The letters of Robert Southey, who entered Balliol as a commoner in 1792, do not give an unfavourable impression of the condition of the College just after Leigh’s death. His own peculiarities of taste and temper placed him doubtless in uncongenial surroundings,--he refused the assistance of the College barber and wore his curly hair long,--but his complaint is not of the College but of the University system in general. The authorities are “men remarkable only for great wigs and little wisdom.” “With respect to its superiors, Oxford only exhibits waste of wigs and want of wisdom; with respect to the undergraduates, every species of abandoned excess.” In his second year, with the haughty air of a senior man, he found the freshmen “not estimable”; but he made friends in College, and two of his first four comrades in the great Pantisocratic scheme were Balliol men. Even his tutor, Thomas Howe, delighted him by being “half a democrat,” and still more by the remark--“Mr. Southey, you won’t learn any thing by my lectures, Sir; so, if you have any studies of your own, you had better pursue them.” Rowing and swimming, Southey used to say, were all he learned at Oxford; but with two years’ residence, and a term missed in them, with Pantisocracy and _Joan of Arc_, we may doubt whether it was all Oxford’s fault.[112] The real revival of Balliol College began after the election of John Parsons as Master in 1798. He succeeded to the Vice-Chancellorship in 1807 unexpectedly, on the death of Dr. Richards, Rector of Exeter, after a single year of office. “He was a good scholar,” says Bedel Cox, “and an impressive preacher, though he did not preach often; above all, he was thoroughly conversant with University matters, having been for several years the leading, or rather the working, man in the Hebdomadal Board. Indeed, he had the great merit of elaborating the details of the Public Examination Statute at the end of the last century. His subsequent promotion” to the Bishopric of Peterborough “was considered as the well-earned reward of that his great work. Dr. Parsons had also the credit of laying the foundation of that collegiate and tutorial system which Dr. Jenkyns afterwards so successfully carried out.”[113] Those who may think the establishment of the examination system a questionable benefit may be comforted by knowing that for many years it was conducted entirely _vivâ voce_, while the requirements for degrees in the time preceding the change were so notoriously perfunctory that the old method could not possibly be maintained. In the Colleges too the tutorial system, in its principle--as still at Cambridge--a disciplinary system, had long outlived its vitality; and Dr. Parsons deserves credit not merely for invigorating it, but for setting on a firm foundation an organization for teaching undergraduates as well as for keeping them in order.