CHAPTER IV - ACTS AND OPPONENCIES after 1772

Summary

‘See Gray, so used to melt the tender eyes,

Stretch'd on the orbit of a circle dies!

And Goldsmith, whom deserted Auburn haled,

See on a pointed triangle impaled!

And to encrease their torment, while they're rackt

Two undergraduate Devils keep an act:

Who stun their ears with Segments and Equations.

Moons horizontal, Tangents, and Vibrations,

And all the jargon of your schools they're pat in;

Bating they speak a little better Latin.’

The Academick Dream (1774), p. 14.

In the early part of the eighteenth century the examination for degrees was not in all cases adequate to the measure of knowledge or to the capacity of the candidates.

In 1731, just after the new senate-house was in use, the exercises of sophisters and questionists were ordered to be performed in the Lent term on the same days and in the same form as in the terms after Easter and Michaelmas. Lent term ‘for many years had been a time of disorder by reason of divers undue Liberties taken by the younger Scholars, an Evil that had been much complained of; and all Exercise had either been neglected or performed in a trifling ludicrous manner.’

Fifty years later we find this trifling (so far as the degree of B.A. was concerned) confined only to the ‘huddling,’ which was done (as will be seen in due course) after a fair, though not fully statutable, modicum of solemn exercises and examinations.