CLASSICAL STUDIES IN ENGLAND 77 



sity was concerned, a man might leave Oxford 

 as ignorant of literature as he had come to it. 

 It is very creditable to the college teachers of 

 that day that, with no encouragement but their 

 own sense of what was right and proper, they 

 did inaugurate a kind of classical renaissance. 

 It was not a period, I think, of profound or 

 abstruse classical learning. But young men 

 were encouraged to read a good deal of the 

 great authors, and elegant scholarship was cul- 

 tivated. Colleges competed with each other 

 in the making of Latin verses, an art which 

 indeed had an early popularity even in Oxford. 

 It was all part of the civilizing process, and 

 came all the more naturally as such, because it 

 happened that about 1750, or so, the Oxford 

 colleges were becoming, for good or evil, in 

 great measure "Finishing Academies for 

 Young Gentlemen," at any rate were becom- 

 ing much more the special preserve of the so- 

 called upper classes than had previously been 

 the case. So it was that, as many colleges 

 catered for the governing classes, the govern- 

 ing classes came to reckon elegant scholarship 

 as their own peculiar attribute. 



