“Mr. Creakle cuts a joke before he beats him, and we laugh at it,--miserable little dogs, we laugh, with our visages as white as ashes, and our hearts sinking into our boots. * * * Miserable little propitiators of a remorseless Idol, how abject we were to him! What a launch in life I think it now, on looking back, to be so mean and servile to a man of such parts and pretensions!” From this infant purgatory the step to the college seems a long one, for that is by comparison an Elysium, however inane and frivolous. Those whose satiric arrows speed thither are Peacock, Lytton, Trollope, Kingsley, and Butler. Thackeray should be mentioned for his two chapters on University Snobs, and the preceding one on Clerical Snobs, in which he describes the colleges as the last strongholds of Feudalism; concluding--[342] “Why is the poor College servitor to wear that name and that badge still? Because Universities are the last places into which Reform penetrates. But now that she can go to College and back for five shillings, let her travel down thither.” Squire Headlong inquires in vain at Oxford for “men of taste and philosophers.” Scythrop and Sir Telegraph were both cured at college of their love for learning. Desmond describes the university system as a “deep-laid conspiracy against the human understanding, * * * a ridiculous and mischievous farce.” But Dr. Folliott refused to succumb. Alluding to some one who cannot quote Greek, he adds,--[343] “But I think he must have finished his education at some very rigid college, where a quotation, or any other overt act showing acquaintance with classical literature, was visited with a severe penalty. For my part, I made it my boast that I was not to be so subdued. I could not be abated of a single quotation by all the bumpers in which I was fined.” The same critic says elsewhere of the curriculum:[344] “Everything for everybody, science for all, schools for all, rhetoric for all, law for all, physic for all, words for all, and sense for none.” Pelham testifies that at Eton he was never taught a syllable of English literature, laws, or history; and was laughed at for reading Pope out of school. On his graduation from Cambridge, a place that “reeked with vulgarity,” he is congratulated by his tutor for having been passably decent. Whereupon he observes,--[345] “Thus closed my academical career. He who does not allow that it passed creditably to my teachers, profitably to myself, and beneficially to the world, is a narrow-minded and illiterate man, who knows nothing of the advantages of modern education.”