AT OXFORD
1740-1746. _Aet._ 17-23
Smith left Scotland for Oxford in June 1740, riding the whole way on
horseback, and, as he told Samuel Rogers many years afterwards, being
much struck from the moment he crossed the Border with the richness of
the country he was entering, and the great superiority of its
agriculture over that of his own country. Scotch agriculture was not
born in 1740, even in the Lothians; the face of the country everywhere
was very bare and waste, and, as he was rather pointedly reminded on
the day of his arrival at Oxford, even its cattle were still lean and
poor, compared with the fat oxen of England. Among the stories told of
his absence of mind is one he is said by a writer in the _Monthly
Review_ to have been fond of relating himself whenever a particular
joint appeared on his own table. The first day he dined in the hall at
Balliol he fell into a reverie at table and for a time forgot his
meal, whereupon the servitor roused him to attention, telling him he
had better fall to, because he had never seen such a piece of beef in
Scotland as the joint then before him. His nationality, as will
presently appear, occasioned him worse trouble at Oxford than this
good-natured gibe.
He matriculated at the University on the 7th of July. Professor
Thorold Rogers, who has collected the few particulars that can now be
learned of Smith's residence at Oxford from official records, gives us
the matriculation entry: "Adamus Smith e Coll. Ball., Gen. Fil. Jul.
7mo 1740,"[10] and mentions that it is written in a round school-boy
hand--a style of hand, we may add, which Smith retained to the last.
He has himself said that literary composition never grew easier to him
with experience; neither apparently did handwriting. His letters are
all written in the same big round characters, connected together
manifestly by a slow, difficult, deliberate process.
He remained at Oxford till the 15th of August 1746; after that day his
name appears no longer in the Buttery Books of the College; but up
till that day he resided at Oxford continuously from the time of his
matriculation. He did not leave between terms, and was thus six years
on end away from home. A journey to Scotland was in those days a
serious and expensive undertaking; it would have taken more than half
Smith's exhibition of £40 to pay for the posting alone of a trip to
Kirkcaldy and back. When Professor Rouet of Glasgow was sent up to
London a few years later to push on the tedious twenty years' lawsuit
between Glasgow College and Balliol about the Snell exhibitions, the
single journey cost him £11:15s., exclusive of personal expenses, for
which he was allowed 6s. 8d. a day.[11] Now Smith out of his £40 a
year had to pay about £30 for his food; Mr. Rogers mentions that his
first quarter's maintenance came to £7:5s., about the usual cost of
living, he adds, at Oxford at that period. Then the tutors, though
they seem to have ceased to do any tutoring, still took their fees of
20s. a quarter all the same, and Smith's remaining £5 would be little
enough to meet other items of necessary expenditure. It appears from
Salmon's _Present State of the Universities_, published in 1744,
during Smith's residence at Oxford, that an Oxford education then cost
£32 a year as a minimum, but that there was scarce a commoner in the
University who spent less than £60.
Smith's name does not appear in Bliss's list of Oxford graduates, and
although in Mr. Foster's recent _Alumni Oxonienses_ other particulars
are given about him, no mention is made of his graduation; but
Professor Rogers has discovered evidence in the Buttery Books of
Balliol which seems conclusively to prove that Smith actually took the
degree of B.A., whatever may be the explanation of the apparent
omission of his name from the official graduation records. In those
Buttery Books he is always styled Dominus from and after the week
ending 13th April 1744. Now Dominus was the usual designation of a
B.A., and in April 1744 Smith would have kept the sixteen terms that
were then, we may say, the only qualification practically necessary
for that degree. He had possibly omitted some step requisite for the
formal completion of the graduation.
Smith's residence at Oxford fell in a time when learning lay there
under a long and almost total eclipse. This dark time seems to have
lasted most of that century. Crousaz visited Oxford about the
beginning of the century and found the dons as ignorant of the new
philosophy as the savages of the South Sea. Bishop Butler came there
as a student twenty years afterwards, and could get nothing to satisfy
his young thirst for knowledge except "frivolous lectures" and
"unintelligible disputations." A generation later he could not even
have got that; for Smith tells us in the _Wealth of Nations_ that the
lecturers had then given up all pretence of lecturing, and a foreign
traveller, who describes a public disputation he attended at Oxford in
1788, says the Præses Respondent and three Opponents all sat consuming
the statutory time in profound silence, absorbed in the novel of the
hour. Gibbon, who resided there not long after Smith, tells that his
tutor neither gave nor sought to give him more than one lesson, and
that the conversation of the common-room, to which as a gentleman
commoner he was privileged to listen, never touched any point of
literature or scholarship, but "stagnated in a round of College
business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal."
Bentham, a few years after Gibbon, has the same tale to tell; it was
absolutely impossible to learn anything at Oxford, and the years he
spent there were the most barren and unprofitable of his life. Smith's
own account of the English universities in the _Wealth of Nations_,
though only published in 1776, was substantially true of Oxford during
his residence there thirty years before. Every word of it is endorsed
by Gibbon as the word of "a moral and political sage who had himself
resided at Oxford." Now, according to that account, nobody was then
taught, or could so much as find "the proper means of being taught,
the sciences which it is the business of those incorporated bodies to
teach." The lecturers had ceased lecturing; "the tutors contented
themselves with teaching a few unconnected shreds and parcels" of the
old unimproved traditionary course, "and even these they commonly
taught very negligently and superficially"; being paid independently
of their personal industry, and being responsible only to one another,
"every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty
provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own"; and the general
consequence was a culpable dislike to improvement and indifference to
all new ideas, which made a rich and well-endowed university the
"sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find
shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner
of the world." Coming up from a small university in the North, which
was cultivating letters with such remarkable spirit on its little
oatmeal wisely dispensed, Smith concluded that the stagnation of
learning which prevailed in the wealthy universities of England was
due at bottom to nothing but their wealth, because it was distributed
on a bad system.
Severely, however, as Smith has censured the order of things he found
prevailing at Oxford, it is worthy of notice that he never, like
Gibbon and Bentham, thought of the six years he spent there as being
wasted. Boswell and others have pronounced him ungrateful for the
censures he deemed meet to pass upon that order of things, but that
charge is of course unreasonable, because the censures were undeniably
true and undeniably useful, and I refer to it here merely to point out
that as a matter of fact Smith not only felt, but has publicly
expressed, gratitude for his residence at the University of Oxford. He
does so in his letter to the Principal of Glasgow College in 1787
accepting the Rectorship, when in enumerating the claims which Glasgow
College had upon his grateful regard, he expressly mentions the fact
that it had sent him as a student to Oxford. In truth, his time was
not wasted at Oxford. He did not allow it to be wasted. He read deeply
and widely in many subjects and in many languages; he read and thought
for six years, and for that best kind of education the negligence of
tutors and lecturers, such as they then were, was probably better than
their assiduity.
For this business of quiet reading Smith seems to have been happily
situated in Balliol. Balliol was not then a reading college as it is
now. A claim is set up in behalf of some of the other Oxford colleges
that they kept the lamp of learning lit even in the darkest days of
last century, but Balliol is not one of them. It was chiefly known in
that age for the violence of its Jacobite opinions. Only a few months
after Smith left it a party of Balliol students celebrated the
birthday of Cardinal York in the College, and rushing out into the
streets, mauled every Hanoverian they met, and created such a serious
riot that they were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for it by the
Court of King's Bench; but for this grave offence the master of the
College, Dr. Theophilus Leigh, and the other authorities, had thought
the culprits entitled to indulgence on account of the anniversary they
were celebrating, and had decided that the case would be sufficiently
met by a Latin imposition. If Balliol, however, was not more
enlightened than any of the other colleges of the day, it had one
great advantage, it possessed one of the best college libraries at
Oxford. The Bodleian was not then open to any member of the University
under the rank of a bachelor of arts of two years' standing, and Smith
was only a bachelor of arts of two years' standing for a few months
before he finally quitted Oxford. He could therefore have made little
use of the Bodleian and its then unrivalled treasures, but in his own
college library at Balliol he was allowed free range, and availed
himself of his privilege with only too great assiduity, to the injury
of his health.
His studies took a new turn at Oxford; he laid aside the mathematics
for which he showed a liking at Glasgow, and gave his strength to the
ancient Latin and Greek classics, possibly for no better reason than
that he could get nobody at Oxford to take the trouble of teaching him
the former, and that the Balliol library furnished him with the means
of cultivating the latter by himself. He did so, moreover, to some
purpose, for all through life he showed a knowledge of Greek and Latin
literature not only uncommonly extensive but uncommonly exact. Dalzel,
the professor of Greek at Edinburgh, was one of Smith's most intimate
friends during those latter years of his life when he was generally
found with one of the classical authors before him, in conformity with
his theory that the best amusement of age was to renew acquaintance
with the writers who were the delight of one's youth; and Dalzel used
always to speak to Dugald Stewart with the greatest admiration of the
readiness and accuracy with which Smith remembered the works of the
Greek authors, and even of the mastery he exhibited over the niceties
of Greek grammar.[12] This knowledge must of course have been acquired
at Oxford. Smith had read the Italian poets greatly too, and could
quote them easily; and he paid special care to the French classics on
account of their style, spending much time indeed, we are told, in
trying to improve his own style by translating their writings into
English.
There was only one fruit in the garden of which he might not freely
eat, and that was the productions of modern rationalism. A story has
come down which, though not mentioned by Dugald Stewart, is stated by
M'Culloch to rest on the best authority, and by Dr. Strang of Glasgow
to have been often told by Smith himself, to the effect that he was
one day detected reading Hume's _Treatise of Human Nature_--probably
the very copy presented him by the author at the apparent suggestion
of Hutcheson--and was punished by a severe reprimand and the
confiscation of the evil book. It is at least entirely consistent with
all we know of the spirit of darkness then ruling in Oxford that it
should be considered an offence of peculiar aggravation for a student
to read a great work of modern thought which had been actually placed
in his hands by his professor at Glasgow, and the only wonder is that
Smith escaped so lightly, for but a few years before three students
were expelled from Oxford for coquetting with Deism, and a fourth, of
whom better hopes seem to have been formed, had his degree deferred
for two years, and was required in the interval to translate into
Latin as a reformatory exercise the whole of Leslie's _Short and Easy
Method with the Deists_.[13]
Except for the great resource of study, Smith's life at Oxford seems
not to have been a very happy one. For one thing, he was in poor
health and spirits a considerable part of the time, as appears from
the brief extracts from his letters published by Lord Brougham. When
Brougham was writing his account of Smith he got the use of a number
of letters written by the latter to his mother from Oxford between
1740 and 1746, which probably exist somewhere still, but which, he
found, contained nothing of any general interest. "They are almost
all," he says, "upon mere family and personal matters, most of them
indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his
strong affection for his mother." The very brief extracts Brougham
makes from them, however, inform us that Smith was then suffering from
what he calls "an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head," for
which he was using the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley
had made the fashionable panacea for all manner of diseases. At the
end of July 1744 Smith says to his mother: "I am quite inexcusable for
not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer
writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or
company, but oftener laziness, hinders me. Tar-water is a remedy very
much in vogue here at present for almost all diseases. It has
perfectly cured me of an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head. I
wish you'd try it. I fancy it might be of service to you." In another
and apparently subsequent letter, however, he states that he had had
the scurvy and shaking as long as he remembered anything, and that the
tar-water had not removed them. On the 29th of November 1743 he makes
the curious confession: "I am just recovered from a violent fit of
laziness, which has confined me to my elbow-chair these three
months."[14] Brougham thinks these statements show symptoms of
hypochondria; but they probably indicate no more than the ordinary
lassitude and exhaustion ensuing from overwork. Hume, when about the
same age, had by four or five years' hard reading thrown himself into
a like condition, and makes the same complaints of "laziness of
temper" and scurvy. The shaking in the head continued to attend Smith
all his days.
But low health was only one of the miseries of his estate at Oxford.
There is reason to believe that Balliol College was in his day a
stepmother to her Scotch sons, and that their existence there was made
very uncomfortable not merely at the hands of the mob of young
gentlemen among whom they were obliged to live, but even more by the
unfair and discriminating harshness of the College authorities
themselves. Out of the hundred students then residing at Balliol,
eight at least were Scotch, four on the Snell foundation and four on
the Warner, and the Scotch eight seem to have been always treated as
an alien and intrusive faction. The Snell exhibitioners were
continually complaining to the Glasgow Senatus on the subject, and the
Glasgow Senatus thought them perfectly justified in complaining. In a
letter of 22nd May 1776, in which they go over the whole long story of
grievances, the Glasgow Senatus tell the Master and Fellows of Balliol
plainly that the Scotch students had never been "welcomely received"
at Balliol, and had never been happy there. If an English
undergraduate committed a fault, the authorities never thought of
blaming any one but himself, but when one of the eight Scotch
undergraduates did so, his sin was remembered against all the other
seven, and reflections were cast on the whole body; "a circumstance,"
add the Senatus, "which has been much felt during their residence at
Balliol." Their common resentment against the injustice of this kind
of tribal accountability that was imposed on them naturally provoked a
common resistance; it developed "a spirit of association," say the
Senatus, which "has at all periods been a cause of much trouble both
to Balliol and to Glasgow Colleges."[15] In 1744, when Smith himself
was one of them, the Snell exhibitioners wrote an account of their
grievances to the Glasgow Senatus, and stated "what they wanted to be
done towards making their residence more easy and advantageous";[16]
and in 1753, when some of Smith's contemporaries would still be on the
foundation, Dr. Leigh, the master of Balliol, tells the Glasgow
Senatus that he had ascertained in an interview with one of the Snell
exhibitioners that what they wanted was to be transferred to some
other college, because they had "a total dislike to Balliol."[17]
This idea of a transference, I may be allowed to add, continued to be
mooted, and in 1776 it was actually proposed by the heads of Balliol
to the Senatus of Glasgow to transfer the Snell foundationers
altogether to Hertford College; but the Glasgow authorities thought
this would be merely a transference of the troubles, and not a remedy
for them, that the exhibitioners would get no better welcome at
Hertford than at Balliol if they came as "fixed property" instead of
coming as volunteers, and that they could never lose their national
peculiarities of dialect and their habits of combination if they came
in a body. Accordingly, in the letter of 22nd May 1776, which I have
already quoted,[18] they recommended the arrangement of leaving each
exhibitioner to choose his own college,--an arrangement, it may be
remembered, which had just then been strongly advocated as a general
principle by Smith in his newly-published _Wealth of the Nations_, on
the broader ground that it would encourage a wholesome competition
between the colleges, and so improve the character of the instruction
given in them all.
Now if the daily relations between the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol
and the authorities and general members of the College were of the
unhappy description partially revealed in this correspondence, that
may possibly afford some explanation of what must otherwise seem the
entirely unaccountable circumstance that Smith, so far as we are able
to judge, made almost no permanent friends at Oxford. Few men were
ever by nature more entirely formed for friendship than Smith. At
every other stage of his history we invariably find him surrounded by
troops of friends, and deriving from their company his chief solace
and delight. But here he is six or seven years at Oxford, at the
season of manhood when the deepest and most lasting friendships of a
man's life are usually made, and yet we never see him in all his
subsequent career holding an hour's intercourse by word or letter with
any single Oxford contemporary except Bishop Douglas of Salisbury, and
Bishop Douglas had been a Snell exhibitioner himself. With Douglas,
moreover, he had many other ties. Douglas was a Fifeshire man, and may
possibly have been a kinsman more or less remote; he was a friend of
Hume and Robertson, and all Smith's Edinburgh friends; and he was,
like Smith again, a member of the famous Literary Club of London, and
is celebrated in that character by Goldsmith in the poem
"Retaliation," as "the scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks." I
have gone over the names of those who might be Smith's contemporaries
at Balliol as they appear in Mr. Foster's list of _Alumni Oxonienses_,
and they were a singularly undistinguished body of people. Smith and
Douglas themselves are indeed the only two of them who seem to have
made any mark in the world at all.
An allusion has been made to the Scottish dialect of the Snell
exhibitioners; it may be mentioned that Smith seems to have lost the
broad Scotch at Oxford without, like Jeffrey, contracting the narrow
English; at any rate Englishmen, who visited Smith after visiting
Robertson or Blair, were struck with the pure and correct English he
spoke in private conversation, and he appears to have done so without
giving any impression of constraint.
Smith returned to Scotland in August 1746, but his name remained on
the Oxford books for some months after his departure, showing
apparently that he had not on leaving come to a final determination
against going back. His friends at home are said to have been most
anxious that he should continue at Oxford; that would naturally seem
to open to him the best opportunities either in the ecclesiastical
career for which they are believed to have destined him, or in the
university career for which nature herself designed him. But both
careers were practically barred against him by his objection to taking
holy orders, the great majority of the Oxford Fellowships being at
that time only granted upon condition of ordination, and Smith
concluded that the best prospect for him was after all the road back
to Scotland. And he never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.
When he became Professor at Glasgow he was the medium of intercourse
between the Glasgow Senate and the Balliol authorities, but beyond the
occasional interchange of letters which this business required, his
relations with the Southern University appear to have continued
completely suspended. Nor did Oxford, on her part, ever show any
interest in him. Even after he had become perhaps her greatest living
alumnus, she did not offer him the ordinary honour of a doctor's
degree.
FOOTNOTES:
[10] Rogers's edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, I. vii.
[11] Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[12] Stewart's _Life of Adam Smith_, p. 8.
[13] Tyerman's _Wesley_, i. 66.
[14] Brougham, _Men of Letters_, ii. 216.
[15] Letter from Senatus of Glasgow College to Balliol College, in
Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[16] Letter of A.G. Ross of Gray's Inn to Professor R. Simson,
Glasgow, in Edinburgh University Library.
[17] Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.
[18] Edinburgh University Library.