Hearne writes of Oxford in 1726, "There are such differences now in the University of Oxford (hardly one college but where all the members are busied in law business and quarrels not at all relating to the promotion of learning), that good letters decay every day, insomuch that this ordination on Trinity Sunday at Oxford there were no fewer (as I am informed) than fifteen denied orders for insufficiency, which is the more to be noted because our bishops, and those employed by them, are themselves illiterate men."[3] The state of things had not much improved twenty or thirty years later when Gibbon went up, but perhaps it had improved a little.

He does not mention lawsuits as a favourite pastime of the Fellows.

"The Fellows or monks of my time," he says, "were decent, easy men, who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days were filled by a series of uniform employments--the chapel, the hall, the coffee-house, and the common room--till they retired weary and well satisfied to a long slumber.

From the toil of reading, writing, or thinking they had absolved their consciences.

Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal.