Let the _Spectator_ describe the rising generation of that time after they had finished their academic career and had gone to the university. In No. 54, attributed to Steele, speaking of Cambridge, he says, 'Now for their manner of living: and here I shall have a large field to expatiate in; but I shall reserve particulars for my intended discourse, and now only mention one or two of their principal exercises. The elder proficients employ themselves in inspecting _mores hominum multorum_, in getting acquainted with all the signs and windows in the town. Some have arrived to so great knowledge, that they can tell every time a butcher kills a calf, every time any old woman's cat is in the straw; and a thousand matters as important. One ancient philosopher contemplates two or three hours every day over a sun-dial; and is true to the dial. As the dial to the sun, Although it be not shone upon. Our younger students are content to carry their speculation as yet no further than bowling greens, billiard tables, and such like places.' Of the reading men, he says, 'They were ever looked upon as a people that impaired themselves more by their strict application to the rules of their order than any other students whatever. Others seldom hurt themselves any further than to gain weak eyes, and sometimes headaches; but these philosophers are seized all over with a general inability, indolence, and weariness, and a certain impatience of the place they are in, with an heaviness in removing to another. 'The loungers are satisfied with being merely part of the number of mankind, without distinguishing themselves from amongst them. They may be said rather to suffer their time to pass than to spend it, without regard to the past or prospect of the future. All they know of life is only in the present instant, and do not taste even that. When one of this order happens to be a man of fortune, the expense of his time is transferred to his coach and horses, and his life is to be measured by their motion, not his own enjoyments or sufferings. The chief entertainment one of these philosophers can possibly propose to himself is to get a relish of dress. This, methinks, might diversify the person he is weary of, his own dear self, to himself. I have known these two amusements make one of these philosophers make a tolerable figure in the world; with variety of dresses in public assemblies in town, and quick motion of his horses out of it, now to Bath, now to Tunbridge, then to Newmarket, and then to London, he has, in process of time, brought it to pass, that his coach and his horses have been mentioned in all these places.' And this description, with a little alteration, would pass as a fair reflex of modern undergraduate existence at either Oxford or Cambridge.