This article offers fresh and detailed information about how the elite schools and colleges of Oxford and Cambridge educated many of the canonical writers and public men of the Romantic Period. While these schools excluded women and non-Anglicans, they offered their students—among whom numbered Percy, Cowper, Darwin, Crabbe Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Byron, Shelley, Sidney Smith, Canning, and most of the clergymen and men of state—a remarkable program of linguistic, mathematical, and theological training. Students began composing metrical verse in Latin and Greek from boyhood, studied logic and read Euclid’s geometry in Greek, did copious amounts of memory work, wrote “themes” several times a week in three languages, and declaimed and argued publicly at least once a year. Understanding how these writers were educated offers scholars of the period several new ways to think about and teach the works of those writers and the movement they inspired. It also allows students of the period to have greater appreciation of Romantic writers’ craft and their own experiences of learning about language, literature, and composition.