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 Praeses 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.