He dealt exhaustively with the peculiarly slack method of conducting, or rather the practical non-existence of, university examinations. On reading his account alone, it would very naturally be supposed that he was drawing the long bow, caricaturing the existing conditions out of all shape and possibility of recognition, and we laugh unreservedly. But further study of other writers’ criticisms of the times very quickly turns our smile into a gasp of amazement. Terrae Filius was not caricaturing. All his absurd and quite impossible relations of bribery and corruption were true. It is precisely the same with all his papers. He has wisely written them in the style of caricatures, and at times, no doubt, has indulged his humour overmuch; but, on going into his inimitable showings up of drinking and immoral Dons, political conflicts, university statutes, toasts, smarts, or any one of the innumerable subjects dissected by him, and then comparing his work with other eighteenth-century documents, one finds that Terrae Filius carried out his boast and kept to the truth. Is there any man to-day who, at the age of twenty-four, has achieved such notoriety, done such brilliant work, and proved himself to be such a master of his craft? CHAPTER XI ’VARSITY LITERATURE (_continued_) The Student--Cambridge included--Its design--The female student--Poem by Sir Walter Raleigh--Bishop Atterbury’s letter--The manly woman. On the first day of January, 1750, there appeared the first number of _The Student_. The sub-title read: _The Oxford Monthly Miscellany_. For two years it ran successfully, and, at the beginning of the second, it was found that Cambridge took such an interest in its doings that the sub-title was enlarged. It then read: _The Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany_. In make-up it differed entirely from Terrae Filius, and contended to be a far more serious and high-minded journal, aiming not so much to amuse as to teach its readers. Thus it contained Latin prose and verse, religious discussions, essays, medical dissertations, and a carefully selected variety of lighter matter in English prose and verse. The tone of the work may be gathered from the sedate foreword to the public.