“... I can see nothing in it to repent of, but the want of sufficient abilities to treat a subject of such general importance in the manner which it deserves. But I hope the reader will excuse some imperfections, when he considers the nature of my stunted education, that I was allow’d to continue but three years at Oxford, and was not twenty-four years of age when I compleated this undertaking.” In self-explanation Terrae Filius started off his campaign with sundry paragraphs calculated to make the authorities uneasy as to their own future safety, and to cause Undergraduates to champion him against them at all hazards. “It has, till of late,” he explained, “been a custom, from time immemorial, for one of our family to mount the rostrum at Oxford at certain seasons, and divert an innumerable crowd of spectators, who flock’d thither to hear him from all parts, with a merry oration in the fescenine manner, interspersed with secret history, raillery, and sarcasm, as the occasions at the times supply’d him with matter. If a venerable head of a college was caught snug a bed with his neighbour’s wife; or shaking his elbows on a Sunday morning; or flattering a prime minister for a bishopric; or coaxing his bedmaker’s girl out of her maidenhead; the hoary old sinner might expect to hear of it from our lay-pulpit the next Act. Or if a celebrated toast and a young student were seen together at midnight under a shady myrtle tree, billing like two turtle doves, to him it belonged, being a poet as well as an orator, to tell the tender story in a melancholy ditty, adapted to pastoral music.” Claiming to follow the precedents established by his old-time predecessors, Terrae Filius set about showing up the scandalous old Heads, disguised in thinly-veiled names. As a consequence he was many times prohibited by Vice-Chancellors and preached down, and cordially loathed and execrated by all the college Heads and Fellows of his time, whom he attacked either directly or indirectly. “Why should a poor Undergraduate,” he asked, “be called an idle rascal, and a good-for-nothing blockhead, for being perhaps but twice at chapel in one day; or for coming into college at ten or eleven o’clock at night; or for a thousand other greater trifles than these; whilst the grey-headed doctors may indulge themselves in what debaucheries and corruptions they please, with impunity, and without censure? Methinks it could not do any great hurt to the universities if the old fellows were to be jobed at least once in four or five years for their irregularities, as the young ones are everyday, if they offend.”