which they call Philosophy, and the Art of Fortification, which they call the Mathematicks; but what Learning they had there, I might easily imagine, when he assured me, that in Three years which he had spent in the Academy, he never saw a Latin book nor any Master that taught anything there, who would not have taken it very ill to be suspected to speake or understand Latin."[268] This sort of aspersion was continued by Dr Wallis, the Savilian Professor of Mathematics at Oxford in 1700, who was roused to a fine pitch of indignation by Maidwell’s efforts to start an academy in London:[269]

“Of teachers in the academie, scarce any of a higher character than a valet-de-chambre.  And, if such an one, who (for instance) hath waited on his master in one or two campagnes, and is able perhaps to copy the draught of a fortification from another paper; this is called mathematicks; and, beyond this (if so much) you are not to expect.”

A certain Mr P. Chester finishes the English condemnation of a school, such as Benjamin’s, by declaring that its pretensions to fit men for life was “like the shearing of Hoggs, much Noyse and little Wooll, nothing considerable taught that I know, butt only to fitt a man to be a French chevalier, that is in plain English a Trooper."[270]

These comments are what one expects from Oxford, to be sure, but even M. Jusserand acknowledges that the academies were not centres of intellectual light, and quotes to prove it certain questions asked of a pupil put into the Bastille, at the demand of his father: 

“Was it not true that the Sieur Varin, his father, seeing that he had no inclination to study, had put him into the Academie Royale to there learn all sorts of exercises, and had there supported him with much expense?

“He admitted that his father, while his mother was living, had put him into the Academie Royale and had given him for that the necessary means, and paid the ordinary pension, 1600 livres a year.

“Was it not true that after having been some time at the Academie Royale, he was expelled, having disguised girls in boys’ clothes to bring them there?

“He denied it.  He had never introduced into the school any academiste feminine:  he had departed at the summons of his father, having taken proper leave of M. and Mme. de Poix."[271]

However, something of an education had to be provided for Royalist boys at the time of the Civil War, when Oxford was demoralized.  Parents wandering homeless on the Continent were glad enough of the academies.  Even the Stuarts tried them, though the Duke of Gloucester had to be weaned from the company of some young French gallants, “who, being educated in the same academy, were more familiar with him than was thought convenient."[272] It was a choice between academies or such an education as Edmund Verney endured in a dull provincial city as the sole pupil of an exiled Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.  But the effects of being