In 1710 Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach visited Cambridge.

He was not impressed.

It rained. The inns were poor and expensive. He found that Cambridge "excepting the colleges is no better than a village." His guide "told us the state of this university, which is certainly very bad."

@TrinCollCam was grand. Its chapel was appealing. The hall was "very large, but ugly, smoky, and smelling so strongly of bread and meat, that it would be impossible for me to eat a morsel in it."

The best that could be said of the library at @stjohnscam was that "The books are more tidy than we have found them elsewhere in England."

The best place he found was the Greek coffeehouse, where "particularly in the morning and after 3 o'clock in afternoon, you may meet the chief professors and doctors, who read the papers over a cup of coffee and a pipe of tobacco, and converse on all subjects."

Cambridge dons, he observes, are more welcoming than many others "and are delighted to see strangers, fewer of whom come hither than to Oxford."

Magdalene College? "one of the meanest here, of which King James used to say in jest, that he would go to stool there."

@QueensCam -- "an old, mean building, not much better than Magdalene College."

@CaiusCollege -- "passable"