As, however, Marvell took his B.A.
degree in 1639, he must have been in residence long before April 1638.
Probably Marvell went to Trinity about 1635, just before the register of pensioners was begun, as a pensioner, becoming a Scholar in 1638, and taking his degree in 1639.
Cambridge undergraduates do not usually keep diaries, nor after they have become Masters of Art are they much in the habit of giving details as to their academic career.

Marvell is no exception to this provoking rule.

He nowhere tells us what his University taught him or how.

The logic of the schools he had no choice but to learn.

Molineus, Peter Ramus, Seton, Keckerman were text-books of reputation, from one or another of which every Cambridge man had to master his _simpliciters_, his _quids_, his _secundum quids_, his _quales_, and his _quantums_.
Aristotle's Physics, Ethics, and Politics were "tutor's books," and those young men who loved to hear themselves talk were left free to discuss, much to Hobbes's disgust, "the freedom of the will, incorporeal substance, everlasting nows, ubiquities, hypostases, which the people understand not nor will ever care for." In the life of Matthew Robinson,[11:1] who went up to Cambridge a little later than Marvell (June 1645), and was probably a harder reader, we are told that "the strength of his studies lay in the metaphysics and in those subtle authors for many years which rendered him an irrefragable disputant _de quolibet ente_, and whilst he was but senior freshman he was found in the bachelor schools, disputing ably with the best of the senior sophisters." Robinson despised the old-fashioned Ethics and Physics, but with the new Cartesian or Experimental Philosophy he was _inter primos_.