own account; devoting himself to the study of Greek, and particularly to an unusually wide range of English Literature.
He wrote, once, to his mother, that he was suffering from "an inveterate scurvy, and shaking of the head;" but that he was curing himself, he thought, by liberal doses of tar-water. Like all other Scotsmen in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, Smith was not very popular in Oxford. There were not many of his countrymen about him with whom he cared to consort; and no doubt what he called "a violent fit of laziness," which confined him to his elbow-chair for three months, was a severe attack of loneliness and homesickness, with complications of too much tar-water, and a little overwork.
An " Exhibition " is defined as "A benefaction settled for the maintenance of Students in English Universities, independent of the Foundation." In Smith's native Scotland, it would have been called a "Bursary," and Smith's "Exhibition" at Balliol made him passing rich on forty pounds a year; the total cost of his first quarter's residence being, we are told, seven pounds five shillings, or thirty-six dollars, a sum which, unfortunately, does not go quite so far in the Oxford of to-day.
Robert Southey entered Balliol, as a Commoner, in 1792. It is recorded, by himself, that he wore
