Though perhaps you do not know that in the nineteenth century Oxford and its less interesting sister Cambridge became definitely commercial.

They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of a peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise.

The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, _the_ bores of society.

They were laughed at, despised--and paid.
Which last was what they aimed at." Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgments.
Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that.

But I must admit that they were mostly prigs, and that they _were_ commercial.