At Balliol

Unlike Gibbon and Bentham, Smith never thought that his 6 years at Oxford were wasted.

Boswell and others have called him ungrateful for his censures on Oxford.

• But that charge is unreasonable because the censures were true and useful.

I refer to it here merely to point out that Smith felt and 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. He enumerated 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.

For that best kind of education, the negligence of tutors and lecturers 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. Some of the other Oxford colleges claimed 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 then 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.

They:

• rushed 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.

The master of the College was Dr. Theophilus Leigh. For this grave offence, he and the other authorities thought the culprits were entitled to indulgence because of the anniversary they were celebrating.

They decided that the case would be sufficiently met by a Latin imposition. However, if Balliol was not more enlightened than any of the other colleges of the day, it [Pg 23]had one great advantage. It had 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. Smith was only a bachelor of arts of two years’ standing for a few months before he finally quit Oxford.

He could 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. He availed of his privilege with 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 liked at Glasgow. He 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 to some purpose.

For all through life, he showed a knowledge of Greek and Latin literature uncommonly extensive and exact. Dalzel was the professor of Greek at Edinburgh. He 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.

It conformed with his theory that the best amusement of age was to renew acquaintance with the writers who were the delight of one’s youth. Dalzel always used to speak to Dugald Stewart admiring Smith’s= readiness and accuracy in remembering the works of the Greek authors, and mastery over the niceties of Greek grammar.[12] This knowledge must have been acquired at Oxford. Smith had read the Italian poets greatly too, and could quote them easily. He paid special care to the French classics because of their style. He spent much time in [Pg 24] 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 Smith was one day seen reading Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature. It was probably the very copy presented to him by Hume at Hutcheson’s suggestion. He 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. The only wonder is that Smith escaped so lightly. A few years before, three students were expelled from Oxford for coquetting with Deism. A fourth had his degree deferred for two years. He 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.

Except for the great resource of study, Smith’s life at Oxford seems not to have been a very happy one. He was in poor health and spirits a considerable part of the time, according from the brief extracts of 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 Smith to his mother from Oxford between 1740 and 1746.

They probably exist somewhere still. But he found them to contain nothing interesting.

He says “they are almost all upon mere family and personal matters most [Pg 25]of them on his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for his mother.”

However, the very brief extracts Brougham makes from them inform us that Smith was then suffering from"an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head."

He used the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley had made the fashionable panacea for all 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 everyday. But always defer writing until the post is just going. Then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me. Tar-water is a remedy very much currently in vogue here 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 think it might help you.”

However, in a subsequent letter, he states:

• that he had the scurvy and shaking as long as he remembered anything, and
• that the tar-water had not removed them.

On November 29, 1743 he makes a confession:

“I am just recovered from a violent fit of laziness. It 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 from overwork.

At around the same age, Hume had thrown himself into a like condition by four or five years’ hard reading.

He also complains 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. Balliol College was in his day a stepmother to her Scotch sons

Their existence there was made very uncomfortable:

• at the hands of the mob of young gentlemen they lived with
• even [Pg 26]more by the unfair and discriminating harshness of the College authorities themselves.

Out of 100 students then residing at Balliol:

• at least 8 were Scotch
• 4 on the Snell foundation and
• 4 on the Warner.

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 about it. The Glasgow Senatus thought them perfectly justified in complaining.

In a letter on May 22, 1776, 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
• never been happy there.

If an English undergraduate committed a fault, the authorities never thought of blaming anyone but himself. But when one of the eight Scotch undergraduates did so= his sin was remembered against all the other seven reflections were cast on the whole body; The Senatus says that it was “a circumstance which has been much felt during their residence at Balliol.”

Their common resentment against this injustice of tribal accountability naturally provoked a common resistance. The Senatus says that it developed “a spirit of association” which “has always caused much trouble to Balliol and 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. They stated “what they wanted to be done towards making their residence more easy and advantageous”[16].

In 1753, Dr. Leigh, the master of Balliol, tells the Glasgow Senatus that [Pg 27] the Snell exhibitioners wanted to be transferred to some other college, because they “totally disliked Balliol."[17]

This idea of a transference continued to be mooted. 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. The exhibitioners would get no better welcome at Hertford than at Balliol if they came as “fixed property” instead of coming as volunteers

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 May 22, 1776,[18] they recommended the arrangement of leaving each exhibitioner to choose his own college.

It was an arrangement 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.

If the daily relations between the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol and the College authorities and members were unhappy, it may explain why Smith 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 [Pg 28]the season of manhood when the deepest and most lasting friendships of a man’s life are usually made.

Yet we never see him in all his subsequent career holding an hour’s conversation by word or letter with any single Oxford contemporary except Bishop Douglas of Salisbury.

Bishop Douglas had been a Snell exhibitioner himself. With Douglas, moreover, he had many other ties. Douglas was a Fifeshire man. He might have been a remote kinsman. He was a friend of Hume, Robertson, and all Smith’s Edinburgh friends. He was, like Smith, a member of the famous Literary Club of London.

He is celebrated in that character by Goldsmith in the poem “Retaliation,” as: “the scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks.”

The names of those who might be Smith’s contemporaries at Balliol in Mr. Foster’s list of Alumni Oxonienses were undistinguished people. Smith and Douglas themselves are the only two who seem to have made any mark in the world.

An allusion has been made to the Scottish dialect of the Snell exhibitioners. Smith seems to have lost the broad Scotch at Oxford without contracting the narrow English, like Jeffrey.

The Englishmen who visited Smith after visiting Robertson or Blair, were struck with the pure and correct English he spoke in private conversation.

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.

It showed 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 in the ecclesiastical career for which they are believed to have destined him, or in the university career for which nature [Pg 29] designed him.

But both careers were practically barred against him by his objection to taking holy orders. The majority of the Oxford Fellowships then were only granted on condition of ordination.

Smith concluded that the best prospect for him was to return to Scotland. He never appears to have set foot in Oxford again.

When he became Professor at Glasgow, he was the medium of communication 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.