VI.THE UNIVERSITIES
The effect of these conditions is perhaps best marked in the state of the universities.Universities have at different periods been great centres of intellectual life.The English universities of the eighteenth century are generally noted only as embodiments of sloth and prejudice.The judgments of Wesley and Gibbon and Adam Smith and Bentham coincide in regard to Oxford;and Johnson's love of his university is an equivocal testimony to its intellectual merits.We generally think of it as of a sleepy hollow,in which portly fellows of colleges,like the convivial Warton,imbibed port wine and sneered at Methodists,though few indeed rivalled Warton's services to literature.The universities in fact had become,as they long continued to be,high schools chiefly for the use of the clergy,and if they still aimed at some wider intellectual training,were sinking to be institutions where the pupils of the public schools might,if they pleased,put a little extra polish upon their classical and mathematical knowledge.The colleges preserved their mediaeval constitution;and no serious changes of their statutes were made until the middle of the present century.The clergy had an almost exclusive part in the management,and dissenters were excluded even from entering Oxford as students.(21)But the clergyman did not as a rule devote himself to a life of study.He could not marry as a fellow,but he made no vows of celibacy.
The college,therefore,was merely a stepping-stone on the way to the usual course of preferment.A fellow looked forwards to settling in a college living,or if he had the luck to act as tutor to a nobleman,he might soar to a deanery or a bishopric.The fellows who stayed in their colleges were probably those who had least ambition,or who had a taste for an easy bachelor's life.The universities,therefore,did not form bodies of learned men interested in intellectual pursuits;but at most,helped such men in their start upon a more prosperous career.The studies flagged in sympathy.Gray's letters sufficiently reveal the dulness which was felt by a man of cultivation confined within the narrow society of college dons of the day.The scholastic philosophy which had once found enthusiastic cultivators in the great universities had more or less held its own through the seventeenth century,though repudiated by all the rising thinkers.Since the days of Locke and Berkeley,it had fallen utterly out of credit.The bright common sense of the polished society of the day looked upon the old doctrine with a contempt,which,if not justified by familiarity,was an implicit judgment of the tree by its fruits.Nobody could suppose the divines of the day to be the depositaries of an esoteric wisdom which the vulgar were not worthy to criticise.They were themselves chiefly anxious to prove that their sacred mysteries were really not at all mysterious,but merely one way of expressing plain common sense.At Oxford,indeed,the lads were still crammed with Aldrich,and learned the technical terms of a philosophy which had ceased to have any real life in it.At Cambridge,ardent young radicals spoke with contempt of this 'horrid jargon --fit only to be chattered by monkies in a wilderness.'(22)Even at Cambridge,they still had disputations On the old form,but they argued theses from Locke's essay,and thought that their mathematical studies were a check upon metaphysical 'jargon.'It is indeed characteristic of the respect for tradition that at Cambridge even mathematics long suffered from a mistaken patriotism which resented any improvement upon the methods of Newton.There were some signs of reviving activity.The fellowships were being distributed with less regard to private interest.The mathematical tripos founded at Cambridge in the middle of the century became the prototype of all competitive examinations;and half a century later Oxford followed the precedent by the Examination Statute of 1800.A certain number of professorships of such modern studies as anatomy,history,botany,and geology were founded during the eighteenth century,and show a certain sense of a need of broader views.The lectures upon which Blackstone founded his commentaries were the product of the foundation of the Vinerian professorship in 1751;and the most recent of the Cambridge colleges,Downing College,shows by its constitution that a professoriate was now considered to be desirable.Cambridge in the last years of the century might have had a body of very eminent professors.Watson,second wrangler of 1759,had delivered lectures upon chemistry,of which it was said by Davy that hardly any conceivable change in the science could make them obsolete.(23)Paley,senior wrangler in 1763,was an almost unrivalled master of lucid exposition,and one of his works is still a textbook at Cambridge.Isaac Milner,senior wrangler in 1774,afterwards held the professorships of mathematics and natural philosophy,and was famous as a sort of ecclesiastical Dr Johnson.