"
It was, no doubt, under some such impression of the malign influence
of a collegiate atmosphere upon genius, that Milton, in speaking of
Cambridge, gave vent to the exclamation, that it was "a place quite
incompatible with the votaries of Phoebus," and that Lord Byron,
versifying a thought of his own, in the letter to Mr. Dallas just
given, declares,
"Her Helicon is duller than her Cam."
The poet Dryden, too, who, like Milton, had incurred some mark of
disgrace at Cambridge, seems to have entertained but little more
veneration for his Alma Mater; and the verses in which he has praised
Oxford at the expense of his own university[89] were, it is probable,
dictated much less by admiration of the one than by a desire to spite
and depreciate the other.
Nor is it genius only that thus rebels against the discipline of the
schools. Even the tamer quality of Taste, which it is the professed
object of classical studies to cultivate, is sometimes found to turn
restive under the pedantic _manege_ to which it is subjected. It was
not till released from the duty of reading Virgil as a task, that Gray
could feel himself capable of enjoying the beauties of that poet; and
Lord Byron was, to the last, unable to vanquish a similar
prepossession, with which the same sort of school association had
inoculated him, against Horace.
--"Though Time hath taught
My mind to meditate what then it learn'd,
Yet such the fix'd inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That, with the freshness wearing out before
My mind could relish what it might have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now restore
Its health; but what it then detested, still abhor.
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