties are to be encountered during the space of three years. He must _determine_ in Lent, he must _do quodlibets_, he must _do austens_, he must declaim twice, he must read six solemn lectures, and he must be again examined in the sciences, before he can be promoted to the degree of Master of Arts. None but the initiated can know what _determining_, doing _quodlibets_, and doing _austens_ mean. I have not room to enter into a minute description of such contemptible minutiæ. Let it be sufficient to say, that these exercises consist of disputations of syllogisms, procured and uttered nearly in the same places, time, and manner, as we have already seen them in doing generals. There is, however, a great deal of trouble in little formalities, such as procuring sixpenny _liceats_, sticking up the names on the walls, sitting in large empty rooms by yourself, or with some poor wight as ill-employed as yourself, without anything to say or do, wearing hoods and a little piece of lambskin wool on it, and a variety of other particulars too tedious and too trifling to enumerate.” The eighteenth-century lad became an Undergraduate on condition of subscribing to a lie, and was sent down as a not undistinguished man after seven years by pronouncing another in the ear of the Vice-Chancellor. “As university degrees are supposed to be badges of learning and merit, there ought to be some qualifications requisite to wear them, besides perjury, and treason, and paying a multitude of fees, which seem to be the three principal things insisted upon in our universities,” said Terrae Filius--and the persistent joker spoke never a truer word. While discussing the same question with some bitterness he asserted that a schoolboy has done more learned things for his breaking-up task than were required of an Oxford man after seven years’ residence. He more than bore out Knox’s words as to the custom of making one’s examiner drunk and so avoiding the irksome necessity of being asked awkward questions by him. “It is also well known,” he wrote, “to be the custom for the candidates either to present their examiners with a piece of gold, or to give them an handsome entertainment, and make them drunk; which they commonly do the night before examination, and sometimes keep them till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by joul, from their drinking-room to the school where they are to be examined. _Quaere_, whether it would not be very ungrateful of the examiner to refuse any candidate a _testimonium_ who has treated him so splendidly over night? and whether he is not, in this case, prevail’d upon by bribes?”