At Oxford the student determined to go to the bar, and through the generosity of the first Lord Foley, who supplied him with funds, he was enabled to follow a profession for which, as he himself said, he felt “a calling.”  He had not been at Oxford a year before he became a member of the Hon. Society of Lincoln’s inn, although he did not begin to keep his terms there until he had taken his bachelor’s degree.  At college William Murray was as diligent as he had been at school, and, intent upon renown, he took care to make all study subservient to the one great object of his life.  He read whatever had been written on the subject of oratory,—­translated into English every oration of Cicero, and retranslated it into Latin, until every thought and expression of the illustrious example was familiar to his mind.  He applied himself vigorously to original composition, and strengthened his intellect by the perusal of works which do not ordinarily fall within the college course.  He was still at Oxford in 1727, the year of George the First’s death, and became the successful competitor for a prize when the students of the University were called upon, in the name of the Muses, to mourn over the urn of the departed Caesar,—­“of that Caesar,” as Mr. Macaulay has it, “who could not read a line of Pope, and who loved nothing but punch and fat women.”  A rival poet upon this occasion was a lad from Eton.  Disappointment and vexation at defeat, it is said, rankled in this boy’s bosom, and opened a wound which closed only with life.  Be this as it may, the classic rivalry begun at school between Pitt and Murray became fiery strife between Chatham and Mansfield, fit for a civilized world to witness and to profit by.

From Christ Church to Lincoln’s-inn was a transfer of abode, scarcely a change of habits or of life.  Murray was four years nearer to his goal, but that goal had still to be reached, and could only be won by untiring, patient, and ceaseless endeavor.  At Oxford he had attended lectures on the Pandects of Justinian, “which gave him a permanent taste for that noble system of jurisprudence.”  In his chambers he made himself thoroughly acquainted with ancient and modern history, applied himself diligently to ethics, to the study of Roman civil law, the foundation of jurisprudence, of international law, and of English municipal law.  No drudgery was too laborious, no toil too dull.  Expecting, from his northern connections, to be employed in appeals from Scotland, he made himself master of the law of that country, and when he was not engaged in these and similar pursuits, or at the Courts of Westminster listening to judgments, he would take his chief of all delights in the company of the juridical writers of France, “that he might see how the Roman and feudal laws had been blended in the different provinces of that kingdom.”  Not a moment was lost in making preparations for the victory which it was the purpose of his life to win.