Excerpt from The University of Cambridge, in the Eighteenth Century His virtues, however, have perished with him and he has come down in history with a sorry and tarnished reputation. It is popularly believed that he was lazy and self-indulgent; but there is good reason to think that his failings have been exaggerated. Though Cam bridge in the eighteenth century was sadly lacking in eminent mathematiciansl, it was not wanting in great classical scholars; and a century of university history which can boast of Bentley, Porson, Dawes and Mark land may be accounted to have paid its debt and more than its debt to classical scholarship. It can of course be contended that scholars of such merit were rare, that they were the exception rather than the rule, and that to derive from them the standard of industry prevailing in the university is to argue from the particular to the general; but, inasmuch as it is the inevitable conse quence of the progress of learning that the greater part of the work of one generation is superseded by the next, and that only a comparatively few students are remembered for all time, it is particularly necessary to be cautious of assuming that idleness must have been almost universal because the proofs of industry are not very obvious. It is true that research was not quite so much the order of the day as it is at present; but the claims of learning and scholarship were certainly not completely disregarded. No one now troubles to in vestigate the high dusty shelves of college libraries on which repose the volumes on philosophy, divinity. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.