Ladies in all the glory of their imported dresses, gentlemen in brilliantly colored knee breeches and coats, with elegantly chased swords at their sides and the best beaver hats made in London under their arms, attended the receptions, the dances, the theater, and more than once adjourned to the famous Apollo room in the Raleigh Tavern, where they indulged in much drinking of "punch, beer, Nantes rum, brandy, Madeira and French claret." The first time young Jefferson went to the Raleigh he was probably shown the largest punch bowl in the house, which had played a part in the purchase of Shadwell, for had not Colonel Jefferson bought the site from William Randolph of Tuckahoe, for "Henry Weatherbourne's biggest bowl of arrack punch"? The college itself was no less an attraction than the town. Built originally on the plans of Christopher Wren, it had unfortunately been remodeled after a fire, "a rude, misshapen pile, which but it had a roof would be taken for a brick-kiln", wrote Jefferson in his "Notes on Virginia." Such as it was, however, with the Capitol, of much better style, it was the first large building and monument the young man had ever seen and he probably admired it at the time as much as most Virginians did. It was by no means a university, not even a real college. Like most institutions of learning in the colonies, it had been established "to the end that the church of Virginia may be furnished with a seminary for ministers of the gospel, and that the youth may be piously educated in good letters and manners, and that the Christian faith may be propagated amongst the Western Indians, to the glory of the Almighty." The lack of preparation of the students, the fact that the sons of the wealthiest were sent to England to finish their education, perhaps also an aristocratic scorn for specialized and intensive learning among the gentry of Virginia, all had contributed to keep down the standards of the institution. Much to his disgust, Jefferson found ... that the admission of the learners of Latin and Greek had filled the college with children. This rendering it disagreeable and degrading to young gentlemen, already prepared for entering on the sciences, they were discouraged from resorting to it, and thus the schools for mathematics and moral philosophy, which might have been of some service, became of very little. The revenues, too, were exhausted in accommodating those who came only to acquire the rudiments of the sciences.[5]