Adam Smith showed his sense of the defects of Oxford in a stern section of the _Wealth of Nations_, written twenty years after he had left the place.

Even youths like Gray and West, fresh from Eton, express themselves with contempt for their respective universities.

"Consider me," says the latter, writing from Christ Church, "very seriously, here is a strange country, inhabited by things that call themselves Doctors and Masters of Arts, a country flowing with syllogisms and ale; where Horace and Virgil are equally unknown." Gray, answering from Peterhouse, can only do justice to his feelings by quoting the words of the Hebrew prophet, and insists that Isaiah had Cambridge equally with Babylon in view when he spoke of the wild beasts and wild asses, of the satyrs that dance, of an inhabitation of dragons and a court for owls.
FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 3: _Social Life at the English Universities_.

By Christopher Wordsworth.

Page 57.] Into such untoward company was Gibbon thrust by his careless father at the age of fifteen.