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Could there be a greater contrast than that between Oxford or Cambridge life in the seventeenth century and in the twentieth?

Despite what Collins says about the young Cavendish delighting more in sports than in books, as well as a statement by his Duchess that “to school-learning he never showed a great inclination,” it is said in the Biographia Britannicassss1 that his father, “discovering, even in his infancy, the strongest marks of an extraordinary genius, etc...., was extremely careful in the cultivation of them, and took all imaginable pains to have him instructed, as well in sciences as in languages; so that, at an age when most young gentlemen are but entering on knowledge, he might be truly said to have acquired a large stock of solid learning, which was adorned with an easy and polite behaviour, that, except on proper occasions, entirely concealed the scholar under the more taking appearance of the fine gentleman.”

ssss1 Edition 1748, vol. II, p. 1208.

Thomas Hobbes, the “Philosopher of Malmsbury,” was tutor to William’s first cousin, whose name was also William. Hobbes may or may not have acted as tutor to the subject of our story; but it was probably through Hobbes’s introduction in a tutorial capacity into the Cavendish family that he became an intimate friend of the William with whom we are concerned.