His career at Oxford is buried in even deeper obscurity than his schooltime at Winchester.  This is no doubt to be explained, on the intellectual side, by the fact that members of New College were at that time exempt from public examination; and, on the social side, by the straitened circumstances which prevented him from showing hospitality, and the pride which made him unwilling to accept what he could not return.  We are left to gather his feelings about Oxford and the system pursued there, from casual references in his critical writings; and these are uncomplimentary enough.  When he wishes to stigmatize a proposition as enormously and preposterously absurd, he says that there is “no authority on earth (always excepting the Dean of Christ Church), which could make it credible to me.”  When stirred to the liveliest indignation by the iniquities which a Tory Government is practising in Ireland, he exclaims—­“A Senior Proctor of the University of Oxford, the Head of a House, or the examining chaplain to a Bishop, may believe these things can last; but every man of the world, whose understanding has been exercised in the business of life, must see (and see with a breaking heart) that they will soon come to a fearful termination.”  He praised a comparison of the Universities to “enormous hulks confined with mooring-chains, everything flowing and progressing around them,” while they themselves stood still.

When pleading for a wider and more reasonable course of studies at Oxford, he says:—­

“A genuine Oxford tutor would shudder to hear his young men disputing upon moral and political truth, forming and putting down theories, and indulging in all the boldness of youthful discussion.  He would augur nothing from it but impiety to God and treason to Kings.”

Protesting against the undue predominance of classical studies in the Universities, as at the Public Schools, he says:—­

“Classical literature is the great object at Oxford.  Many minds so employed have produced many works, and much fame in that department:  but if all liberal arts and sciences useful to human life had been taught there; if some had dedicated themselves to chemistry, some to mathematics, some to experimental philosophy; and if every attainment had been honoured in the mixt ratio of its difficulty and utility; the system of such an University would have been much more valuable, but the splendour of its name something less.”

The hopelessness of any attempt to reform the curriculum of Oxford by opening the door to Political Economy is stated with characteristic vigour.—­