He matriculated at the University on the 7th of July.  Professor Thorold Rogers, who has collected the few particulars that can now be learned of Smith’s residence at Oxford from official records, gives us the matriculation entry:  “Adamus Smith e Coll.  Ball., Gen. Fil.  Jul. 7mo 1740,"[10] and mentions that it is written in a round school-boy hand—­a style of hand, we may add, which Smith retained to the last.  He has himself said that literary composition never grew easier to him with experience; neither apparently did handwriting.  His letters are all written in the same big round characters, connected together manifestly by a slow, difficult, deliberate process.

He remained at Oxford till the 15th of August 1746; after that day his name appears no longer in the Buttery Books of the College; but up till that day he resided at Oxford continuously from the time of his matriculation.  He did not leave between terms, and was thus six years on end away from home.  A journey to Scotland was in those days a serious and expensive undertaking; it would have taken more than half Smith’s exhibition of L40 to pay for the posting alone of a trip to Kirkcaldy and back.  When Professor Rouet of Glasgow was sent up to London a few years later to push on the tedious twenty years’ lawsuit between Glasgow College and Balliol about the Snell exhibitions, the single journey cost him L11:15s., exclusive of personal expenses, for which he was allowed 6s. 8d. a day.[11] Now Smith out of his L40 a year had to pay about L30 for his food; Mr. Rogers mentions that his first quarter’s maintenance came to L7:5s., about the usual cost of living, he adds, at Oxford at that period.  Then the tutors, though they seem to have ceased to do any tutoring, still took their fees of 20s. a quarter all the same, and Smith’s remaining L5 would be little enough to meet other items of necessary expenditure.  It appears from Salmon’s Present State of the Universities, published in 1744, during Smith’s residence at Oxford, that an Oxford education then cost L32 a year as a minimum, but that there was scarce a commoner in the University who spent less than L60.

Smith’s name does not appear in Bliss’s list of Oxford graduates, and although in Mr. Foster’s recent Alumni Oxonienses other particulars are given about him, no mention is made of his graduation; but Professor Rogers has discovered evidence in the Buttery Books of Balliol which seems conclusively to prove that Smith actually took the degree of B.A., whatever may be the explanation of the apparent omission of his name from the official graduation records.  In those Buttery Books he is always styled Dominus from and after the week ending 13th April 1744.  Now Dominus was the usual designation of a B.A., and in April 1744 Smith would have kept the sixteen terms that were then, we may say, the only qualification practically necessary for that degree.  He had possibly omitted some step requisite for the formal completion of the graduation.