The
strange thing is that, with all their neglect of learning and
morality, the colleges were not the resorts of jovial if unseemly boon
companionship; they were collections of quarrelsome and spiteful
litigants, who spent their time in angry lawsuits. The indecent
contentions between Bentley and the Fellows of Trinity were no
isolated scandal. They are best known and remembered on account of the
eminence of the chief disputants, and of the melancholy waste of
Bentley's genius which they occasioned. 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.
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