The Professors of the eighteenth century have incurred the indignant scorn of posterity, and for the most part they deserve it. As a class they stand condemned of scandalously neglecting their duties, however clearly and meticulously those duties were defined, of failing to advance knowledge by study and research, and even of sometimes being unacquainted with the rudiments of the subject they had undertaken to teach. But it has not been left to posterity to cast the first stone against them: some of their contemporaries were well aware of their shortcomings and not slow to censure. In the early part of the eighteenth century Dr Conyers Middleton lamented that certain Professors were omitting to lecture, and at its close the author of a pamphlet upon the discipline of the University complained that several of the professorships had been converted into sinecures. Even an enthusiastic admirer of Cambridge and its works like Dr Parr was only able to say that “the persons there appointed to professorships have in few instances disgraced themselves by notorious incapacity or criminal negligence’, a remark which most effectively damns with faint praise. Thus it cannot be contended that a later and more rigid age has magnified into grievous sins of omission what at the time were only considered to be peccadilloes: in their own day the erring Professors were held by a few to disgrace the University and their calling.

Their severest critics have however always admitted that a wholesale condemnation cannot be justified. Not every Cambridge Professor in the eighteenth century systematically neglected his duties, and a few won undying fame as scholars.