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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Oxford, by Andrew Lang, Illustrated by George
+F. Carline
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
+the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at 
+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Oxford
+
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 24, 2015  [eBook #2444]
+[This file was first posted on February 13, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. edition by David Price,
+email ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+                          [Picture: Book cover]
+
+  [Picture: St. Mary’s Church from the corner of Oriel Street and Merton
+                 Street, with Oriel College on the right]
+
+
+
+
+
+                                  OXFORD
+
+
+                                    BY
+                               ANDREW LANG
+                             SOMETIME FELLOW
+                        OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                       WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
+                                    BY
+                            GEORGE F. CARLINE
+                                  R.B.A.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                  LONDON
+                         SEELEY, SERVICE & CO LTD
+                         38 GREET RUSSELL STREET
+                                   1922
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    TO
+                                A. M. LEE
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+THESE papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history of
+Oxford.  They are merely records of the impressions made by this or that
+aspect of the life of the University as it has been in different ages.
+Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and white, with the pen or
+the etcher’s needle.  On a wild winter or late autumn day (such as Father
+Faber has made permanent in a beautiful poem) the sunshine fleets along
+the plain, revealing towers, and floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery
+light, and leaving them once more in shadow.  The melancholy mist creeps
+over the city, the damp soaks into the heart of everything, and such
+suicidal weather ensues as has been described, once for all, by the
+author of _John-a-Dreams_.  How different Oxford looks when the road to
+Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat seems almost tropical, and
+by the drowsy banks of the Cherwell you might almost expect some shy
+southern water-beast to come crashing through the reeds!  And such a day,
+again, is unlike the bright weather of late September, when all the gold
+and scarlet of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that cover the
+walls of Magdalen with an imperial vesture.
+
+Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of Indolence,
+vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her scenery.  Days of spring
+and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with days of gloom and
+loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation.  Our mental pictures of the
+place are tinged by many moods, as the landscape is beheld in shower and
+sunshine, in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather.  Oxford,
+that once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may become a
+dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with other weary, waiting
+people.  At last, if men linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison,
+and it is the final condition of the loiterer to take ‘this for a
+hermitage.’  It is well to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry
+away few but kind recollections.  If there be any who think and speak
+ungently of their _Alma Mater_, it is because they have outstayed their
+natural ‘welcome while,’ or because they have resisted her genial
+influence in youth.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAP.             I.  THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY                19
+   ,,            II.  THE EARLY STUDENTS—A DAY WITH A               43
+                      MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE
+   ,,           III.  THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION           67
+   ,,            IV.  JACOBEAN OXFORD                               89
+   ,,             V.  SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION             111
+   ,,            VI.  HIGH TORY OXFORD                             133
+   ,,           VII.  GEORGIAN OXFORD                              153
+   ,,          VIII.  POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR          171
+   ,,            IX.  A GENERAL VIEW                               191
+   ,,             X.  UNDERGRADUATE LIFE—CONCLUSION                209
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+MOST old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been scrawled
+over again and again by their successive owners.  Oxford, though not one
+of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more legibly than the rest,
+the handwriting, as it were, of many generations.  The convenient site
+among the interlacing waters of the Isis and the Cherwell has commended
+itself to men in one age after another.  Each generation has used it for
+its own purpose: for war, for trade, for learning, for religion; and war,
+trade, religion, and learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks.
+No set of its occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very
+eager to deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors.  Old things
+were turned to new uses, or altered to suit new tastes; they were not
+overthrown and carted away.  Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see
+everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows which
+have been builded up; or again, openings which have been cut where none
+originally existed.  The upper part of the round Norman arches in the
+Cathedral has been preserved, and converted into the circular bull’s-eye
+lights which the last century liked.  It is the same everywhere, except
+where modern restorers have had their way.  Thus the life of England, for
+some eight centuries, may be traced in the buildings of Oxford.  Nay, if
+we are convinced by some antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street
+contains even earlier scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude
+marks of savages who scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low
+walls in the gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand.
+Here half-naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and
+hither they may have brought home the boars which they slew in the
+trackless woods of Headington and Bagley.  It is with the life of
+historical Oxford, however, and not with these fancies, that we are
+concerned, though these papers have no pretension to be a history of
+Oxford.  A series of pictures of men’s life here is all they try to
+sketch.
+
+It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of
+Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history.  What she may
+have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a home
+for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid among the
+swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in great sanctity,
+we cannot even guess.  This legend of St. Frideswyde, and of her
+foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church, is not,
+indeed, without its value and significance for those who care for Oxford.
+This home of religion and of learning was a home of religion from the
+beginning, and her later life is but a return, after centuries of war and
+trade, to her earliest purpose.  What manner of village of wooden houses
+may have surrounded the earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we
+cannot readily guess, but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was
+when the _English Chronicle_ first mentions her.  Even then it is not
+unnatural to think Oxford might well have been a city of peace.  She lies
+in the very centre of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland,
+burning church and cloister, must have wandered long before they came to
+Oxford.  On the other hand, the military importance of the site must have
+made it a town that would be eagerly contended for.  Any places of
+strength in Oxford would command the roads leading to the north and west,
+and the secure, raised paths that ran through the flooded fens to the
+ford or bridge, if bridge there then was, between Godstowe and the later
+Norman _grand pont_, where Folly Bridge now spans the Isis.  Somewhere
+near Oxford, the roads that ran towards Banbury and the north, or towards
+Bristol and the west, would be obliged to cross the river.  The
+water-way, too, and the paths by the Thames’ side, were commanded by
+Oxford.  The Danes, as they followed up the course of the Thames from
+London, would be drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place
+which is surrounded by half a dozen deep natural moats.  Lastly, Oxford
+lay in the centre of England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia
+and Wessex.  A border town of natural strength and of commanding
+situation, she can have been no mean or poor collection of villages in
+the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder
+‘incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides
+of Watling Street’ (Freeman’s _Norman Conquest_, vol. i. p. 57), and took
+possession of London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a
+scientific frontier.  If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on
+the hill that was not yet ‘Shotover,’ and had looked along the plain to
+the place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
+in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but ‘the
+smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,’
+
+             Καπνὸν δ’ ἐνὶ γέσσῃ
+    ἔδρακον ὀφθαλμοῖσι διὰ δρυμὰ πυκνὰ καὶ ὕλην
+
+The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds trimmed
+and enclosed.  Centuries later, when the early students came, they had to
+ride ‘through the thick forest and across the moor, to the East Gate of
+the city’ (_Munimenta Academica_, Oxon., vol. i. p. 60).  In the midst of
+a country still wild, Oxford was already no mean city; but the place
+where the hostile races of the land met to settle their differences, to
+feast together and forget their wrongs over the mead and ale, or to
+devise treacherous murder, and close the banquet with fire and sword.
+
+Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
+about burning and wasting England.  The wooden towns were flaming through
+the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from Thamesmouth
+to Cambridge.  ‘And next was there no headman that force would gather,
+and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there no shire that
+would help another.’  When the first fury of the plundering invaders was
+over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to settle and till the land and
+have some measure of peace, the early meetings between them and the
+English rulers were held in the border-town, in Oxford.  Thus Sigeferth
+and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came to see Eadric in Oxford, and there
+were slain at a banquet, while their followers perished in the attempt to
+avenge them.  ‘Into the tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as
+men could not drive them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished
+in the burning.’  So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years
+later, read the story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St.
+Frideswyde.  There is another version of the story in the _Codex
+Diplomaticus_ (DCCIX.).  Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of
+lands to St. Frideswyde’s Church (‘mine own minster’), that the Danes
+were slain in the massacre of St. Brice.  On that day Aethelred, ‘by the
+advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the wheat,
+the Danes in England.’  Certain of these fled into the minster, as into a
+fortress, and therefore it was burned and the books and monuments
+destroyed.  For this cause Aethelred gives lands to the minster, ‘fro
+Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the
+lawe to the foule putte,’ and so forth.  It is pleasant to see how old
+are the familiar names ‘Cherwell,’ ‘Hedington,’ ‘Couelee’ or Cowley,
+where the college cricket-grounds are.  Three years passed, and the
+headmen of the English and of the Danes met at Oxford again, and more
+peacefully, and agreed to live together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar;
+to the law, that is, as it was administered in older days, that seem
+happier and better ruled to men looking back on them from an age of
+confusion and bloodshed.  At Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of
+1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at
+Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040.  The place
+indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King
+Algar, left her curse on it.  Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden
+by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May
+morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl’s wings in the
+dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to enter
+Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden.  Harold
+died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried.  His body was
+laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his enemies dug it up,
+and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into the river.  Many years
+later, when Henry III. entered Oxford, not without fear, the curse of
+Frideswyde lighted also upon him.  He came in 1263, with Edward the
+prince, and misfortune fell upon him, so that his barons defeated and
+took him prisoner at the battle of Lewes.  The chronicler of Oseney Abbey
+mentions his contempt of superstitions, and how he alone of English kings
+entered the city: ‘_Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari_,’
+an error, for Harold _attemptavit_, and died.  When Edward I. was king,
+he was less audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode up to the East
+Gate and turned his horse’s head about, and sought a lodging outside the
+town, _reflexis habenis equitans extra moenia aulam regiain in suburbio
+positam introivit_.  In 1280, however, he seems to have plucked up
+courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.
+
+The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford in
+October 1065.  ‘_In urle quæ famoso nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur_,’ to
+quote a document of Cnut’s.  (_Cod. Dipl._ DCCXLVI. in 1042.)  There the
+Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the Confessor.
+With this meeting we leave that Oxford before the Conquest, of which
+possibly not one stone, or one rafter, remains.  We look back through
+eight hundred years on a city, rich enough, it seems, and powerful, and
+we see the narrow streets full of armed bands of men—men that wear the
+cognisance of the horse or of the raven, that carry short swords, and are
+quick to draw them; men that dress in short kirtles of a bright colour,
+scarlet or blue; that wear axes slung on their backs, and adorn their
+bare necks and arms with collars and bracelets of gold.  We see them
+meeting to discuss laws and frontiers, and feasting late when business is
+done, and chaffering for knives with ivory handles, for arrows, and
+saddles, and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens.  Through the mist of
+time this picture of ancient Oxford may be distinguished.  We are tempted
+to think of a low, grey twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up with
+fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde’s Minster flaring like a torch
+athwart the night; of poplars waving in the same wind that drives the
+vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes who have taken
+refuge there, and there stand at bay against the English and the people
+of the town.  The material Oxford of our times is not more unlike the
+Oxford of low wooden booths and houses, and of wooden spires and towers,
+than the life led in its streets was unlike the academic life of to-day.
+The Conquest brought no more quiet times, but the whole city was wrecked,
+stormed, and devastated, before the second period of its history began,
+before it was the seat of a Norman stronghold, and one of the links of
+the chain by which England was bound.  ‘Four hundred and seventy-eight
+houses were so ruined as to be unable to pay taxes,’ while, ‘within the
+town or without the wall, there were but two hundred and forty-three
+houses which did yield tribute.’
+
+With the buildings of Robert D’Oily, a follower of the Conqueror’s, and
+the husband of an English wife, the heiress of Wigod of Wallingford, the
+new Oxford begins.  Robert’s work may be divided roughly into two
+classes.  First, there are the strong places he erected to secure his
+possessions, and, second, the sacred places he erected to secure the
+pardon of Heaven for his robberies.  Of the castle, and its ‘shining
+coronal of towers,’ only one tower remains.  From the vast strength of
+this picturesque edifice, with the natural moat flowing at its feet, we
+may guess what the castle must have been in the early days of the
+Conquest, and during the wars of Stephen and Matilda.  We may guess, too,
+that the burghers of Oxford, and the rustics of the neighbourhood, had no
+easy life in those days, when, as we have seen, the town was ruined, and
+when, as the extraordinary thickness of the walls of its remaining tower
+demonstrates, the castle was built by new lords who did not spare the
+forced labour of the vanquished.  The strength of the position of the
+castle is best estimated after viewing the surrounding country from the
+top of the tower.  Through the more modern embrasures, or over the low
+wall round the summit, you look up and down the valley of the Thames, and
+gaze deep into the folds of the hills.  The prospect is pleasant enough,
+on an autumn morning, with the domes and spires of modern Oxford
+breaking, like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps above the
+roofs of the good town.  In the old times, no movement of the people who
+had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of an army from any
+direction could have evaded the watchman.  The towers guarded the fords
+and the bridge and were themselves almost impregnable, except when a hard
+winter made the Thames, the Cherwell, and the many deep and treacherous
+streams passable, as happened when Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford.
+This natural strength of the site is demonstrated by the vast mound
+within the castle walls, which tradition calls the Jews’ Mound, but which
+is probably earlier than the Norman buildings.  Some other race had
+chosen the castle site for its fortress in times of which we know
+nothing.  Meanwhile, some of the practical citizens of Oxford wish to
+level the Jews’ Mound, and to ‘utilise’ the gravel of which it is largely
+composed.  There is nothing to be said against this economic project
+which could interest or affect the persons who entertain it.  M.
+Brunet-Debaines’ illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as
+old as the tower.  Did the citizens bring their corn to be tolled and
+ground at the lord’s mill?
+
+Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature inclined to
+piety, and, his piety beginning at home, he founded the church of St.
+George within the castle.  The crypt of the church still remains, and is
+not without interest for persons who like to trace the changing fortunes
+of old buildings.  The site of Robert’s Castle is at present occupied by
+the County Gaol.  When you have inspected the tower (which does not do
+service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the courtesy of the Governor, to
+the crypt, and satisfy your archæological curiosity.  The place is much
+lower, and worse lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St.
+Peter’s-in-the-East, but not, perhaps, less interesting.  The
+square-headed capitals have not been touched, like some of those in St.
+Peter’s, by a later chisel.  The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise
+much as Robert D’Oily left it.  There is an odd-looking arrangement of
+planks on the floor.  It is _the new drop_, which is found to work very
+well, and gives satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it.
+Sinister the Norman castle was in its beginning, ‘it was from the castle
+that men did wrong to the poor around them; it was from the castle that
+they bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and tyrant as he might be,
+was still a protector against smaller tyrants.’  Sinister the castle
+remains; you enter it through ironed and bolted doors, you note the
+prisoners at their dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the engines
+of the law lying in the old crypt you pass out into the place of
+execution.  Here, in a corner made by Robert’s tower and by the wall of
+the prison, is a dank little quadrangle.  The ground is of the yellow
+clay and gravel which floors most Oxford quadrangles.  A few letters are
+scratched on the soft stone of the wall—the letters ‘H. R.’ are the
+freshest.  These are the initials of the last man who suffered death in
+this corner—a young rustic who had murdered his sweetheart.  ‘H. R.’ on
+the prison wall is all his record, and his body lies under your feet, and
+the feet of the men who are to die here in after days pass over his tomb.
+It is thus that malefactors are buried, ‘within the walls of the gaol.’
+
+One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert’s place of arms—as glad
+as Matilda may have been when ‘they let her down at night from the tower
+with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to Wallingford.’  Robert
+seems at first to have made the natural use of his strength.  ‘Rich he
+was, and spared not rich or poor, to take their livelihood away, and to
+lay up treasures for himself.’  He stole the lands of the monks of
+Abingdon, but of what service were moats, and walls, and dungeons, and
+instruments of torture, against the powers that side with monks?
+
+The _Chronicle of Abingdon_ has a very diverting account of Robert’s
+punishment and conversion.  ‘He filched a certain field without the walls
+of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it over to
+the soldiers in the castle.  For which loss the brethren were greatly
+grieved—the brethren of Abingdon.  Therefore, they gathered in a body
+before the altar of St. Michael—the very altar that St. Dunstan the
+archbishop dedicated—and cast themselves weeping on the ground, accusing
+Robert D’Oily, and praying that his robbery of the monastery might be
+avenged, or that he might be led to make atonement.’  So, in a dream,
+Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady by two brethren of Abingdon, and
+thence carried into the very meadow he had coveted, where ‘most nasty
+little boys,’ _turpissimi pueri_, worked their will on him.  Thereon
+Robert was terrified and cried out, and wakened his wife, who took
+advantage of his fears, and compelled him to make restitution to the
+brethren.
+
+After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery and
+performing other good works.  He it was who built a bridge over the Isis,
+and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford—churches which,
+perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin.  The tower of St. Michael’s,
+in ‘the Corn,’ is said to be of his building; perhaps he only ‘restored’
+it, for it is in the true primitive style—gaunt, unadorned, with
+round-headed windows, good for shooting from with the bow.  St. Michael’s
+was not only a church, but a watchtower of the city wall; and here the
+old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned the street.  The rooms above the
+gate were used till within quite recent times, and the poor inmates used
+to let down a greasy old hat from the window in front of the passers-by,
+and cry, ‘Pity the Bocardo birds’:
+
+    ‘Pigons qui sont en l’essoine,
+    Enserrez soubz trappe volière,’
+
+as a famous Paris student, François Villon, would have called them.  Of
+Bocardo no trace remains, but St. Michael’s is likely to last as long as
+any edifice in Oxford.  Our illustrations represent it as it was in the
+last century.  The houses huddle up to the church, and hide the lines of
+the tower.  Now it stands out clear, less picturesque than it was in the
+time of Bocardo prison.  Within the last two years the windows have been
+cleared, and the curious and most archaic pillars, shaped like
+balustrades, may be examined.  It is worth while to climb the tower and
+remember the times when arrows were sent like hail from the narrow
+windows on the foes who approached Oxford from the north, while prayers
+for their confusion were read in the church below.
+
+That old Oxford of war was also a trading town.  Nothing more than the
+fact that it was a favourite seat of the Jews is needed to prove its
+commercial prosperity.  The Jews, however, demand a longer notice in
+connection with the still unborn University.  Meanwhile, it may be
+remarked that Oxford trade made good use of the river.  The _Abingdon
+Chronicle_ (ii. 129) tells us that ‘from each barque of Oxford city,
+which makes the passage by the river Thames past Abingdon, a hundred
+herrings must yearly be paid to the cellarer.  The citizens had much
+litigation about land and houses with the abbey, and one Roger Maledoctus
+(perhaps a very early sample of the pass-man) gave Abingdon tenements
+within the city.’  Thus we leave the pre-Academic Oxford a flourishing
+town, with merchants and moneylenders.  As for the religious, the
+brethren of St. Frideswyde had lived but loosely (_pro libito viverunt_),
+says William of Malmesbury, and were to be superseded by regular canons,
+under the headship of one Guimond, and the patronage of the Bishop of
+Salisbury.  Whoever goes into Christ Church new buildings from the
+river-side, will see, in the old edifice facing him, a certain bulging in
+the wall.  That is the mark of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read
+aloud to the brethren in the refectory of St. Frideswyde.  The new leaven
+of learning was soon to ferment in an easy Oxford, where men lived _pro
+libito_, under good lords, the D’Oilys, who loved the English, and built,
+not churches and bridges only, but the great and famous Oseney Abbey,
+beyond the church of St. Thomas, and not very far from the modern station
+of the Great Western Railway.  Yet even after public teaching in Oxford
+certainly began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity there
+(1133; cf. _Oseney Chronicle_), the tower was burned down by Stephen’s
+soldiery in 1141 (_Oseney Chronicle_, p. 24).
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+THE EARLY STUDENTS—A DAY WITH A MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE
+
+
+OXFORD, some one says, ‘is bitterly historical.’  It is difficult to
+escape the fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of ‘our antiquary,’ Bryan
+Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the University.  Indeed,
+it is impossible to understand the strange blending of new and old at
+Oxford—the old names with the new meanings—if we avert our eyes from what
+is ‘bitterly historical.’  For example, there is in most, perhaps in all,
+colleges a custom called ‘collections.’  On the last days of term
+undergraduates are called into the Hall, where the Master and the Dean of
+the Chapel sit in solemn state.  Examination papers are set, but no one
+heeds them very much.  The real ordeal is the awful interview with the
+Master and the Dean.  The former regards you with the eyes of a judge,
+while the Dean says, ‘Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown’s
+_papers_ are very fair, very fair.  But in the matters of _chapels_ and
+of _catechetics_, Mr. Brown sets—for a _scholar_—a very bad example to
+the other undergraduates.  He has only once attended divine service on
+Sunday morning, and on that occasion, Master, his dress consisted
+exclusively of a long great-coat and a pair of boots.’  After this
+accusation the Master will turn to the culprit and observe, with emphasis
+ill represented by italics, ‘Mr. Brown, the _College_ cannot hear with
+pleasure of such behaviour on the part of a _scholar_.  You are _gated_,
+Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next term.’  Now why should this
+tribunal of the Master and the Dean, and this dread examination, be
+called collections?  Because (_Munimenta Academica_, Oxon., i. 129) in
+1331 a statute was passed to the effect that ‘every scholar shall pay at
+least twelve pence a-year for lectures in logic, and for physics
+eighteenpence a-year,’ and that ‘all Masters of Arts except persons of
+royal or noble family, shall be obliged to _collect_ their salary from
+the scholars.’  This _collection_ would be made at the end of term; and
+the name survives, attached to the solemn day of doom we have described,
+though the college dues are now collected by the bursar at the beginning
+of each term.
+
+By this trivial example the perversions of old customs at Oxford are
+illustrated.  To appreciate the life of the place, then, we must glance
+for a moment at the growth of the University.  As to its origin, we know
+absolutely nothing.  That Master Puleyn began to lecture there in 1133 we
+have seen, and it is not likely that he would have chosen Oxford if
+Oxford had possessed no schools.  About these schools, however, we have
+no information.  They may have grown up out of the seminary which,
+perhaps, was connected with St. Frideswyde’s, just as Paris University
+may have had some connection with ‘the School of the Palace.’  Certainly
+to Paris University the academic corporation of Oxford, the
+_Universitas_, owed many of her regulations; while, again, the founder of
+the college system, Walter de Merton (who visited Paris in company with
+Henry III.), may have compared ideas with Robert de Sorbonne, the founder
+of the college of that name.  In the early Oxford, however, of the
+twelfth and most of the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their
+statutes were unknown.  The University was the only corporation of the
+learned, and she struggled into existence after hard fights with the
+town, the Jews, the Friars, the Papal courts.  The history of the
+University begins with the thirteenth century.  She may be said to have
+come into being as soon as she possessed common funds and rents, as soon
+as fines were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of
+scholars.  Now the first recorded fine is the payment of fifty-two
+shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the compensation for the
+hanging of certain clerks.  In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in a
+letter to his ‘beloved sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,’ bade
+them excuse the ‘scholars studying in Oxford’ half the rent of their
+halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years.  The burghers were also
+to do penance, and to feast the poorer students once a year; but the
+important point is, that they had to pay that large yearly fine ‘propter
+suspendium clericorum’—all for the hanging of the clerks.  Twenty-six
+years after this decision of the Legate, Robert Grossteste, the great
+Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment and distribution of the fine,
+and founded the first of the _chests_, the chest of St. Frideswyde.
+These _chests_ were a kind of Mont de Piété, and to found them was at
+first the favourite form of benefaction.  Money was left in this or that
+_chest_, from which students and masters would borrow, on the security of
+pledges, which were generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth.
+
+                [Picture: Merton College from the Fields]
+
+Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history, which
+happily illustrates the growth of the University.  The beginning of the
+whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which, in 1209, had hanged
+two clerks, ‘in contempt of clerical liberty.’  The matter was taken up
+by the Legate—in those bad years of King John the Pope’s viceroy in
+England—and out of the humiliation of the town the University gained
+money, privileges, and halls at low rental.  These were precisely the
+things that the University wanted.  About these matters there was a
+constant strife, in which the Kings, as a rule, took part with the
+University.  The University possessed the legal knowledge, which the
+monarchs liked to have on their side, and was therefore favoured by them.
+Thus, in 1231 (Wood, _Annals_, i. 205), ‘the King sent out his Breve to
+the Mayor and Burghers commanding them not to overrate their houses’; and
+thus gradually the University got the command of the police, obtained
+privileges which enslaved the city, and became masters where they had
+once been despised, starveling scholars.  The process was always the
+same.  On the feast of St. Scholastica, for example, in 1354, Walter de
+Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered into the
+Swyndlestock tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of John de Croydon’s
+wine, and ended by pitching the tankard at the head of that vintner.  In
+ten minutes the town bell at St. Martin’s was rung, and the most terrible
+of all Town-and-Gown rows began.  The Chancellor could do no less than
+bid St. Mary’s bell reply to St. Martin’s, and shooting commenced.  The
+Gown held their own very well at first, and ‘defended themselves till
+Vespertide,’ when the citizens called in their neighbours, the rustics of
+Cowley, Headington, and Hincksey.  The results have been precisely
+described in anticipation by Homer:
+
+    τόφρα δ’ ἄρ οἰχόμενοι Κίκονες Κικόνεσσι γεγώνευν
+    οἴ σφῖν γείτονες ἦσαν ἅμα πλέονες καὶ ἀρείους
+
+                                  . . . . .
+
+    ἦμος δ’ Ηέλιος μετενίσσετο βουλυτόνδε
+    καὶ τότε δὴ Κίκονες κλῖναν δαμάσαντες ’Αχαιούς.
+
+Which is as much as to say, ‘The townsfolk call for help to their
+neighbours, the yokels, that were more numerous than they, and better men
+in battle . . . so when the sun turned to the time of the loosing of oxen
+the Town drave in the ranks of the Gown, and won the victory.’  They were
+strong, the townsmen, but not merciful.  ‘The crowns of some chaplains,
+viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps
+flayed off in scorn of their clergy,’ and ‘some poor innocents these
+confounded sons of Satan knocked down, beat, and most cruelly wounded.’
+The result, in the long run, was that the University received from Edward
+III. ‘a most large charter, containing many liberties, some that they had
+before, and _others that he had taken away from the town_.’  Thus Edward
+granted to the University ‘the custody of the assize of bread, wine, and
+ale,’ the supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing
+the streets of the town and suburbs.  Moreover, the Mayor and the chief
+Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and
+humiliation on St. Scholastica’s Day.  Thus, by the middle of the
+fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had ended in the complete
+victory of the latter.
+
+Though the University owed its success to its clerkly character, and
+though the Legate backed it with all the power of Rome, yet the scholars
+were Englishmen and Liberals first, Catholics next.  Thus they had all
+English sympathy with them when they quarrelled with the Legate in 1238,
+and shot his cook (who, indeed, had thrown hot broth at them); and thus,
+in later days, the undergraduates were with Simon de Montfort against
+King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful body of archers.  The
+University, too, constantly withstood the Friars, who had settled in
+Oxford on pretence of wishing to convert the Jews, and had attempted to
+get education into their hands.  ‘The Preaching Friars, who had lately
+obtained from the Pope divers privileges, particularly an exemption, as
+they pretended, from being subject to the jurisdiction of the University,
+began to behave themselves very insolent against the Chancellors and
+Masters.’  (Wood, _Annals_, i. 399.)  The conduct of the Friars caused
+endless appeals to Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly
+national, and resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the
+King.  The King’s Jews, too, the University kept in pretty good order,
+and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched the crucifix from the hand
+of the Chancellor and trod it under foot, his tribesmen were compelled to
+raise ‘a fair and stately cross of marble, very curiously wrought,’ on
+the scene of the sacrilege.
+
+The growth in power and importance of academic corporations having now
+been sketched, let us try to see what the outer aspect of the town was
+like in these rude times, and what manner of life the undergraduates led.
+For this purpose we may be allowed to draw a rude, but not unfaithful,
+picture of a day in a student’s life.  No incident will be introduced for
+which there is not authority, in Wood, or in Mr. Anstey’s invaluable
+documents, the _Munimenta Academica_, published in the collection of the
+Master of the Rolls.  Some latitude as to dates must be allowed, it is
+true, and we are not of course to suppose that any one day of life was
+ever so gloriously crowded as that of our undergraduate.
+
+The time is the end of the fourteenth century.  The forest and the moor
+stretch to the east gate of the city.  Magdalen bridge is not yet built,
+nor of course the tower of Magdalen, which M. Brunet-Debaines has
+sketched from Christ Church walks.  Not till about 1473 was the tower
+built, and years would pass after that before choristers saluted with
+their fresh voices from its battlements the dawn of the first of May, or
+sermons were preached from the beautiful stone pulpit in the open air.
+When our undergraduate, Walter de Stoke, or, more briefly, Stoke, was at
+Oxford, the spires of the city were few.  Where Magdalen stands now, the
+old Hospital of St. John then stood—a foundation of Henry III.—but the
+Jews were no longer allowed to bury their dead in the close, which is now
+the ‘Physic Garden.’  ‘In 1289,’ as Wood says, ‘the Jews were banished
+from England for various enormities and crimes committed by them.’  The
+Great and Little Jewries—those dim, populous streets behind the modern
+Post Office—had been sacked and gutted.  No clerk would ever again risk
+his soul for a fair Jewess’s sake, nor lose his life for his love at the
+hands of that eminent theologian, Fulke de Breauté.  The beautiful tower
+of Merton was still almost fresh, and the spires of St. Mary’s, of old
+All Saints, of St. Frideswyde, and the strong tower of New College on the
+city wall, were the most prominent features in a bird’s-eye view of the
+town.  But though part of Merton, certainly the chapel tower as we have
+seen, the odd muniment-room with the steep stone roof, and, perhaps, the
+Library, existed; though New was built; and though Balliol and University
+owned some halls, on, or near, the site of the present colleges, Oxford
+was still an university of poor scholars, who lived in town’s-people’s
+dwellings.
+
+Thus, in the great quarrel with the Legate in 1238, John Currey, of
+Scotland, boarded with Will Maynard, while Hugh le Verner abode in the
+house of Osmund the Miller, with Raynold the Irishman and seven of his
+fellows.  John Mortimer and Rob Norensis lodged with Augustine Gosse, and
+Adam de Wolton lodged in Cat Street, where you can still see the curious
+arched doorway of Catte’s, or St. Catherine’s Hall.  By the time of my
+hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed that all scholars of
+years of discretion should live in the house of some sufficient principal
+(1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall, at the corner of the street that
+leads to New College out of the modern Broad Street, which was then the
+City Ditch.  It is six o’clock on a summer morning, and the bells waken
+Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock bed, in his little _camera_.  His room,
+though he is not one of the luxurious clerks whom the University scolds
+in various statutes, is pretty well furnished.  His bed alone is worth
+not less than fifteenpence; he has a ‘cofer’ valued at twopence (we have
+plenty of those old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat,
+which no one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence,
+‘a roll of the seven Psalms,’ and twelve books only ‘at his beddes heed.’
+Stoke has not
+
+    ‘Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
+    Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,’
+
+like Chaucer’s Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile.  There
+are not many records of ‘as many as twenty bookes’ in the old valuations.
+The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of buckler, bow, arrows,
+and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on the wall.  Stoke opens his
+eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes, and sees, with no surprise,
+that his laundress has not sent home his clean linen.  No; Christina, of
+the parish of St. Martin, who used to be Stoke’s _lotrix_, has been
+detected at last.  ‘Under pretence of washing for scholars, _multa mala
+perpetrata fuerunt_,’ she has committed all manner of crimes, and is now
+in the Spinning House, _carcerata fuit_.  Stoke wastes a malediction on
+the laundress, and, dressing as well as he may, runs down to Parson’s
+Pleasure, I hope, and has a swim, for I find no tub in his room, or,
+indeed, in the _camera_ of any other scholar.  It is now time to go, not
+to chapel—for Catte’s has no chapel—but to parish Church, and Stoke goes
+very devoutly to St. Peter’s, where we shall find him again, later in the
+day, in another mood.  About eight o’clock he ‘commonises’ with a Paris
+man, Henricus de Bourges, who has an admirable mode of cooking omelettes,
+which makes his company much sought after at breakfast-time.  The
+University, in old times, was full of French students, as Paris was
+thronged by Englishmen.  Lectures begin at nine, and first there is
+lecture in the hall by the principal of Catte’s.  That scholar receives
+his pupils in a bare room, where it is very doubtful whether the students
+are allowed to sit down.  From the curious old seal of the University of
+St. Andrews, however, it appears that the luxury of forms was permitted,
+in Scotland, to all but the servitors, who held the lecturer’s candles.
+The principal of Catte’s is in academic dress, and wears a black cape,
+boots, and a hood.  The undergraduates have no distinguishing costume.
+After an hour or two of _vivâ voce_ exercises in the grammar of Priscian,
+preparatory lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the
+‘schools,’ a set of low-roofed buildings between St. Mary’s and
+Brasenose.  There he will find the Divinity ‘school’ or lecture-room in
+the place of honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the
+lecture-rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry,
+and astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and ‘the tongues,’ stretching
+down School Street on either side.  Here the Prælectors are holding
+forth, and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their
+subject _regere scholas_, whether they like it or not.  Our friend,
+Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine of
+twopence for omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his _nation_
+(he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch, Welsh, and Irish) in the
+parish Church.  He stops in the Flower Market and at a barber’s shop on
+his way to St. Peter’s, and comes forth a wonderful pagan figure with a
+Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance, with horns protruding
+through a wig of tow, with vine-leaves twisted in and out of the horns,
+and roses stuck wherever there is room for roses.  Henricus de Bourges,
+and half a dozen Picardy men, with some merry souls from the Southern
+side of the Thames, are jigging down the High, playing bag-pipes and
+guitars.  To these Stoke joins himself, and they waltz joyously into the
+church, and in and out of the gateways of the different halls, singing,—
+
+    ‘Mihi est propositum in taberna mori,
+    Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
+    Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori
+    Deus sit propitius huic potatori.’
+
+The students of the Northern nations mock, of course, at these revellers,
+thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged, and we shall see what comes of the
+quarrel.  But the hall bells chime half-past noon; it is dinner-time in
+Oxford, and Stoke, as he throws off his mask (_larva_) and vine-leaves,
+mutters to himself the equivalent for ‘there _will_ be a row about this.’
+There will, indeed, for the penalty is not ‘crossing at the buttery,’ nor
+‘gating,’ but—excommunication!  (_Munim. Academ._, i. 18.)  Dinner is not
+a very quiet affair, for the Catte’s men have had to fight for their beer
+in the public streets with some Canterbury College fellows who were set
+on by their Warden, of all people, to commit this violence (_ut vi et
+violentia raperent cerevisiam aliorum scholarum in vico_): however,
+Catte’s has had the best of it, and there is beer in plenty.  It is
+possible, however, that fish is scarce, for certain ‘forestallers’
+(_regratarii_) have been buying up salmon and soles, and refusing to sell
+them at less than double the proper price.  On the whole, however, there
+a rude abundance of meat and bread; indeed, Stoke may have fared better
+in Catte’s than the modern undergraduate does in the hall of the college
+protected by St. Catherine.  After dinner there would be lecture in Lent,
+but we are not in Lent.  A young man’s fancy lightly turns to the
+Beaumont, north of the modern Beaumont Street, where there are wide
+playing-fields, and space for archery, foot-ball, stool-ball, and other
+sports.  Stoke rushes out of hall, and runs upstairs into the _camera_ of
+Roger de Freshfield, a reading man, but a good fellow.  He knocks and
+enters, and finds Freshfield over his favourite work, the _Posterior
+Analytics_, and a pottle of strawberries.  ‘Come down to the Beaumont,
+old man,’ he says, ‘and play pyked staffe.’  Roger is disinclined to
+move, he _must_ finish the _Posterior Analytics_.  Stoke lounges about,
+in the eternal fashion of undergraduates after luncheon, and picking up
+the _Philobiblon_ of Richard de Bury (then quite a new book), clinches
+his argument in favour of pyke and staffe with a quotation: ‘You will
+perhaps see a stiff-necked youth lounging sluggishly in his study . . .
+He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to
+transfer his cup from side to side upon it.’  Thus addressed, Roger lays
+aside his _Analytics_, and the pair walk down by Balliol, to the
+Beaumont, where pyked staffe, or sword and buckler, is played.  At the
+Beaumont they find two men who say that ‘sword and buckler can be played
+sofft and ffayre,’ that is, without hard hitting, and with one of these
+Stoke begins to fence.  Alas! a dispute arose about a stroke, the
+by-standers interfered, and Stoke’s opponent drew his hanger (_extraxit
+cultellum vocatum hangere_), and hit one John Felerd over the sconce.  On
+this the Proctors come up, and the assailant is put in Bocardo, while
+Stoke goes off to a ‘pass-supper’ given by an _inceptor_, who has just
+taken his degree.  These suppers were not voluntary entertainments, but
+enforced by law.  At supper the talk ranges over University gossip, they
+tell of the scholar who lately tried to raise the devil in Grope Lane,
+and was pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul fiend.  They speak
+of the Queen’s man, who has just been plucked for maintaining that _Ego
+currit_, or _ego est currens_, is as good Latin as _ego curro_.  Then the
+party breaks up, and Stoke goes towards Merton, with some undergraduates
+of that college, Bridlington, Alderberk, and Lymby.  At the corner of
+Grope Lane, out come many men of the Northern nations, armed with
+shields, and bows and arrows.  Stoke and his friends run into Merton for
+weapons, and ‘standing in a window of that hall, shot divers arrows, and
+one that Bridlington shot hit Henry de l’Isle, and David Kirkby
+unmercifully perished, for after John de Benton had given him a dangerous
+wound in the head with his faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and wounded
+him in the knee with his sword.’
+
+These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke had a brush
+with the Town before he got safely back to Catte’s Hall.  The old
+rudeness gave way gradually, as the colleges swallowed up the irregular
+halls, and as the scholars unattached, _infando nomine Chamber-Dekyns_,
+ceased to exist.  Learning, however, dwindled, as colleges increased,
+under the clerical and reactionary rule of the House of Lancaster.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION
+
+
+WE have now arrived at a period in the history of Oxford which is
+confused and unhappy, but for us full of interest, and perhaps of
+instruction.  The hundred years that passed by between the age of Chaucer
+and the age of Erasmus were, in Southern Europe, years of the most eager
+life.  We hear very often—too often, perhaps—of what is called the
+Renaissance.  The energy of delight with which Italy welcomed the new
+birth of art, of literature, of human freedom, has been made familiar to
+every reader.  It is not with Italy, but with England and with Oxford,
+that we are concerned.  How did the University and the colleges prosper
+in that strenuous time when the world ran after loveliness of form and
+colour, as, in other ages, it has run after warlike renown, or the
+far-off rewards of the saintly life?  What was Oxford doing when
+Florence, Venice, and Rome were striving towards no meaner goal than
+perfection?
+
+It must be said that ‘the spring came slowly up this way.’  The
+University merely reflected the very practical character of the people.
+In contemplating the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in
+their influence on English civilisation, we are reminded once more of the
+futility of certain modern aspirations.  No amount of University
+Commissions, nor of well-meant reforms, will change the nature of
+Englishmen.  It is impossible, by distributions of University prizes and
+professorships, to attract into the career of letters that proportion of
+industry and ingenuity which, in Germany for example, is devoted to the
+scholastic life.  Politics, trade, law, sport, religion, will claim their
+own in England, just as they did at the Revival of Letters.  The
+illustrious century which Italy employed in unburying, appropriating, and
+enjoying the treasures of Greek literature and art, our fathers gave, in
+England, to dynastic and constitutional squabbles, and to religious
+broils.  The Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a
+bitter and changeful spring.  There was an hour of genial warmth, there
+breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer; then came
+frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court favour shone on
+literature for a while, when Henry VIII. encouraged study, and Wolsey and
+Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more the bad
+days of religious strife returned, and the promise of learning was
+destroyed.  Thus the chief result of the awakening thought of the
+fourteenth century in England was not a lively delight in literature, but
+the appearance of the Lollards.  The intensely practical genius of our
+race turned not to letters, but to questions about the soul and its
+future, about property and its distribution.  The Lollards were put down
+in Oxford; ‘the tares were weeded out’ by the House of Lancaster, and in
+the process the germs of free thought, of originality, and of a rational
+education, were destroyed.  ‘Wyclevism did domineer among us,’ says Wood;
+and, in fact, the intellect of the University was absorbed, like the
+intellect of France during the heat of the Jansenist controversy, in
+defending or assailing ‘267 damned conclusions,’ drawn from the books of
+Wyclif.  The University ‘lost many of her children through the profession
+of Wyclevism.’  Those who remained were often ‘beneficed clerks.’  The
+Friars lifted up their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large
+ecclesiastical school.  As the University declared to Archbishop Chichele
+(1438), ‘Our noble mother, that was blessed in so goodly an offspring, is
+all but utterly destroyed and desolate.’  Presently the foreign wars and
+the wars of the Roses drained the University of the youth of England.
+The country was overrun with hostile forces, or infested by disbanded
+soldiers.  Plague and war, war and plague, and confusion, alternate in
+the annals.  Sickly as Oxford is to-day by climate and situation, she is
+a city of health compared to what she was in the middle ages.  In 1448 ‘a
+pestilence broke out, occasioned by the overflowing of waters, . . . also
+by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every
+Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases.’
+In the general dulness and squalor two things were remarkable: one, the
+last splendour of the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the new
+learning from Italy.  In 1452, George Neville of Balliol, brother of the
+King-maker, gave the most prodigious pass-supper that was ever served in
+Oxford.  On the first day there were 600 messes of meat, divided into
+three courses.  The second course is worthy of the attention of the
+epicure:
+
+                              SECOND COURSE
+
+Vian in brase.       Carcell.
+Crane in sawce.      Partrych.
+Young Pocock.        Venson baked.
+Coney.               Fryed meat in paste.
+Pigeons.             Lesh Lumbert.
+Byttor.              A Frutor.
+Curlew.              A Sutteltee.
+
+Against this prodigious gormandising we must set that noble gift, the
+Library presented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester.  In the
+Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark many books of the utmost value to
+the impoverished students.  Here are the works of Plato, and the _Ethics_
+and _Politics_ of Aristotle, translated by Leonard the Aretine.  Here,
+among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and Seneca,
+Averroes and Avicenna, _Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum_, Apuleius,
+Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch.  Here, with Ovid’s verses, is
+the Commentary on Dante, and his _Divine Comedy_.  Here, rarest of all,
+is a Greek Dictionary, the silent father of Liddel’s and Scott’s to be.
+
+   [Picture: Broad Street, a fine wide street containing many historic
+ buildings, and showing the Sheldonian and the old Clarendon Building on
+                                the right]
+
+The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of those
+manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their illuminations proved
+ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a printing-press at
+Oxford, and the arrival of certain Italians, ‘to propagate and settle the
+studies of true and genuine humanity among us.’  The exact date of the
+introduction of printing let us leave to be determined by the learned
+writer who is now at work on the history of Oxford.  The advent of the
+Italians is dated by Wood in 1488.  Polydore Virgil had lectured in New
+College.  ‘He first of all taught literature in Oxford.  Cyprianus and
+Nicholaus, _Italici_, also arrived and dined with the Vice-President of
+Magdalen on Christmas Day.  Lily and Colet, too, one of them the founder,
+the other the first Head Master, of St. Paul’s School, were about this
+time studying in Italy, under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus.
+Oxford, which had so long been in hostile communication with Italy as
+represented by the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the
+electric current of Italian civilisation.  At this conjuncture of
+affairs, who but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua?
+Till the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that ‘huge
+barbarian pupil,’ and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers: ‘of fat
+beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and fourteen,
+that in the entering in of spring he might have plenty of powdered beef.’
+The bill of fare of George Neville’s feast is like one of the catalogues
+dear to the Curé of Meudon.  For Oxford, as for Gargantua, ‘they
+appointed a great sophister-doctor, that read him Donatus, Theodoletus,
+and Alanus, in _parabolis_.’  Oxford spent far more than Gargantua’s
+eighteen years and eleven months over ‘the book de Modis significandis,
+with the commentaries of Berlinguandus and a rabble of others.’  Now,
+under Colet, and Erasmus (1497), Oxford was put, like Gargantua, under
+new masters, and learned that the old scholarship ‘had been but
+brutishness, and the old wisdom but blunt, foppish toys serving only to
+bastardise noble spirits, and to corrupt all the flower of youth.’
+
+The prospects of classical learning at Oxford (and, whatever may be the
+case to-day, on classical learning depended, in the fifteenth century,
+the fortunes of European literature) now seemed fair enough.  People from
+the very source of knowledge were lecturing in Oxford.  Wolsey was Bursar
+of Magdalen.  The colleges, to which B. N. C. was added in 1509, and C.
+C. C. in 1516, were competing with each other for success in the New
+Learning.  Fox, the founder of C. C. C., established in his college two
+chairs of Greek and Latin, ‘to extirpate barbarism.’  Meanwhile,
+Cambridge had to hire an Italian to write public speeches at twenty pence
+each!  Henry VIII. in his youth was, like Francis I., the patron of
+literature, as literature was understood in Italy.  He saw in learning a
+new splendour to adorn his court, a new source of intellectual luxury,
+though even Henry had an eye on the theological aspect of letters.
+Between 1500 and 1530 Oxford was noisy with the clink of masons’ hammers
+and chisels.  Brasenose, Corpus, and the magnificent kitchen of Christ
+Church, were being erected.  (The beautiful staircase, which M.
+Brunet-Debaines has sketched, was not finished till 1640.  The world owes
+it to Dr. Fell.  The Oriel niches, designed in the illustration, are of
+rather later date.)  The streets were crowded with carts, dragging in
+from all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future homes of the
+fair humanities.  Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the
+Platonic Society of Florence.  ‘He would hardly care much about going to
+Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there.  When I listen to
+Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself’; and he praises
+the judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and Linacre, who
+had been taught in Italy.
+
+In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten at
+the root.  Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a deadly
+blight.  Our academic forefathers ‘drove at practice,’ and saw everything
+with the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no interest save
+that of religion.  It is Mr. Seebohm (_Oxford Reformers_, 1867), I think,
+who detects, in Colet’s concern with the religious side of literature,
+the influence of Savonarola.  When in Italy ‘he gave himself entirely to
+the study of the Holy Scriptures.’  He brought to England from Italy, not
+the early spirit of Pico of Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his
+youth, but his later austerity, his later concern with the harmony of
+scripture and philosophy.  The book which the dying Petrarch held
+wistfully in his hands, revering its very material shape, though he could
+not spell its contents, was the _Iliad_ of Homer.  The book which the
+young Renaissance held in its hands in England, with reverence and
+eagerness as strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul.  It
+was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in 1496–97, when doctors and
+abbots flocked to hear him, with their note-books in their hands.  Thus
+Oxford differed from Florence, England from Italy: the former all intent
+on what it believed to be the very Truth, the latter all absorbed on what
+it knew to be no other than Beauty herself.
+
+We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford made.  The
+search for Truth was as certain to bring ‘not peace but a sword’ as the
+search for Beauty was to bring the decadence of Italy, the corruption of
+manners, the slavery of two hundred years.  Still, our practical
+earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of the Renaissance.  It is
+not possible here to tell the story of religious and social changes,
+which followed so hard upon each other, in the reigns of Henry VIII.,
+Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth.  A few moments in these stormy years are
+still memorable for some terrible or ludicrous event.
+
+That Oxford was rather ‘Trojan’ than ‘Greek,’ that men were more
+concerned about their dinners and their souls than their prosody and
+philosophy, in 1531, is proved by the success of Grynaeus.  He visited
+the University and carried off quantities of MSS., chiefly Neoplatonic,
+on which no man set any value.  Yet, in 1535, Layton, a Commissioner,
+wrote to Cromwell that he and his companions had established the New
+Learning in the University.  A Lecture in Greek was founded in Magdalen,
+two chairs of Greek and Latin in New, two in All Souls, and two already
+existed, as we have seen, in C. C. C.  This Layton is he that took a
+Rabelaisian and unquotable revenge on that old tyrant of the Schools,
+Duns Scotus.  ‘We have set Dunce in Bocardo, and utterly banished him
+from Oxford for ever, with all his blind glosses . . . And the second
+time we came to New College we found all the great quadrant full of the
+leaves of Dunce, the wind blowing them into every corner.  And there we
+found a certain Mr. Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering
+up part of the same books’ leaves, as he said, therewith to make him
+_sewers_ or _blanshers_, to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to
+have the better cry with his hounds.’  Ah! if the University
+Commissioners would only set Aristotle, and Messrs. Ritter and Preller,
+‘in Bocardo,’ many a young gentleman out of Buckinghamshire and other
+counties would joyously help in the good work, and use the pages, if not
+for _blanshers_, for other sportive purposes!
+
+‘_Habent sua fata libelli_,’ as Terentianus Maurus says, in a frequently
+quoted verse.  If Cromwell’s Commissioners were hard on Duns, the
+Visitors of Edward VI. were ruthless in their condemnation of everything
+that smacked of Popery or of magic.  Evangelical religion in England has
+never been very favourable to learning.  Thus, in 1550 ‘the ancient
+libraries were by their appointment rifled.  Many manuscripts, guilty of
+no other superstition than red letters in the front or titles, were
+condemned to the fire . . . Such books wherein appeared angles were
+thought sufficient to be destroyed, because accounted Papish or
+diabolical, or both.’  A cart-load of MSS., lucubrations of the Fellows
+of Merton, chiefly in controversial divinity, was taken away; but, by the
+good services of one Herks, a Dutchman, many books were preserved, and,
+later, entered the Bodleian Library.  The world can spare the
+controversial manuscripts of the Fellows of Merton, but who knows what
+invaluable scrolls may have perished in the Puritan bonfire!  Persons,
+the librarian of Balliol, sold old books to buy Protestant ones.  Two
+noble libraries were sold for forty shillings, for waste paper.  Thus the
+reign of Edward VI. gave free play to that ascetic and intolerable hatred
+of letters which had now and again made its voice heard under Henry VIII.
+Oxford was almost empty.  The schools were used by laundresses, as a
+place wherein clothes might conveniently be dried.  The citizens
+encroached on academic property.  Some schools were quite destroyed, and
+the sites converted into gardens.  Few men took degrees.  The college
+plate and the jewels left by pious benefactors were stolen, and went to
+the melting-pot.  Thus flourished Oxford under Edward VI.
+
+The reign of Mary was scarcely more favourable to letters.  No one knew
+what to be at in religion.  In Magdalen no one could be found to say
+Mass, the fellows were turned out, the undergraduates were whipped—boyish
+martyrs—and crossed at the buttery.  What most pleases, in this tragic
+reign, is the anecdote of Edward Anne of Corpus.  Anne, with the conceit
+of youth, had written a Latin satire on the Mass.  He was therefore
+sentenced to be publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to
+receive one lash for each line in his satire.  Never, surely, was a poet
+so sharply taught the merit of brevity.  How Edward Anne must have
+regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a
+smart quatrain with the sting of the wit in the tail!
+
+Oxford still retains a memory of the hideous crime of this reign.  In
+Broad Street, under the windows of Balliol, there is a small stone cross
+in the pavement.  This marks the place where, some years ago, a great
+heap of wooden ashes was found.  These ashes were the remains of the fire
+of October 16th, 1555—the day when Ridley and Latimer were burned.  ‘They
+were brought,’ says Wood, ‘to a place over against Balliol College, where
+now stands a row of poor cottages, a little before which, under the town
+wall, ran so clear a stream that it gave the name of Canditch, _candida
+fossa_, to the way leading by it.’  To recover the memory of that event,
+let the reader fancy himself on the top of the tower of St. Michael’s,
+that is, immediately above the city wall.  No houses interfere between
+him and the open country, in which Balliol stands; not with its present
+frontage, but much farther back.  A clear stream runs through the place
+where is now Broad Street, and the road above is dark with a swaying
+crowd, out of which rises the vapour of smoke from the martyrs’ pile.  At
+your feet, on the top of Bocardo prison (which spanned the street at the
+North Gate), Cranmer stands manacled, watching the fiery death which is
+soon to purge away the memory of his own faults and crimes.  He, too,
+joined that ‘noble army of martyrs’ who fought all, though they knew it
+not, for one cause—the freedom of the human spirit.
+
+It was in a night-battle that they fell, and ‘confused was the cry of the
+pæan,’ but they won the victory, and we have entered into the land for
+which they contended.  When we think of these martyrdoms, can we wonder
+that the Fellows of Lincoln did not spare to ring a merry peal on their
+gaudy-day, the day of St. Hugh, even though Mary the Queen had just left
+her bitter and weary life?
+
+It would be pleasant to have to say that learning returned to Oxford on
+the rising of ‘that bright Occidental star, Queen Elizabeth.’  On the
+other hand, the University recovered slowly, after being ‘much troubled,’
+as Wood says, ‘_and hurried up and down_ by the changes of religion.’  We
+get a glimpse, from Wood, of the Fellows of Merton singing the psalms of
+Sternhold and Hopkins round a fire in the College Hall.  We see the
+sub-warden snatching the book out of the hands of a junior fellow, and
+declaring ‘that he would never dance after that pipe.’  We find Oxford so
+illiterate, that she could not even provide an University preacher!  A
+country gentleman, Richard Taverner of Woodeaton, would stroll into St.
+Mary’s, with his sword and damask gown, and give the Academicians,
+destitute of academical advice, a sermon beginning with these words:
+
+    ‘Arriving at the mount of St. Mary’s, I have brought you some fine
+    bisketts baked in the Oven of Charitie, carefully conserved for the
+    chickens of the Church, the sparrows of the spirit, and the sweet
+    swallows of salvation.’
+
+In spite of these evil symptoms, a Greek oration and plenty of Latin
+plays were ready for Queen Elizabeth when she visited Oxford in 1566.
+The religious refugees, who had ‘eaten mice at Zurich’ in Mary’s time,
+had returned, and their influence was hostile to learning.  A man who had
+lived on mice for his faith was above Greek.  The court which contained
+Sydney, and which welcomed Bruno, was strong enough to make the classics
+popular.  That famed Polish Count, Alasco, was ‘received with Latin
+orations and disputes (1583) in the best manner,’ and only a scoffing
+Italian, like Bruno, ventured to call the Heads of Houses _the Drowsy
+heads_—_dormitantes_.  Bruno was a man whom nothing could teach to speak
+well of people in authority.  Oxford enjoyed the religious peace (not
+extended to ‘Seminarists’) of Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, and did not
+foresee that she was about to become the home of the Court and a place of
+arms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+JACOBEAN OXFORD
+
+
+THE gardens of Wadham College on a bright morning in early spring are a
+scene in which the memory of old Oxford pleasantly lingers, and is easily
+revived.  The great cedars throw their secular shadow on the ancient
+turf, the chapel forms a beautiful background; the whole place is exactly
+what it was two hundred and sixty years ago.  The stones of Oxford walls,
+when they do not turn black and drop off in flakes, assume tender tints
+of the palest gold, red, and orange.  Along a wall, which looks so old
+that it may well have formed a defence of the ancient Augustinian priory,
+the stars of the yellow jasmine flower abundantly.  The industrious hosts
+of the bees have left their cells, to labour in this first morning of
+spring; the doves coo, the thrushes are noisy in the trees.  All breathes
+of the year renewal, and of the coming April; and all that gladdens us
+may have gladdened some indolent scholar in the time of King James.
+
+In the reign of the first Stuart king of England, Oxford became the town
+that we know.  Even in Elizabeth’s days, could we ascend the stream of
+centuries, we should find ourselves much at home in Oxford.  The earliest
+trustworthy map, that of Agas (1578), is worth studying, if we wish to
+understand the Oxford that Elizabeth left, and that the architects of
+James embellished, giving us the most interesting examples of collegiate
+buildings, which are both stately and comfortable.  Let us enter Oxford
+by the Iffley Road, in the year 1578.  We behold, as Agas
+enthusiastically writes:
+
+    ‘A citie seated, rich in everything,
+    Girt with wood and water, meadow, corn, and hill.’
+
+The way is not bordered, of course, by the long, straggling streets of
+rickety cottages, which now stretch from the bridge half-way to Cowley
+and Iffley.  The church, called by ribalds ‘the boiled rabbit,’ from its
+peculiar shape, lies on the right; there is a gate in the city wall, on
+the place where the road now turns to Holywell.  At this time the walls
+still existed, and ran from Magdalen past ‘St. Mary’s College, called
+Newe,’ through Exeter, through the site of Mr. Parker’s shop, and all
+along the south side of Broad Street to St. Michael’s, and Bocardo Gate.
+There the wall cut across to the castle.  On the southern side of the
+city, it skirted Corpus and Merton Gardens, and was interrupted by Christ
+Church.  Probably if it were possible for us to visit Elizabethan Oxford,
+the walls and the five castle towers would seem the most curious features
+in the place.  Entering the East Gate, Magdalen and Magdalen Grammar
+School would be familiar objects.  St. Edmund’s Hall would be in its
+present place, and Queen’s would present its ancient Gothic front.  It is
+easy to imagine the change in the High Street which would be produced by
+a Queen’s not unlike Oriel, in the room of the highly classical edifice
+of Wren.  All Souls would be less remarkable; at St. Mary’s we should
+note the absence of the ‘scandalous image’ of Our Lady over the door.  At
+Merton the fellows’ quadrangle did not yet exist, and a great wood-yard
+bordered on Corpus.  In front of Oriel was an open space with trees, and
+there were a few scattered buildings, such as Peckwater’s Inn (on the
+site of ‘Peck’), and Canterbury College.  Tom Quad was stately but
+incomplete.  Turning from St. Mary’s past B. N. C., we miss the attics in
+Brasenose front, we miss the imposing Radcliffe, we miss all the
+quadrangle of the Schools, except the Divinity school, and we miss the
+Theatre.  If we go down South Street, past Ch. Ch. we find an open space
+where Pembroke stands.  Where Wadham is now, the most uniform, complete,
+and unchanged of all the colleges, there are only the open pleasances,
+and perhaps a few ruins of the Augustinian priory.  St. John’s lacks its
+inner quadrangle, and Balliol, in place of its new buildings, has its old
+delightful grove.  As to the houses of the town, they are not unlike the
+tottering and picturesque old roofs and gables of King Street.
+
+To the Oxford of Elizabeth’s reign, then, the founders and architects of
+her successor added, chiefly, the Schools’ quadrangle, with the great
+gate of the five orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in its own
+despite.  They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort, at Merton;
+they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful achievement.  Their
+taste was a medley of new and old: they made a not uninteresting effort
+to combine the exquisiteness of Gothic decoration with the proportions of
+Greek architecture.  The tower of the five orders reminds the spectator,
+in a manner, of the style of Milton.  It is rich and overloaded, yet its
+natural beauty is not abated by the relics out of the great treasures of
+Greece and Rome, which are built into the mass.  The Ionic and Corinthian
+pillars are like the Latinisms of Milton, the double-gilding which once
+covered the figures and emblems of the upper part of the tower gave them
+the splendour of Miltonic ornament.  ‘When King James came from Woodstock
+to see this quadrangular pile, he commanded the gilt figures to be
+whitened over,’ because they were so dazzling, or, as Wood expresses it,
+‘so glorious and splendid that none, especially when the sun shone, could
+behold them.’  How characteristic of James is this anecdote!  He was by
+no means _le roi soleil_, as courtiers called Louis XIV., as divines
+called the pedantic Stuart.  It is easy to fancy the King issuing from
+the Library of Bodley, where he has been turning over books of theology,
+prosing, and displaying his learning for hours.  The rheumy, blinking
+eyes are dazzled in the sunlight, and he peevishly commands the gold work
+to be ‘whitened over.’  Certainly the translators of the Bible were but
+ill-advised when they compared his Majesty to the rising sun in all his
+glory.
+
+James was rather fond of visiting Oxford and the royal residence at
+Woodstock.  We shall see that his Court, the most dissolute, perhaps,
+that England ever tolerated, corrupted the manners of the students.  On
+one of his Majesty’s earliest visits he had a chance of displaying the
+penetration of which he was so proud.  James was always finding out
+something or somebody, till it almost seemed as if people had discovered
+that the best way to flatter him was to try to deceive him.  In 1604,
+there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic.
+This Haydock practised his profession during the day like other mortals,
+but varied from the kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching
+all night.  It was Haydock’s contention that he preached unconsciously in
+his sleep, when he would give out a text with the greatest gravity, and
+declare such sacred matters as were revealed to him in slumber, ‘his
+preaching coming by revelation.’  Though people went to hear Haydock,
+they were chiefly influenced by curiosity.  ‘His auditory were willing to
+silence him by pulling, haling, and pinching him, yet would he
+pertinaciously persist to the end, and sleep still.’  The King was
+introduced into Haydock’s bedroom, heard him declaim, and next day
+cross-examined him in private.  Awed by the royal acuteness, Haydock
+confessed that he was a humbug, and that he had taken to preaching all
+night by way of getting a little notoriety, and because he felt himself
+to be ‘a buried man in the University.’
+
+                [Picture: New College Cloisters and Tower]
+
+That a man should hope to get reputation by preaching all night is itself
+a proof that the University, under James, was too theologically minded.
+When has it been otherwise?  The religious strife of the reigns of Henry
+VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, was not asleep; the troubles of Charles’s
+time were beginning to stir.  Oxford was as usual an epitome of English
+opinion.  We see the struggle of the wildest Puritanism, of Arminianism,
+of Pelagianism, of a dozen ‘isms,’ which are dead enough, but have left
+their pestilent progeny to disturb a place of religion, learning, and
+amusement.  By whatever names the different sects were called, men’s
+ideas and tendencies were divided into two easily recognisable classes.
+Calvinism and Puritanism on one side, with the Puritanic haters of
+letters and art, were opposed to Catholicism in germ, to literature, and
+mundane studies.  How difficult it is to take a side in this battle,
+where both parties had one foot on firm ground, the other in chaos, where
+freedom, or what was to become freedom of thought, was allied with narrow
+bigotry, where learning was chained to superstition!
+
+As early as 1606, Mr. William Laud, B.D., of St. John’s College, began to
+disturb the University.  The young man preached a sermon which was
+thought to look Romewards.  Laud became _suspect_, it was thought a
+‘scandalous’ thing to give him the usual courteous greetings in the
+street or in the college quadrangle.  From this time the history of
+Oxford, for forty years, is mixed up with the history of Laud.  The
+divisions of Roundhead and of Cavalier have begun.  The majority of the
+undergraduates are on the side of Laud; and the Court, the citizens, and
+many of the elder members of the University, are with the Puritans.
+
+The Court and the King, we have said, were fond of being entertained in
+the college halls.  James went from libraries to academic disputations,
+thence to dinner, and from dinner to look on at comedies played by the
+students.  The Cambridge men did not care to see so much royal favour
+bestowed on Oxford.  When James visited the University in 1641, a
+Cambridge wit produced a remarkable epigram.  For some mysterious reason
+the playful fancies of the sister University have never been greatly
+admired at Oxford, where the brisk air, men flatter themselves, breeds
+nimbler humours.  Here is part of the Cantab’s epigram:
+
+    ‘To Oxenford the King has gone,
+       With all his mighty peers,
+    That hath in peace maintained us,
+       These five or six long years.’
+
+The poem maunders on for half a dozen lines, and ‘loses itself in the
+sands,’ like the River Rhine, without coming to any particular point or
+conclusion.  How much more lively is the Oxford couplet on the King, who,
+being bored by some amateur theatricals, twice or thrice made as if he
+would leave the hall, where men failed dismally to entertain him.
+
+    ‘“The King himself did offer,”—“What, I pray?”
+    “He offered twice or thrice—to go away!”’
+
+As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to wear
+love-locks.  In Elizabeth’s time, when men wore their hair ‘no longer
+than their ears,’ long locks had been a mark, says Wood, of ‘swaggerers.’
+Drinking and gambling were now very fashionable, undergraduates were
+whipped for wearing boots, while ‘Puritans were many and troublesome,’
+and Laud publicly declared (1614) that ‘Presbyterians were as bad as
+Papists.’  Did Laud, after all, think Papists so very bad?  In 1617 he
+was President of his college, St. John’s, on which he set his mark.  It
+is to Laud and to Inigo Jones that Oxford owes the beautiful
+garden-front, perhaps the most lovely thing in Oxford.  From the
+gardens—where for so many summers the beauty of England has rested in the
+shadow of the chestnut-trees, amid the music of the chimes, and in air
+heavy with the scent of the acacia flowers—from the gardens, Laud’s
+building looks rather like a country-house than a college.
+
+If St. John’s men have lived in the University too much as if it were a
+large country-house, if they have imitated rather the Toryism than the
+learning of their great Archbishop, the blame is partly Laud’s.  How much
+harm to study he and Waynflete have unwittingly done, and how much they
+have added to the romance of Oxford!  It is easy to understand that men
+find it a weary task to read in sight of the beauty of the groves of
+Magdalen and of St. John’s.  When Kubla Khan ‘a stately pleasure-dome
+decreed,’ he did not mean to settle students there, and to ask them for
+metaphysical essays, and for Greek and Latin prose compositions.  Kubla
+Khan would have found a palace to his desire in the gardens of Laud, or
+where Cherwell, ‘meandering with a mazy motion,’ stirs the green weeds,
+and flashes from the mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows
+white and purple with fritillaries.
+
+    ‘And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills,
+    Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree’;
+
+but here is scarcely the proper training-ground of first-class men!
+
+Oxford returned to her ancient uses in 1625.  Soon after the accession of
+Charles I. the plague broke out in London, and Oxford entertained the
+Parliament, as six hundred years before she had received the Witan.
+There seemed something ominous in all that Charles did in his earlier
+years—the air, or men’s minds, was full of the presage of fate.  It was
+observed that the House of Commons met in the Divinity School, and that
+the place seemed to have infected them with theological passion.  After
+1625 there was never a Parliament but had its committee to discuss
+religion, and to stray into the devious places of divinity.  The plague
+pursued Charles to Oxford.  In those days, and long afterwards, it was a
+common complaint that the citizens built rows of poor cottages within the
+walls, and that these cottages were crowded by dirty and indigent people.
+Plague was bred almost yearly at Oxford, and Charles really seems to have
+improved the sanitary arrangements of the city.
+
+Laud, the President of St. John’s, became, by some intrigue, Chancellor
+of the University.  He made Oxford many presents of Greek, Chinese,
+Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic MSS.  There may have been—let us hope there
+were—quiet bookworms who enjoyed these gifts, while the town and
+University were bubbling over with religious feuds.  People grumbled that
+‘Popish darts were whet afresh on a Dutch grindstone.’  A series of
+anti-Romish and anti-Royal sermons and pamphlets, followed as a rule by a
+series of recantations, kept men’s minds in a ferment.  The good that
+Laud did by his gifts—and he was a munificent patron of learning—he
+destroyed by his dogmatism.  Scholars could not decipher Greek texts
+while they were torturing biblical ones into arguments for and against
+the opinions of the Chancellor.  What is the true story about the
+gorgeous vestments which were found in a box in the house of the
+President of St. John’s, and which are now preserved in the library of
+that college?  Did they belong to the last of the old Catholic presidents
+of what was Chichele’s College of St. Bernard before the Reformation?
+Were they, on the other hand, the property of Laud himself?  It has been
+said that Laud would not have known how to wear them.  Fancy sees him
+treasuring that bright ecclesiastical raiment, πέπλοι παμποίκιλοι, in
+some place of security.  At night, perhaps, when candles were lit and
+curtains drawn, and he was alone, he may have arrayed himself in the
+gorgeous chasuble before the mirror, as Hetty wore her surreptitious
+finery.  ‘There is a great deal of human nature in man.’  If Laud really
+strutted in solitude, draped rather at random in these vestments, the
+ecclesiastical gear is even more interesting than the thin ivory-headed
+staff which supported him on his way to the scaffold; more curious than
+the diary in which he recorded the events of night and day, of dreaming
+hours and waking.  In the library at St. John’s they show his bust—a
+tarnished, gilded work of art.  He has a neat little cocked-up moustache,
+not like a prelate’s; the face is that of a Bismarck without strength of
+character.
+
+In speaking of Oxford before the civil war, let us not forget that true
+students and peaceable men found a welcome retreat beyond the din of
+theological fictions.  Lord Falkland’s house was within ten miles of the
+town.  ‘In this time,’ says Clarendon, in his immortal panegyric, ‘in
+this time he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polished
+men of the University, who found such an immenseness of wit and such a
+solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most
+logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in
+anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that
+they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in
+a purer air; so that his house was a university in a less volume, whither
+they came not so much for repose as study; and to examine and refine
+those grosser propositions, which laziness and consent made current in
+vulgar conversation.’
+
+The signs of the times grew darker.  In 1636 the King and Queen visited
+Oxford, ‘with no applause.’  In 1640 Laud sent the University his last
+present of manuscripts.  He was charged with many offences.  He had
+repaired crucifixes; he had allowed the ‘scandalous image’ to be set up
+in the porch of St. Mary’s; and Alderman Nixon, the Puritan grocer, had
+seen a man bowing to the scandalous image—so he declared.  In 1642
+Charles asked for money from the colleges, for the prosecution of the war
+with the Parliament.  The beautiful old college plate began its journey
+to the melting-pot.  On August 9th the scholars armed themselves.  There
+were two bands of musqueteers, one of pikemen, one of halberdiers.  In
+the reign of Henry III. the men had been on the other side.  Magdalen
+bridge was blocked up with heaps of wood.  Stones, for the primitive
+warfare of the time, were transported to the top of Magdalen tower.  The
+stones were never thrown at any foemen.  Royalists and Roundheads in turn
+occupied the place; and while grocer Nixon fled before the Cavaliers, he
+came back and interceded for All Souls College (which dealt with him for
+figs and sugar) when the Puritans wished to batter the graven images on
+the gate.  On October 29th the King came, after Edgehill fight, the Court
+assembled, and Oxford was fortified.  The place was made impregnable in
+those days of feeble artillery.  The author of the _Gesta Stephani_ had
+pointed out, many centuries before, that Oxford, if properly defended,
+could never be taken, thanks to the network of streams that surrounds
+her.  Though the citizens worked grudgingly and slowly, the trenches were
+at last completed.  The earthworks—a double line—ran in and out of the
+interlacing streams.  A Parliamentary force on Headington Hill seems to
+have been unable to play on the city with artillery.  Barbed arrows were
+served out to the scholars, who formed a regiment of more than six
+hundred men.  The Queen held her little court in Merton, in the Warden’s
+lodgings.  Clarendon gives rather a humorous account of the discontent of
+the fine ladies ‘The town was full of lords (besides those of the
+Council), and of persons of the best quality, with very many ladies, who,
+when not pleased themselves, kept others from being so.’  Oxford never
+was so busy and so crowded; letters, society, war, were all confused;
+there were excursions against Brown at Abingdon, and alarms from Fairfax
+on Headington Hill.  The siege, from May 22nd to June 5th, was almost a
+farce.  The Parliamentary generals ‘fought with perspective glasses.’
+Neither Cromwell at Wytham, nor Brown at Wolvercot, pushed matters too
+hard.  When two Puritan regiments advanced on Hinksey, Mr. Smyth blazed
+away at them from his house.  As in Zululand, any building made a
+respectable fort, when cannon-balls had so little penetrative power, or
+when artillery was not at the front.  Oxford was surrendered, with other
+places of arms, after Naseby, and—Presbyterians became heads of colleges!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION
+
+
+IN Merton Chapel a little mural tablet bears the crest, the name, and the
+dates of the birth and death, of Antony Wood.  He has been our guide in
+these sketches of Oxford life, as he must be the guide of the gravest and
+most exact historians.  No one who cares for the past of the University
+should think without pity and friendliness of this lonely scholar, who in
+his lifetime was unpitied and unbefriended.  We have reached the period
+in which he lived and died, in the midst of changes of Church and State,
+and surrounded by more worldly scholars, whose letters remain to testify
+that, in the reign of the Second Charles, Oxford was modern Oxford.  In
+the epistles of Humphrey Prideaux, student of Christ Church, we recognise
+the foibles of the modern University, the love of gossip, the internecine
+criticism, the greatness of little men whom _rien ne peut plaire_.
+
+Antony Wood was a scholar of a different sort, of a sort that has never
+been very common in Oxford.  He was a perfect dungeon of books; but he
+wrote as well as read, which has never been a usual practice in his
+University.  Wood was born in 1632, in one of the old houses opposite
+Merton, perhaps in the curious ancient hall which has been called Beham,
+Bream, and _Bohemiæ Aula_, by various corruptions of the original
+spelling.  As a boy, Wood must have seen the siege of Oxford, which he
+describes not without humour.  As a young man, he watched the religious
+revolution which introduced Presbyterian Heads of Houses, and sent
+Puritanical captains of horse, like Captain James Wadsworth, to hunt for
+‘Papistical reliques’ and ‘massing stuffs’ among the property of the
+President of C. C. C. and the Dean of Ch. Ch. (1646–1648).  In 1650 he
+saw the Chancellorship of Oliver Cromwell; in 1659 he welcomed the
+Restoration, and rejoiced that ‘the King had come to his own again.’  The
+tastes of an antiquary combined, with the natural reaction against
+Puritanism, to make Antony Wood a High Churchman, and not averse to Rome,
+while he had sufficient breadth of mind to admire Thomas Hobbes, the
+patriarch of English learning.  But Wood had little room in his heart or
+mind for any learning save that connected with the University.  Oxford,
+the city, and the colleges, the remains of the old religious art, the
+customs, the dresses—these things he adored with a loverlike devotion,
+which was utterly unrewarded.  He owed no office to the University, and
+he was even expelled (1693) for having written sharply against Clarendon.
+This did not abate his zeal, nor prevent him from passing all his days,
+and much of his nights, in the study and compilation of University
+history.
+
+The author of Wood’s biography has left a picture of his sombre and
+laborious old age.  He rose at four o’clock every morning.  He scarcely
+tasted food till supper-time.  At the hour of the college dinner he
+visited the booksellers’ shops, where he was sure not to be disturbed by
+the gossip of dons, young and old.  After supper he would smoke his pipe
+and drink his pot of ale in a tavern.  It was while he took this modest
+refreshment, before old age came upon him, that Antony once fell in, and
+fell out, with Dick Peers.  This Dick was one of the men employed by Dr.
+Fell, the Dean of Ch. Ch., to translate Wood’s History and Antiquities of
+the University of Oxford into Latin.  The translation gave rise to a
+number of literary quarrels.  As Dean of Ch. Ch., Dr. Fell yielded to the
+besetting sin of deans, and fancied himself the absolute master of the
+University, if not something superior to mortal kind.  An autocrat of
+this sort had no scruples about changing Wood’s copy whenever he differed
+from Wood in political or religious opinion.  Now Antony, as we said, had
+eyes to discern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the Dean considered no
+better than a Deist or an Atheist.  The Dean therefore calmly altered all
+that Wood had written of the Philosopher of Malmesbury, and so maligned
+Hobbes that the old man, meeting the King in Pall Mall, begged leave to
+reply in his own defence.  Charles allowed the dispute to go on, and
+Hobbes hit Fell rather hard.  The Dean retorted with the famous
+expression about _irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmesburiense animal_.
+This controversy amused Oxford, but bred bad feeling between Antony Wood
+and Dick Peers, the translator of his work, and the tool of the Dean of
+Ch. Ch.  Prideaux (_Letters to John Ellis_; Camden Society, 1875)
+describes the battles in city taverns between author and translator:
+
+    ‘I suppose that you have heard of the continuall feuds, and often
+    battles, between the author and the translator; they had a skirmish
+    at Sol Hardeing [keeper of a tavern in All Saints’ parish], another
+    at the printeing house [the Sheldonian theatre], and several other
+    places.’
+
+From the record of these combats, we learn that the recluse Antony was a
+man of his hands:
+
+    ‘As Peers always cometh off with a bloody nose or a black eye, he was
+    a long time afraid to goe annywhere where he might chance to meet his
+    too powerful adversary, for fear of another drubbing, till he was
+    pro-proctor, and now Woods (_sic_) is as much afraid to meet him,
+    least he should exercise his authority upon him.  And although he be
+    a good bowzeing blad, yet it hath been observed that never since his
+    adversary hath been in office hath he dared to be out after nine,
+    least he should meet him and exact the rigor of the statute upon
+    him.’
+
+The statute required all scholars to be in their rooms before Tom had
+ceased ringing.  It was, perhaps, too rash to say that the Oxford of the
+Restoration was already modern Oxford.  The manners of the students were,
+so to speak, more accentuated.  However much the lecturer in Idolology
+may dislike the method and person of the Reader in the Mandingo language,
+these two learned men do not box in taverns, nor take off their coats if
+they meet each other at the Clarendon Press.  People are careful not to
+pitch into each other in that way, though the temper which confounds
+opponents for their theory of irregular verbs is not at all abated.  As
+Wood grew in years he did not increase in honours.  ‘He was a mere
+scholar,’ and consequently might expect from the greater number of men
+disrespect.  When he was but sixty-four, he looked eighty at least.  His
+dress was not elegant, ‘cleanliness being his chief object.’  He rarely
+left his rooms, that were papered with MSS., and where every table and
+chair had its load of books and yellow parchments from the College
+muniment rooms.  When strangers came to Oxford with letters of
+recommendation, the recluse would leave his study, and gladly lead them
+about the town, through Logic Lane to Queen’s, which had not then the
+sublimely classical front, built by Hawksmoor, ‘but suggested by Sir
+Christopher Wren.’  It is worthy of his genius.  Wood died in 1695,
+‘forgiving every one.’  He could well afford to do so.  In his _Athenæ
+Oxonienses_ he had written the lives of all his enemies.
+
+Wood, ‘being a mere scholar,’ could, of course, expect nothing but
+disrespect in a place like Oxford.  His younger contemporary, Humphrey
+Prideaux, was, in the Oxford manner, a man of the world.  He was the son
+of a Cornish squire, was educated at Westminster under Busby (that awful
+pedagogue, whose birch seems so near a memory), got a studentship at
+Christ Church in 1668, and took his B.A. degree in 1672.  Here it may be
+observed that men went up quite as late in life then as they do now, for
+Prideaux was twenty-four years old when he took his degree.  Fell was
+Dean of Christ Church, and was showing laudable zeal in working the
+University Press.  What a pity it is that the University Press of to-day
+has become a trading concern, a shop for twopenny manuals and penny
+primers!  It is scarcely proper that the University should at once
+organise examinations and sell the manuals which contain the answers to
+the questions most likely to be set.  To return to Fell; he made Prideaux
+edit Lucius Florus, and publish the _Marmora Oxoniensia_, which came out
+1676.  We must not suppose, however, that Prideaux was an enthusiastic
+archæologist.  He did the _Marmora_ because the Dean commanded it, and
+because educated people were at that period not uninterested in Greek
+art.  At the present hour one may live a lifetime in Oxford and only
+learn, by the accident of examining passmen in the Arundel Room, that the
+University possesses any marbles.  In the walls of the Arundel Room (on
+the ground-floor in the Schools’ quadrangle) these touching remains of
+Hellas are interred.  There are the funereal stelæ, with their quiet
+expression of sorrow, of hope, of resignation.  The young man, on his
+tombstone, is represented in the act of rising and taking the hand of a
+friend.  He is bound on his latest journey.
+
+    ‘He goeth forth unto the unknown land,
+       Where wife nor child may follow; thus far tell
+    The lingering clasp of hand in faithful hand,
+       And that brief carven legend, _Friend_, _farewell_.
+
+    O pregnant sign, profound simplicity!
+       All passionate pain and fierce remonstrating
+    Being wholly purged, leave this mere memory,
+       Deep but not harsh, a sad and sacred thing.’ {120}
+
+The lady chooses from a coffer a trinket, or a ribbon.  It is her last
+toilette she is making, with no fear and no regret.  Again, the
+long-severed souls are meeting with delight in the home of the just made
+perfect.
+
+              [Picture: Trinity College Gates, Parks’ Road]
+
+Even in the Schools these scraps of Greek lapidary’s work seem beautiful
+to us, in their sober and cheerful acceptance of life and death.  We
+hope, in Oxford, that the study of ancient art, as well as of ancient
+literature, may soon be made possible.  These tangible relics of the past
+bring us very near to the heart and the life of Greece, and waken a
+kindly enthusiasm in every one who approaches them.  In Humphrey
+Prideaux’s letters there is not a trace of any such feeling.  He does his
+business, but it is hack-work.  In this he differs from the modern
+student, but in his caustic description of the rude and witless society
+of the place he is modern enough.  In his letters to his friend, John
+Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants to get
+preferment.  His taste and his ambition alike made him detest the heavy,
+beer-drinking doctors, the fast ‘All Souls gentlemen,’ and the fossils of
+stupidity who are always plentifully imbedded in the soil of University
+life.  Fellowships were then sold, at Magdalen and New, when they were
+not given by favour.  Prideaux grumbles (July 28th, 1674) at the laxness
+of the Commissioners, who should have exposed this abuse: ‘In town, one
+of their inquirys is whether any of the scholars weare pantaloons or
+periwigues, or keep dogs.’  The great dispute about dogs, which raged at
+a later date in University College, had already begun to disturb dons and
+undergraduates.  The choice language of Oxford contempt was even then
+extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison in _Daniel Deronda_, spoke curtly of
+the people whom he did not like as ‘brutes.’  ‘Pembroke—the fittest
+colledge in the town for brutes.’  The University did not encourage
+certain ‘players’ who had paid the place a visit, and the players, in
+revenge, had gone about the town at night and broken the windows.
+
+When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is
+amusing to read of Prideaux’s miserable adventures, in the diligence,
+between a lady of easy manners, a ‘pitiful rogue,’ and two undergraduates
+who ‘sordidly affected debauchery.’
+
+    ‘This ill company made me very miserable all the way.  Only once I
+    could not but heartily laugh to see Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by
+    five or six carmen with whips and prong staves for provoking them
+    with some of his extravagant frolics.’
+
+The ‘violent affection to vice’ in the University, or in the country,
+was, of course, the reaction against the godliness of Puritan captains of
+horse.  Another form of the reaction is discernible in the revived High
+Church sentiments of Prideaux, Wood, and most of the students of the
+time.
+
+The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than those of the
+pot-house-haunting seniors.  Dr. Good, the Master of Balliol, ‘a good old
+toast,’ had much trouble with his students.
+
+    ‘There is, over against Balliol College, a dingy, horrid, scandalous
+    ale-house, fit for none but draymen and tinkers, and such as, by
+    going there, have made themselves equally scandalous.  Here the
+    Balliol men continually, and by perpetuall bubbing, add art to their
+    natural stupidity, to make themselves perfect sots.’
+
+The envy and jealousy of the inferior colleges, alas! have put about many
+things, in these latter days, to the discredit of the Balliol men, but
+not even Humphrey Prideaux would, out of all his stock of epithets,
+choose ‘sottish’ and ‘stupid.’  In these old times, however, Dr. Good had
+to call the men together, and—
+
+    ‘Inform them of the mischiefs of that hellish liquor called ale; but
+    one of them, not so tamely to be preached out of his beloved liquor,
+    made answer that the Vice-Chancelour’s men drank ale at the “Split
+    Crow,” and why should not they too?’
+
+On this, old Dr. Good posted off to the Vice-Chancellor, who, ‘being a
+lover of old ale’ himself, returned a short answer to the head of
+Balliol.  The old man went back to his college, and informed his fellows,
+‘that he was assured there were no hurt in ale, so that now they may be
+sots by authority.’  Christ Church men were not more sober.  David
+Whitford, who had been the tutor of Shirley the poet, was found lying
+dead in his bed: ‘he had been going to take a dram for refreshment, but
+death came between the cup and the lips, and this is the end of Davy.’
+Prideaux records, in the same feeling style, that smallpox carried off
+many of the undergraduates, ‘besides my brother,’ a student at Corpus.
+
+The University Press supplied Prideaux with gossip.  They printed ‘a book
+against Hobs,’ written by Clarendon.  Hobbes was the heresiarch of the
+time, and when an unhappy fellow of Merton hanged himself, the doctrines
+of Hobbes were said to have prompted him to the deed.  To return to the
+Press.  ‘Our Christmas book will be Cornelius Nepos . . . Our marbles are
+now printing.’  Prideaux, as has been said, took no interest in his own
+work.
+
+    ‘I coat (quote) a multitude of authors; if people think the better of
+    me for that, I will think the worse of them for their judgement.  It
+    beeing soe easyly a thinge to make this specious show, he must be a
+    fool that cannot gain whatsoever repute is to be gotten by it.  If
+    people will admire him for this, they may; I shall admire such for
+    nothing else but their good indexs.  As long as books have these, on
+    what subject may we not coat as many others as we please, and never
+    have read one of them?’
+
+It is not easy to gather from this confession whether Prideaux had or had
+not read the books he ‘coated.’  It is certain that Dean Aldrich (and
+here again we recognise the eternal criticism of modern Oxford) held a
+poor opinion of Humphrey Prideaux.  Aldrich said Prideaux was
+‘incorrect,’ ‘muddy-headed,’ ‘he would do little or nothing besides
+heaping up notes’; ‘as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any,
+but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former editors.’
+This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to
+put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts,
+every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be
+in the air.  Oxford is a discouraging place.  College drudgery absorbs
+the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness.  They
+have only the waste odds-and-ends of time for their own labours.  They
+live in an atmosphere of criticism.  They collect notes, they wait, they
+dream; their youth goes by, and the night comes when no man can work.
+The more praise to the tutors and lecturers who decipher the records of
+Assyria, or patiently collate the manuscripts of the _Iliad_, who not
+only teach what is already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and
+advance the boundaries of scholarship and science.
+
+One lesson may be learned from Prideaux’s cynical letters, which is still
+worth the attention of every young Oxford student who is conscious of
+ambition, of power, and of real interest in letters.  He can best serve
+his University by coming out of her, by declining college work, and by
+devoting himself to original study in some less exhausted air, in some
+less critical society.
+
+Among the aversions of Humphrey Prideaux were the ‘gentlemen of All
+Souls.’  They certainly showed extraordinary impudence when they secretly
+employed the University Press to print off copies of Marc Antonio’s
+engravings after Giulio Romano’s drawings.  It chanced that Fell visited
+the press rather late one evening, and found ‘his press working at such
+an imployment.  The prints and plates he hath seased, and threatened the
+owners of them with expulsion.’  ‘All Souls,’ adds Prideaux, ‘is a
+scandalous place.’  Yet All Souls was the college of young Mr. Guise, an
+Arabic scholar, ‘the greatest miracle in the knowledge of that I ever
+heard of.’  Guise died of smallpox while still very young.
+
+Thus Prideaux prattles on, about Admiral Van Tromp, ‘a drunken greazy
+Dutchman,’ whom Speed, of St. John’s, conquered in boozing; of the
+disputes about races in Port Meadow; of the breaking into the Mermaid
+Tavern.  ‘We Christ Church men bear the blame of it, our ticks, as the
+noise of the town will have it, amounting to £1,500.’  Thus Christ Church
+had little cause to throw the first stone at Balliol.  Prideaux shows
+little interest in letters, little in the press, though he lived in palmy
+days of printing, in the time of the Elzevirs; none at all in the
+educational work of the place.  He sneers at the Puritans, and at the
+controversy on ‘The Foundations of Hell Torments shaken and removed.’  He
+admits that Locke ‘is a man of very good converse,’ but is chiefly
+concerned to spy out the movements of the philosopher, suspected of
+sedition, and to report them to Ellis in town.  About the new buildings,
+as of the beautiful western gateway, where Great Tom is hung, the work of
+Wren, Prideaux says little; St. Mary’s was suffering restoration, and
+‘the old men,’ including Wood, we may believe, ‘exceedingly exclaim
+against it.’  That is the way of Oxford, a college is constantly
+rebuilding amid the protests of the rest of the University.  There is no
+question more common, or less agreeable than this, ‘What are you doing to
+your tower?’ or ‘What are you doing to your hall, library, or chapel?’
+No one ever knows; but we are always doing something, and working men for
+ever sit, and drink beer, on the venerable roofs.
+
+Long intercourse with Prideaux’s letters, and mournful memories of Oxford
+new buildings, tempt a writer to imitate Prideaux’s spirit.  Let us shut
+up his book, where he leaves Oxford, in 1686, to become rector of
+Saham-Toney, in Norfolk, and marry a wife, though, says he, ‘I little
+thought I should ever come to this.’
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+HIGH TORY OXFORD
+
+
+THE name of her late Majesty Queen Anne has for some little time been a
+kind of party watch-word.  Many harmless people have an innocent loyalty
+to this lady, make themselves her knights (as Mary Antoinette has still
+her sworn champions in France and Mary Stuart in Scotland), buy the plate
+of her serene period, and imitate the dress.  To many moral critics in
+the press, however, Queen Anne is a kind of abomination.  I know not how
+it is, but the terms ‘Queen Anne furniture and blue china’ have become
+words of almost slanderous railing.  Any didactic journalist who uses
+them is certain at once to fall heavily on the artistic reputation of Mr.
+Burne Jones, to rebuke the philosophy of Mr. Pater, and to hint that the
+entrance-hall of the Grosvenor Gallery is that ‘by-way’ with which Bunyan
+has made us familiar.  In the changes of things our admiration of the
+Augustan age of our literature, the age of Addison and Steele, of
+Marlborough and Aldrich, has become a sort of reproach.  It may be that
+our modern preachers know but little of that which they traduce.  At all
+events, the Oxford of Queen Anne’s time was not what they call
+‘un-English,’ but highly conservative, and as dull and beer-bemused as
+the most manly taste could wish it to be.
+
+The _Spectator_ of the ingenious Sir Richard Steele gives us many a
+glimpse of non-juring Oxford.  The old fashion of Sanctity (Mr. Addison
+says, in the _Spectator_, No. 494) had passed away; nor were appearances
+of Mirth and Pleasure looked upon as the Marks of a Carnal Mind.  Yet the
+Puritan Rule was not so far forgotten, but that Mr. Anthony Henley (a
+Gentleman of Property) could remember how he had stood for a Fellowship
+in a certain College whereof a great Independent Minister was Governor.
+As Oxford at this Moment is much vexed in her Mind about Examinations,
+wherein, indeed, her whole Force is presently expended, I make no scruple
+to repeat the account of Mr. Henley’s Adventure:
+
+    ‘The Youth, according to Custom, waited on the Governor of his
+    College, to be examined.  He was received at the Door by a Servant,
+    who was one of that gloomy Generation that were then in Fashion.  He
+    conducted him with great Silence and Seriousness to a long Gallery
+    which was darkened at Noon-day, and had only a single Candle burning
+    in it.  After a short stay in this melancholy Apartment, he was led
+    into a Chamber hung with black, where he entertained himself for some
+    time by the glimmering of a Taper, till at length the Head of the
+    College came out to him from an inner Room, with half a dozen Night
+    Caps upon his Head, and a religious Horror in his Countenance.  The
+    Young Man trembled; but his Fears increased when, instead of being
+    asked what progress he had made in Learning, he was ask’d “how he
+    abounded in Grace?”  His _Latin_ and _Greek_ stood him in little
+    stead.  He was to give an account only of the state of his
+    Soul—whether he was of the Number of the Elect; what was the Occasion
+    of his Conversion; upon what Day of the Month and Hour of the Day it
+    happened; how it was carried on, and when completed.  The whole
+    Examination was summed up in one short Question, namely, _Whether he
+    was prepared for Death_?  The Boy, who had been bred up by honest
+    Parents, was frighted out of his wits by the solemnity of the
+    Proceeding, and by the last dreadful Interrogatory, so that, upon
+    making his Escape out of this House of Mourning, he could never be
+    brought a second Time to the Examination, as not being able to go
+    through the Terrors of it.’
+
+By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund’s Hall, began to keep
+his diary, the ‘honest folk’—that is, the High Churchmen—had the better
+of the Independent Ministers.  The Dissenters had some favour at Court,
+but in the University they were looked upon as utterly reprobate.  From
+the _Reliquiæ_ of Hearne (an antiquarian successor of Antony Wood, a
+_bibliophile_, an archæologist, and as honest a man as Jacobitism could
+make him) let us quote an example of Heaven’s wrath against Dissenters:
+
+    ‘_Aug._ 6, 1706.  We have an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire,
+    that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks
+    to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and
+    spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to
+    their great mortification.’
+
+Hearne’s common-place books are an amusing source of information about
+Oxford society in the years of Queen Anne, and of the Hanoverian usurper.
+Tom Hearne was a Master of Arts of St. Edmund’s Hall, and at one time
+Deputy-Librarian of the Bodleian.  He lost this post because he would not
+take ‘the wicked oaths’ required of him, but he did not therefore leave
+Oxford.  His working hours were passed in preparing editions of
+antiquarian books, to be printed in very limited number, on ordinary and
+LARGE PAPER.  It was the joy of Tom’s existence to see his editions
+become first scarce, then VERY SCARCE, while the price augmented in
+proportion to the rarity.  When he was not reading in his rooms he was
+taking long walks in the country, tracing Roman walls and roads, and
+exploring Woodstock Park for the remains of ‘the labyrinth,’ as he calls
+the Maze of Fair Rosamund.  In these strolls he was sometimes accompanied
+by undergraduates, even gentlemen of noble family, ‘which gave cause to
+some to envy our happiness.’  Hearne was a social creature, and had a
+heart, as he shows by the entry about the death of his ‘very dear friend,
+Mr. Thomas Cherry, A.M., to the great grief of all that knew him, being a
+gentleman of great beauty, singular modesty, of wonderful good nature,
+and most excellent principles.’
+
+The friends of Hearne were chiefly, perhaps solely, what he calls ‘honest
+men,’ supporters of the Stuart family, and always ready to drink his
+Majesty’s (King James’) health.  They would meet in ‘Antiquity Hall,’ an
+old house near Wadham, and smoke their honest pipes.  They held certain
+of the opinions of ‘the Hebdomadal Meeting,’ satirised by Steele in the
+_Spectator_ (No. 43).  ‘We are much offended at the Act for importing
+_French_ wines.  A bottle or two of good solid Edifying Port, at honest
+_George’s_, made a Night cheerful, and threw off Reserve.  But this
+plaguy _French_ Claret will not only cost us more Money but do us less
+good.’  Hearne had a poor opinion of ‘Captain Steele,’ and of ‘one
+Tickle: this Tickle is a pretender to poetry.’  He admits that, though
+‘Queen’s people are angry at the _Spectator_, and the common-room say
+’tis silly dull stuff, men that are indifferent commend it highly, as it
+deserves.’  Some other satirist had a plate etched, representing
+Antiquity Hall—a caricature of Tom’s antiquarian engravings.  It may be
+seen in Skelton’s book.
+
+Thanks to Hearne, it is easy to reproduce the common-room gossip, and the
+more treasonable talk of honest men at Antiquity Hall.  The learned were
+much interested, as they usually are at Oxford, in theological
+discussion.  Some one proved, by an ingenious syllogism, that all men are
+to be saved; but Hearne had the better of this Latitudinarian, easily
+demonstrating that the comfortable argument does not meet the case of
+madmen, and of deaf-mutes, whom Tom did not expect to meet in a future
+state.  The ingenious, though depressing speculations of Mr. Dodwell were
+also discussed: ‘He makes the air the receptacle of all souls, good and
+bad, and that they are under the power of the D—l, he being prince of the
+air.’  ‘The less perfectly good’ hang out, if we may say so, ‘in the
+space between earth and the clouds,’ all which is subtle, and creditable
+to Mr. Dodwell’s invention, but not susceptible of exact demonstration.
+The whole controversy is an interesting specimen of Queen Anne
+philosophy, which, with all respect for the taste of the period, we need
+not wish to see revived.  The Bishop of Worcester, for example, ‘expects
+the end of the world about nine years hence.’  While the theology of
+Oxford is being mentioned, the zeal of Dr. Miller, Regius Professor of
+Greek, must not be forgotten.  The learned Professor endeavoured to
+convert, and even ‘writ a Letter to Mrs. Bracegirdle, giving her great
+encomiums (as having himself been often to see plays acted whilst they
+continued here) upon account of her excellent qualifications, and
+persuading her to give over this loose way of living, and betake herself
+to such a kind of life as was more innocent, and would gain her more
+credit.’  The Professor’s advice was wasted on ‘Bracegirdle the brown.’
+
+Politics were naturally much discussed in these doubtful years, when the
+Stuarts, it was thought, had still a chance to win their own again.  In
+1706, Tom says, ‘The great health now is “The Cube of Three,” which is
+the number 27, i.e. the number of the protesting Lords.’  The University
+was most devoted, as far as drinking toasts constitutes loyalty.  In
+Hearne’s common-place book is carefully copied out this ‘Scotch Health to
+K. J.’:
+
+    ‘He’s o’er the seas and far awa’,
+    He’s o’er the seas and far awa’;
+    Altho’ his back be at the wa’
+    We’ll drink his health that’s far awa’.’
+
+The words live, and ring strangely out of that dusty past.  The song
+survives the throne, and sounds pathetically, somehow, as one has heard
+it chanted, in days as dead as the year 1711, at suppers that seem as
+ancient almost as the festivities of Thomas Hearne.  It is not unpleasant
+to remember that the people who sang could also fight, and spilt their
+blood as well as their ‘edifying port.’  If the Southern ‘honest men’ had
+possessed hearts for anything but tippling, the history of England would
+have been different.
+
+When ‘the allyes and the French fought a bloudy battle near Mons’ (1709,
+‘Malplaquet’), the Oxford honest men, like Colonel Henry Esmond, thought
+‘there was not any the least reason of bragging.’  The young King of
+England, under the character of the Chevalier St. George, ‘shewed
+abundance of undaunted courage and resolution, led up his troups with
+unspeakable bravery, appeared in the utmost dangers, and at last was
+wounded.’  Marlborough’s victories were sneered at, his new palace of
+Blenheim was said to be not only ill-built, but haunted by signs of evil
+omen.
+
+It was not always safe to say what one thought about politics at Oxford.
+One Mr. A. going to one Mr. Tonson, a barber, put the barber and his wife
+in a ferment (they being rascally Whigs) by maintaining that the
+hereditary right was in the P. of W.  Tonson laid information against the
+gentleman; ‘which may be a warning to honest men not to enter into
+topicks of this nature with barbers.’  One would not willingly, even now,
+discuss the foreign policy of her Majesty’s Ministers with the person who
+shaves one.  There are opportunities and temptations to which no decent
+person should be wantonly exposed.  The bad effect of Whiggery on the
+temper was evident in this, that ‘the Mohocks are all of the Whiggish
+gang, and indeed all Whigs are looked upon as such Mohocks, their
+principles and doctrines leading thus to all manner of barbarity and
+inhumanity.’  So true is it that Conservatives are all lovers of peace
+and quiet, that (May 29th, 1715) ‘last night a good part of the
+Presbyterian meeting-house in Oxford was pulled down.  The people ran up
+and down the streets, crying, _King James the Third_!  _The true king_!
+_No Usurper_.  In the evening they pulled a good part of the Quakers’ and
+Anabaptists’ meeting-houses down.  The heads of houses have represented
+that it was begun by the Whiggs.’  Probably the heads of houses reasoned
+on _à priori_ principles when they arrived at this remarkable conclusion.
+
+                 [Picture: The Cottages, Trinity College]
+
+In consequence of the honesty, frankness, and consistency of his
+opinions, Mr. Hearne ran his head in danger when King George came to the
+throne, which has ever since been happily settled in the possession of
+the Hanoverian line.  A Mr. Urry, a Non-juror, had to warn him, saying,
+‘Do you not know that they have a mind to hang you if they can, and that
+you have many enemies who are very ready to do it?’  In spite of this,
+Hearne, in his diaries, still calls George I. the Duke of Brunswick, and
+the Whigs, ‘that fanatical crew.’  John, Duke of Marlborough, he styles
+‘that villain the Duke.’  We have had enough, perhaps, of Oxford
+politics, which were not much more prejudiced in the days of the Duke
+than in those of Mr. Gladstone.  Hearne’s allusions to the contemporary
+state of buildings and of college manners are often rather instructive.
+In All Souls the Whigs had a feast on the day of King Charles’s
+martyrdom.  They had a dinner dressed of woodcock, ‘whose heads they cut
+off, in contempt of the memory of the blessed martyr.’  These men were
+‘low Churchmen, more shame to them.’  The All Souls men had already given
+up the custom of wandering about the College on the night of January
+14th, with sticks and poles, in quest of the mallard.  That ‘swopping’
+bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in
+the college of which he is the protector.  But now all hope of recovering
+him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to
+marvel over the fossil bones of the ‘swopping, swopping mallard.’
+
+As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne’s reign—quite a different
+thing from the ‘Neo-paganism’ which now causes so much anxiety to the
+moral press-man—let us note the affecting instance of Geffery Ammon.  ‘He
+was a merry companion, and his conversation was much courted.’  Geffery
+had but little sense of religion.  He is now buried on the west side of
+Binsey churchyard, near St. Margaret’s well.  Geffery selected Binsey for
+the place of his sepulchre, because he was partial to the spot, having
+often shot snipe there.  In order to moisten his clay, he desired his
+friend Will Gardner, a boatman of Oxford, who was accustomed to row him
+down the river, to put now and then a bottle of ale by his grave when he
+came that way; an injunction which was punctually complied with.
+
+Oxford lost in Hearne’s time many of her old buildings.  It is said, with
+a dreadful appearance of truth, that Oxford is now to lose some of the
+few that are left.  Corpus and Merton, if they are not belied, mean to
+pull down the old houses opposite Merton, halls and houses consecrated to
+the memory of Antony Wood, and to build lecture-rooms _and houses for
+married dons_ on the site.  The topic, for one who is especially bound to
+pray for Merton (and who now does so with unusual fervour), is most
+painful.  A view of the ‘proposed new buildings,’ in the Exhibition of
+the Royal Academy (1879), depresses the soul.  In the same spirit Hearne
+says (March 28th, 1671), ‘It always grieves me when I go through Queen’s
+College, to see the ruins of the old chapell next to High Street, the
+area of which now lies open (the building being most of it pulled down)
+and trampled upon by dogs, etc., as if the ground had never been
+consecrated.  Nor do the Queen’s Coll. people take any care, but rather
+laught at it when ’tis mentioned.’  In 1722 ‘the famous postern-gate
+called the _Turl_ Gate’ (a corruption for _Thorold_ Gate) was ‘pulled
+down by one Dr. Walker, who lived by it, and pretended that it was a
+detriment to his house.  As long ago as 1705, they had pulled down the
+building of Peckwater quadrangle, in Ch. Ch.’  Queen’s also ‘pulled down
+the old refectory, which was on the west side of the old quadrangle, and
+was a fine old structure that I used to admire much.’  It appears that
+the College was also anxious to pull down the chamber of King Henry V.
+This is a strange craze for destruction, that some time ago endangered
+the beautiful library of Merton, a place where one can fancy that Chaucer
+or Wyclif may have studied.  Oxford will soon have little left of the
+beauty and antiquity of _Patey’s Quad_ in Merton, as represented in our
+illustration.  What the next generation will think of the multitudinous
+new buildings, it is not hard to conjecture.  Imitative experiments,
+without style or fancy in structure or decoration, and often more than
+medievally uncomfortable, they will seem but evidences of Oxford’s love
+of destruction.  People of Hearne’s way of thinking, people who respect
+antiquity, protest in vain, and, like Hearne, must be content sadly to
+enjoy what is left of grace and dignity.  He died before Oxford had quite
+become the Oxford of Gibbon’s autobiography.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+GEORGIAN OXFORD
+
+
+OXFORD has usually been described either by her lovers or her
+malcontents.  She has suffered the extremes of filial ingratitude and
+affection.  There is something in the place that makes all her children
+either adore or detest her; and it is difficult, indeed, to pick out the
+truth concerning her past social condition from the satires and the
+encomiums.  Nor is it easy to say what qualities in Oxford, and what
+answering characteristics in any of her sons, will beget the favourable
+or the unfavourable verdict.  Gibbon, one might have thought, saw the
+sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of the University.  With youth, and
+wealth, and liberty, with a set of three beautiful rooms in that ‘stately
+pile, the new building of Magdalen College,’ Gibbon found nothing in
+Oxford to please him—nothing to admire, nothing to love.  From his poor
+and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson—rugged,
+anxious, and conscious of his great unemployed power—looked down on a
+much more pleasant Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased
+to regard with affection.  This contrast is found in the opinions of our
+contemporaries.  One man will pass his time in sneering at his tutors and
+his companions, in turning listlessly from study to study, in following
+false tendencies, and picking up scraps of knowledge which he despises,
+and in later life he will detest his University.  There are wiser and
+more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge against the stately
+mother of us all, that so easily can disregard our petty spleens and
+ungrateful rancour.  Mr. Lowe’s most bitter congratulatory addresses to
+the ‘happy Civil Engineers,’ and his unkindest cuts at ancient history,
+and at the old philosophies which ‘on Argive heights divinely sung,’ move
+her not at all.  Meanwhile, the majority of men are more kindly compact,
+and have more natural affections, and on them the memory of their
+earliest friendships, and of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave
+to their years of youth, is not wholly wasted.
+
+There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons.  There is
+little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson’s life at Pembroke.
+He went up in the October term of 1728, being then nineteen years of age,
+and already full of that wide and miscellaneous classical reading which
+the Oxford course, then as now, somewhat discouraged.  ‘His figure and
+manner appeared strange’ to the company in which he found himself; and
+when he broke silence it was with a quotation from Macrobius.  To his
+tutor’s lectures, as a later poet says, ‘with freshman zeal he went’; but
+his zeal did not last out the discovery that the tutor was ‘a heavy man,’
+and the fact that there was ‘sliding on Christ Church Meadow.’  Have any
+of the artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in
+the Doctor’s life—drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in
+these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even the
+exercise of skating could not have made ‘swan-like,’ to quote the young
+lady in ‘Pickwick’?  Johnson was ‘sconced’ in the sum of twopence for
+cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the amount of the fine was
+the same four hundred years earlier, when Master Stoke, of Catte Hall
+(whose career we touched on in the second of these sketches), deserted
+his lessons.  It was when he was thus sconced that Johnson made that
+reply which Boswell preserves ‘as a specimen of the antithetical
+character of his wit’—‘Sir, you have sconced me twopence for
+non-attendance on a lecture not worth a penny.’
+
+Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in
+degree.  ‘A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some discontent,
+cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his College sent his
+servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five shillings; and,’ says the
+Doctor, ‘tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I’ll sconce him
+ten!’  This prosaic punishment might perhaps deter some Werthers from
+playing with edged tools.
+
+From Boswell’s meagre account of Johnson’s Oxford career we gather some
+facts which supplement the description of Gibbon.  The future historian
+went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson departed without
+taking his degree.  Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by
+the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased.  He
+‘eloped,’ as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to
+town, where he was by no means the ideal of ‘the Manly Oxonian in
+London.’  The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a revenue which private
+avarice might easily have raised to £30,000, took no interest in their
+pupils.  Gibbon’s tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a style
+of dry and literal translation.  The other fellows, less conscientious,
+passed their lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the ‘Oxford
+Toasts,’ and drinking other toasts to the king over the water.  ‘Some
+duties,’ says Gibbon, ‘may possibly have been imposed on the poor
+scholars,’ but ‘the velvet cap was the cap of liberty,’ and the gentleman
+commoner consulted only his own pleasure.  Johnson was a poor scholar,
+and on him duties were imposed.  He was requested to write an ode on the
+Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks ‘his vivacity and imagination must
+have produced something fine.’  He neglected, however, with his usual
+indolence, this opportunity of producing something fine.  Another
+exercise imposed on the poor was the translation of Mr. Pope’s ‘Messiah,’
+in which the young Pembroke man succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope’s own
+generous confession, future ages would doubt whether the English or the
+Latin piece was the original.  Johnson complained that no man could be
+properly inspired by the Pembroke ‘coll,’ or college beer, which was then
+commonly drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of
+collecting Chinese monsters.
+
+    _Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetæ_
+       _Ingenium jubeas purior baustus alat_.
+
+In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the ‘bitterness mistaken for
+frolic,’ with which Johnson entertained the other undergraduates round
+Pembroke gate, he never ceased to respect his college.  ‘His love and
+regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last,’ while of his old tutor
+he said, ‘a man who becomes Jorden’s pupil becomes his son.’  Gibbon’s
+sneer is a foil to Johnson’s kindliness.  ‘I applaud the filial piety
+which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To the University of
+Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she will as cheerfully renounce
+me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.’
+
+Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to judge
+by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the eighteenth century
+was excessively rough.  Manners were rather primitive: a big fire burned
+in the centre of Balliol Hall, and round this fire, one night in every
+year, it is said that all the world was welcome to a feast of ale and
+bread and cheese.  Every guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling
+a story; and one can fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality.
+‘What learning can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil
+behaviour?’ says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746) Southey
+has made some extracts.  The diarist was a Puritan of the old leaven, who
+visited Oxford shortly before Johnson’s period, and who speaks of ‘a
+power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly prevailing in that
+place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked
+place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and
+most mischievous.’  But this strange and unfriendly critic was a
+Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their piety by
+wrecking chapels and ‘rabbling’ ministers.  In our days only the
+Davenport Brothers and similar professors of strange creeds suffer from
+the manly piety of the undergraduates.
+
+Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish assailants of
+_Alma Mater_, the author of _Terræ Filius_ was the most persistent.  The
+first little volume which contains the numbers of this bi-weekly
+periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom’s Coffee-house, in Russell
+Street, Covent Garden, MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and is well worth a
+desultory reading.  What strikes one most in _Terræ Filius_ is the
+religious discontent of the bilious author.  One thinks, foolishly of
+course, of even Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at least in their
+undergraduate days.  The mere aspect of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s work on the
+philosophers of the eighteenth century is enough to banish this pleasing
+delusion.  The Deists and Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson’s
+day among the undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery, was
+unpopular, and might be punished.  Johnson says, that when he was a boy
+he was a lax _talker_, rather than a lax _thinker_, against religion;
+‘but lax talking against religion at Oxford would not be suffered.’  The
+author of _Terræ Filius_, however, never omits a chance of sneering at
+our faith, and at the Church of England as by law established.  In his
+description of the exercises of the Club of Wits, only one respectably
+clever epigram is quoted, beginning,—
+
+    ‘Since in religion all men disagree,
+    And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.’
+
+This production ‘was voted heretical,’ and burned by the hands of the
+small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled.  In the author’s advice
+to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary
+creatures.  The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University
+sermon, ‘never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly’;
+but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up in what he
+conceived to be gorgeous attire.  ‘I observe, in the first place, that
+you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to
+distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a
+pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword.’  As soon
+as they arrived in Oxford, these youths were hospitably received ‘amongst
+a parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in
+honour and common civility, to make you _damnable drunk_, and carry you,
+as they call it, a CORPSE to bed.’  When this period of jollity is ended,
+the freshman must declare his views.  He must see that he is in the
+fashion; ‘and let your declarations be, that you are _Churchmen_, and
+that you believe as the _Church_ believes.  For instance, you have
+subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the
+sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses; so
+many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and no
+_true Churchman_ in that which the words bear, and in that which they
+were written.’
+
+This is pretty plain speaking, and _Terræ Filius_ enforces, by an
+historical example, the dangers of even political freethought.  In 1714
+the Constitution Club kept King George’s birthday.  The Constitutional
+Party was then the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though,
+thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon
+the same.  The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club, sallying
+forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as seen in our
+illustration), where the ‘silly statue,’ as Hearne calls it, was about
+that time erected.  The Whigs took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted
+the gates, and an Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman
+of Brasenose.  The Tories, ‘under terror of this dangerous and unexpected
+resistance, retreated from Oriel.’  Yet such was the academic strength of
+the Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a
+‘Constitutioner,’ could scarcely take his degree.
+
+_Terræ Filius_, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed, dissipation,
+rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan’s report about
+the bad manners of the undergraduates.  Yet Oxford, then as now, did not
+lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair.  _Terræ Filius_ thus
+describes a ‘smart,’ as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery:
+
+    ‘He is one of those who come in their academical undress, every
+    morning between ten and eleven, to Lyne’s Coffee-house; after which
+    he takes a turn or two upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst
+    the dull _regulars_ are at dinner in their hall, according to
+    statute; about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled
+    chicken or some pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour at
+    least to dress in, to make his afternoon’s appearance at Lyne’s; from
+    whence he adjourns to Hamilton’s about five; from whence (after
+    strutting about the room for a while, and drinking a dram of citron),
+    he goes to chapel, to show how genteelly he dresses, and how well he
+    can chaunt.  After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast,
+    and then waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and
+    back again.  He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but
+    novels and romances.’
+
+The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets more
+gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating men.
+
+    ‘He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in
+    the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long
+    natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his
+    waist]; a broad bully-cock’d hat, or a square cap of about twice the
+    usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes.  His clothes
+    lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well
+    as at the wrists.’
+
+These ‘smarts’ cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in
+Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-woolsey
+coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings,
+flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-cloths run with
+red at the bottom.
+
+         [Picture: Magdalen College and Bridge from the Cherwell]
+
+After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the contemporary
+account-book of a Proctor.  In 1752 Gilbert White of Selborne was
+Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen, who little thought
+that Oxford boasted an official who was to become an English classic.
+White paid some attention to dress, and got a feather-topp’d, grizzled
+wig from London; cost him £2, 5s.  He bought ‘mountain wine, very old and
+good,’ and had his crest engraved on his teaspoons, that everything might
+be handsome about him.  When he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall
+they ate a hundred pounds weight of biscuits—not, we trust, without
+marmalade.  ‘A bowl of rum-punch from Horsman’s’ cost half a crown.
+Fancy a jolly Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in
+April!  Eggs cost a penny each, and ‘three oranges and a mouse-trap’
+ninepence.
+
+White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor ‘seven pounds of
+double-refined white sugar.’  I like to fancy my learned friend, the
+Proctor, going to the present Vice-Chancellor’s with a donation of white
+sugar!  Manners have certainly changed in the direction of severity.
+‘Share of the expense for Mr. Butcher’s release’ came to ten and
+sixpence.  What had Mr. Butcher been doing?  The Proctor went ‘to
+Blenheim with Nan,’ and it cost him fifteen and sixpence.  Perhaps she
+was one of the ‘Oxford Toasts’ of a contemporary satire.  Strawberries
+were fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on November 6, White
+lost one shilling ‘at cards, in common room.’  He went from Selborne to
+Oxford, ‘in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke’; and he gave Jenny a ‘round
+Chinaturene.’  Tea cost eight shillings a pound in 1752, while rum-punch
+was but half a crown a bowl.  White’s highest terminal battels were but
+£12, though he was a hospitable man, and would readily treat the other
+Proctor to a bowl of punch.  It is well to remember White and Johnson
+when the Gibbon of that or any other day bewails the intellectual poverty
+of Oxford.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR
+
+
+AT any given time a large number of poets may be found among the
+undergraduates at Oxford, and the younger dons.  It is not easy to say
+what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar
+people while they remain in residence.  The undergraduate poet is a not
+uninteresting study.  He wears his hair long, and divides it down the
+middle.  His eye is wild and wandering, and his manner absent, especially
+when he is called on to translate a piece of an ancient author in
+lecture.  He does not ‘read’ much, in the technical sense of the term,
+but consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor
+poetry.  His own verses the poet may be heard declaiming aloud, at unholy
+midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his
+windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold
+meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divine _afflatus_.
+When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends
+it to the Editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, and it returns to him after
+many days.  At last it appears in print, in _College Rhymes_, a
+collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or
+irregular intervals, and was never seen except in the rooms of
+contributors.  The poet also speaks at the Union, where his sentiments
+are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on
+Magna Charta as the first step on the path that leads to England’s ruin.
+As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no mean between Mr. Peter
+Taylor and King John.  He has been known to found a Tory club, and
+shortly afterwards to swallow the formulæ of Mr. Bradlaugh.
+
+The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare with his dons.
+He cannot conform himself to pedantic rules, which demand his return to
+college before midnight.  Though often the possessor of a sweet vein of
+clerical and Kebleian verse, the poet does not willingly attend chapel;
+for indeed, as he sits up all night, it is cruel to expect him to arise
+before noon.  About the poet’s late habits a story is told, which seems
+authentic.  A remarkable and famous contemporary singer was known to his
+fellow-undergraduates only by this circumstance, that his melodious voice
+was heard declaiming anapaests all through the ambrosial night.  When the
+voice of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the
+silence.  This noise was produced by the bard’s Scotch friend and critic
+in knocking the ashes out of his pipe.  These feasts of reason are almost
+incompatible with the early devotion which, strangely enough, Shelley
+found time and inclination to attend.
+
+Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might break the
+decalogue and the laws of man in every direction with safety and the
+approval of the dons, if you only went regularly to chapel.  As the poet
+cannot do this (unless he is a ‘sleepless man’), his existence is a long
+struggle with the fellows and tutors of his college.  The manners of
+poets vary, of course, with the tastes of succeeding generations.  I have
+heard of two (Thyrsis and Corydon) ‘who lived in Oxford as if it were a
+large country-house.’
+
+Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is invidiously
+said that they build shrines to Blue China and other ceramic abominations
+of the Philistine, and worship the same in their rooms.  Of this sort it
+is not the moment to speak.  Time has not proved them.  But the old poets
+of ten years ago lived a militant life; they rarely took good classes
+(though they competed industriously for the Newdigate, writing in the
+metre of _Dolores_), and it not uncommonly happened that they left Oxford
+without degrees.  They were often very agreeable fellows, as long as one
+was in no way responsible for them; but it was almost impossible—human
+nature being what it is—that they should be much appreciated by tutors,
+proctors, and heads of houses.  How could these worthy, learned, and
+often kind and courteous persons know when they were dealing with a lad
+of genius, and when they had to do with an affected and pretentious
+donkey?
+
+These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a consideration of the
+existence of Shelley and Landor at Oxford—the Oxford of 1793–1810.
+Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said
+that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less
+than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type.  In Walter Savage
+Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the same
+class.  People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are
+unavoidably compelled to generalise.  No don, that was a don, could have
+seen Shelley or Landor as they are described to us without hastily
+classing them in the category of poets who would come to no good and do
+little credit to the college.  Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793.
+It was the dreadful year of the Terror, when good Englishmen hated the
+cruel murderers of kings and queens.  Landor was a good Englishman, of
+course, and he never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie
+Antoinette.  But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his own unpowdered
+hair—the Poet thus declaring himself at once in the regular recognised
+fashion.  ‘For a portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the
+results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything
+in the shape of competition.’  (Now competition is the essence of modern
+University study.)  ‘Though I wrote better Latin verses than any
+undergraduate or graduate in the University,’ says Landor, ‘I could never
+be persuaded by my tutor or friends to contend for any prize whatever.’
+The pleasantest and most profitable hours that Landor could remember at
+Oxford ‘were passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the
+half-hidden Cherwell.’  Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and
+most profitable that any of us pass at Oxford.  The one duty which that
+University, by virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is the
+assembling of young men together from all over England, and giving them
+three years of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes
+which are classical and peaceful.  For these hours, the most fruitful of
+our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives; that
+is, as long as life and memory remain with us.  And, ‘if anything endure,
+if hope there be,’ our conscious existence in the after-world would ask
+for no better companions than those who walked with us by the Isis and
+the Cherwell.
+
+Landor called himself ‘a Jacobin,’ though his own letters show that he
+was as far as the most insolent young ‘tuft’ from relishing doctrines of
+human equality.  He had the reputation, however, of being not only a
+Jacobin, but ‘a mad Jacobin’; too mad for Southey, who was then young,
+and a Liberal.  ‘Landor was obliged to leave the University for shooting
+at one of the Fellows through a window,’ is the account which Southey
+gave of Landor’s rustication.  Now fellows often put up with a great deal
+of horse-play.  There is scarcely a more touching story than that of the
+don who for the first time found himself ‘screwed up,’ and fastened
+within his own oak.  ‘What am I to do?’ the victim asked his sympathising
+scout, who was on the other, the free side of the oak.  ‘Well, sir, Mr.
+Muff, sir, when ’e’s screwed up ’e sends for the blacksmith,’ replied the
+servant.  What a position for a man having authority, to be in the
+constant habit of sending for the blacksmith!  Fellows have not very
+unfrequently been fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with
+soda-water bottles full of gunpowder.  One has also known sparrows shot
+from Balliol windows on the Martyrs’ Memorial of our illustration.  In
+this case, too, the sportsman was a poet.  But deliberately to pot at a
+fellow, ‘to go for him with a shot gun,’ as the repentant American said
+he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a
+strong measure.  No college which pretended to maintain discipline could
+allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly.  In truth, Landor’s offence has
+been exaggerated by Southey.  It was nothing out of the common.  The poet
+was giving ‘an after-dinner party’ in his rooms.  The men were mostly
+from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he says, with only one
+undergraduate of his own college, Trinity.  On the opposite side of the
+quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom
+the Jacobin Landor calls ‘servitors and other raff of every description.’
+The guests at the rival wine-parties began to ‘row’ each other, Landor
+says, adding, ‘All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have
+blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out of a
+window.  But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back
+closet some little shot.  I proposed, as they had closed the casements,
+and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley.  It was
+thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired.’
+Mr. Leeds very superfluously complained to the President.  Landor adopted
+the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this poet
+parted company.
+
+It seems to have been generally understood that Landor’s affair was a
+boyish escapade.  A copious literature is engaged with the subject of
+Shelley’s expulsion.  As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful
+book, the _Life of Shelley_, that poet’s career at Oxford was a typical
+one.  There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness,
+wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius.  The
+divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of
+the band whom the world has not tamed.  As Mr. Hogg’s book is out of
+print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce
+some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she
+was in 1810.  The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways
+for the better.  Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was
+better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as
+Shelley.  When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be
+‘the Atheist,’ that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, ‘No;
+the college authorities were civil, and left him alone.’  Let us remember
+this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls
+Shelley ‘an Atheist.’  Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates
+were left too much alone.  But who could have safely advised or securely
+guided Shelley?
+
+Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes,
+than perhaps they like—certainly much more than Shelley would have liked.
+But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that
+no _official_ interference can be of real value?  Friendship and
+confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils.  There
+are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal
+youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation
+after generation of freshmen.  This is fortunate; but who can wonder that
+middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other,
+lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young,
+who are thus cast at once on their own resources?  One has occasionally
+heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that
+their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped
+them to unpack.  And it is true that modern education, when it meets the
+impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of
+men.  To put it shortly, clever students have to go through their age of
+_Sturm und Drang_, and they are sometimes disappointed when older people,
+their tutors, for example, do not help them to weather the storm.  It is
+a tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and
+Shelley ‘was borne darkly, fearfully afar,’ into unplumbed seas of
+thought and experience.  When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend was too
+much left to himself to study and think as he pleased, let us remember
+that no one could have helped Shelley.  He was better at Oxford without
+his old Dr. Lind, ‘with whom he used to curse George III. after tea.’
+
+    [Picture: In the Garden of Worcester College.  By Richard Seeley]
+
+There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than those
+which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford.  We see him entering the hall
+of University College—a tall, shy stripling, bronzed with the September
+sun, with long elf-locks.  He takes his seat by a stranger, and in a
+moment holds him spell-bound, while he talks of Plato, and Goethe, and
+Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek philosophy.  Mr. Hogg draws a
+curious sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, where seven-shilling
+pieces were being dissolved in acid in the teacups, where there was a
+great hole in the floor that the poet had burned with his chemicals.  The
+one-eyed scout, ‘the Arimaspian,’ must have had a time of tribulation
+(being a conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd master.  How
+characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to
+science, to declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not
+literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and then to leave a
+lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that ‘stones are dull
+things after all!’  Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on Magdalen
+Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which Oxford, with
+the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the Arabian Nights—a
+town of palaces and princesses, rather than of proctors.
+
+    ‘One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that
+    the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived: we sallied forth
+    hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner.  In the
+    middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms.
+    Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life
+    that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the
+    present, according to the established usages of society, in that
+    fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century.
+    With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child.  The mother, who
+    might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of
+    the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long
+    train.
+
+    ‘“Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?” he
+    asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look.’
+
+Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life of the
+Scholar Gipsy.  In Mr. Arnold’s poem, which has made permanent for all
+time the charm, the sentiment of Oxfordshire scenery, the poet seems to
+be following the track of Shelley.  In Mr. Hogg’s memoirs we hear little
+of summer; it seems always to have been in winter that the friends took
+their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in talk, his inspiration.
+One thinks of him
+
+          ‘in winter, on the causeway chill,
+    Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,’
+
+returning to the supper in Hogg’s rooms, to the curious desultory meals,
+the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring fire, the small head lying
+perilously near the flames.  One would not linger here over the absurd
+injustice of his expulsion from the University.  It is pleasant to know,
+on Mr. Hogg’s testimony, that ‘residence at Oxford was exceedingly
+delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most beneficial.’  At Oxford,
+at least, he seems to have been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness,
+and who, if he made another suffer, himself suffered so much for others.
+The memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford.
+Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we
+not say, with the shepherd in Theocritus, of the divine singer:
+
+    αἰθ’ ἐπ’ ἐγμῦ ζωοῖς ἐναρίθμιος ὤφελες εἶμεν,
+    ὥς τοι ἐγὼν ἐνόμευον ἀν ὤρεα τὰς καλὰς αἶγας
+    φωνᾶς εἰσαίων, τὺ δ’ ὑπὸ δρυσὶν ἦ ὑπὸ πεύκαις
+    ἁδὺ μελισδόμενος κατεκέκλισο, θεῖε Κομᾶτα.
+
+‘Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how
+gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and
+listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pine-trees lying,
+didst sweetly sing, divine Comatas!’
+
+
+
+
+
+                                CHAPTER IX
+                              A GENERAL VIEW
+
+
+WE have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now,
+perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a
+bird’s-eye view of its present condition.  We may ask St. Bernard’s
+question, _Whither hast thou come_? a question to which there are so many
+answers readily given, from within and without the University.  It is not
+probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that
+which has all along been its own.  We shall have considered Oxford to
+very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less
+a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English
+intellectual life.  At Oxford the men have been thinking what England was
+to think a few months later, and they have been thinking with the passion
+and the energy of youth.  The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very
+often been given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has
+come from without—from Italy, from France, from London, from a country
+vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher.  Whencesoever
+the leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has
+always fermented readily, and promptly distributed the new forces,
+religious or intellectual, throughout England.
+
+It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions
+that move the people most, have always been religious, or deeply
+tinctured with religion.  Conservative as Oxford is, the home of
+‘impossible causes,’ she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all
+the thoughts which comfortable people call ‘dangerous.’  We have seen her
+agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager
+protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the
+Reformation.  Oxford was literally devastated by that movement, and by
+the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by
+the war of Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism.  The latter had scarcely
+had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port,
+when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and
+fond of repose.  The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley’s time was
+comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or, at
+least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were
+accustomed.  Between the era of the Revolution and our own day, two
+religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept over
+Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship
+in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than it really is.
+
+The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious
+disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful.
+
+It is curious to read about that movement in the _Apologia_, for example,
+of Cardinal Newman.  On what singular topics men’s minds were bent! what
+queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they
+walked round Christ Church meadows!  They enlightened each other on
+things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and,
+properly speaking, unspeakable.  It is as if they ‘spoke with tongues,’
+which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years
+later, seem as meaningless as the inscriptions of Easter Island.
+
+    [Picture: Old Episcopal Palace.  From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas]
+
+This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in which the
+great Romantic reaction laid hold on England and Oxford.  The father of
+all the revival of old doctrines and old rituals in our Church, the
+originator of that wistful return to things beautiful and long dead,
+was—Walter Scott.  Without him, and his wonderful wand which made the dry
+bones of history live, England and France would not have known this
+picturesque reaction.  The stir in these two countries was curiously
+characteristic of their genius.  In France it put on, in the first place,
+the shape of art, of poetry, painting, sculpture.  Romanticism blossomed
+in 1830, and bore fruit for ten years.  The religious reaction was a
+punier thing; the great Abbé, who was the Newman of France, was himself
+unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of
+medieval ruins.  In England, and especially in Oxford, the æsthetic
+admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into religion.  Doctrines
+which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not
+poetry or painting, but the sermons of Newman, the _Tracts_, the whole
+religious force which has transformed and revivified the Church of
+England.  That force is still working, it need hardly be said, in the
+University of to-day, under conditions much changed, but not without
+thrills of the old volcanic energy.
+
+Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully agitating of
+intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845.  A new current came in from
+Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural tide of reaction
+began to run very strong.  If we had the _apologiæ_ of the men who
+thought most, about the time when Clough was an undergraduate, we should
+see that the influence of the Anglican divines had become a thing of
+sentiment and curiosity.  The life had not died out of it, but the people
+whom it could permanently affect were now limited in number and easily
+recognisable.  This form of religion might tempt and attract the
+strongest men for a while, but it certainly would not retain them.  It is
+by this time a matter of history, though we are speaking of our
+contemporaries, that the abyss between the _Lives of the English Saints_,
+and the _Nemesis of Faith_, was narrow, and easily crossed.  There was in
+Oxford that enthusiasm for certain German ideas which had previously been
+felt for medieval ideas.  Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion
+was the ruling power; and people believed in Liberalism.  What is, or
+used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some ten or fifteen
+years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford.  The _Essays and Reviews_ were
+what the _Tracts_ had been; and Homeric battles were fought over the
+income of the Regius Professor of Greek.  When that affair was settled
+Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single dominant
+intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly subsiding, left the ship
+of the University lurching and rolling in a heavy swell.
+
+People believed in Liberalism!  Their faith worked miracles; and the
+great University Commission performed many wonderful works, bidding close
+fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of Examiners.
+Their dispensation still survives; the large examining-machine works
+night and day, in term time and vacation, and yet we are not happy.  The
+age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the age of collapsed
+opinions.  Never men believed more fervidly in any revelation than the
+men of twenty years ago believed in political economy, free trade, open
+competition, and the reign of Common-sense and of Mr. Cobden.  Where is
+that faith now?  Many of the middle-aged disciples of the Church of
+Common-sense are still in our midst.  They say the old sayings, they
+intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that scepticism is abroad;
+it seems that the world is wider than their system.  Not even open
+examinations for fellowships and scholarships, not half a dozen new
+schools, and science, and the Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art,
+have made Oxford that ideal University which was expected to come down
+from Heaven like the New Jerusalem.
+
+We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have not
+learned that it is an eminently discontented place.  There is room in
+colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent—the ignoble, which
+is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the
+unassuaged thirst for perfection.  The present result of the last forty
+years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to improve the
+working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of the University.
+There are more ways than one in which this feeling gets vent.  The
+simplest, and perhaps the most honest and worthy impulse, is that which
+makes the best of the present arrangements.  Great religious excitement
+and religious discussion being in abeyance, for once, the energy of the
+place goes out in teaching.  The last reforms have made Oxford a huge
+collection of schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy,
+philology, scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but
+archæology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour.  The
+hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all
+tutors are conscientious.  The professors being an ornamental, but (with
+few exceptions) _merely_ ornamental, order of beings, the tutors have to
+do the work of a University, which, for the moment, is a
+teaching-machine.  They deliver I know not how many sets of lectures a
+year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full acquaintance with the
+latest ideas of French, German, and Italian scholars.  No one can afford,
+or is willing, to lag behind; every one is ‘gladly learning,’ like
+Chaucer’s clerk, as well as earnestly teaching.  The knowledge and the
+industry of these gentlemen is a perpetual marvel to the ‘bellelettristic
+trifler.’  New studies, like that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental
+tongues, have sprung up during recent years, have grown into strength and
+completeness.  It is unnecessary to say, perhaps, that these facts
+dispose of the popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation.
+During the more part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must
+be toiling after the great mundane movement in learning.  He must be
+acquiring the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the
+Ogham characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek
+inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the
+familiar classics by the light of the latest commentaries.
+
+                 [Picture: The Ante Chapel, New College]
+
+What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours?  The
+answer is the secret of University discontent.  All this accumulated
+knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in lectures, is
+caught up in note-books, and is poured out, with a difference, in
+examinations.  There is not an amount of original literary work produced
+by the University which bears any due proportion to the solid materials
+accumulated.  It is just the reverse of Falstaff’s case—but one
+halfpenny-worth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of
+the spirit of learning to cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge.
+The time and energy of men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing,
+and then in eternal examinations.  Even if the results are satisfactory
+on the whole, even if a hundred well-equipped young men are turned out of
+the examining-machine every year, these arrangements certainly curb
+individual ambition.  If a resident in Oxford is to make an income that
+seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and primers,
+till he is grey, and till the energy that might have added something new
+and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has departed.
+
+This state of things has produced the demand for the ‘Endowment of
+Research.’  It is not necessary to go into that controversy.  Englishmen,
+as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice.  They would rather
+endow a theatre than a _Gelehrter_, if endow something they must.  They
+have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if useless beings, the
+heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to abolish if Researchers
+were to get the few tens of thousands they require.  Finally, it is asked
+whether the learned might not find great endowment in economy; for it is
+a fact that a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian will ‘research’ for life
+on no larger income than a simple fellowship bestows.
+
+The great obstacle to this ‘plain living’ is perhaps to be found in the
+traditional hospitality of Oxford.  All her doors are open, and every
+stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the ‘discreet
+housewife’ in Homer—
+
+                 εἴδατα πόλλ’ ἐπιθεῖσα, χαριζομένη παρεόντων.
+
+In some languages the same word serves for ‘stranger’ and ‘enemy,’ but in
+the Oxford dialect ‘stranger’ and ‘guest’ are synonymous.  Such is the
+custom of the place, and it does not make plain living very easy.  Some
+critics will be anxious here to attack the ‘æsthetic’ movement.  One will
+be expected to say that, after the ideas of Newman, after the ideas of
+Arnold, and of Jowett, came those of the wicked, the extravagant, the
+effeminate, the immoral ‘Blue China School.’  Perhaps there is something
+in this, but sermons on the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries
+in the present didactic mood of the Press.  ‘They were friends of ours,
+moreover,’ as Aristotle says, ‘who brought these ideas in’; so the
+subject may be left with this brief notice.  As a piece of practical
+advice, one may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of
+Research that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than
+to get a subsidy from the Commission.
+
+The last important result of the ‘modern spirit’ at Oxford, the last
+stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was the removal of the celibate
+condition from certain fellowships.  One can hardly take a bird’s-eye
+view of Oxford without criticising the consequences of this innovation.
+The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons, very difficult to handle.
+One reason is, that the experiment has not been completely tried.  It is
+easy enough to marry on a fellowship, a tutorship, and a few small
+miscellaneous offices.  But how will it be when you come to forty years,
+or even fifty?  No materials exist which can be used by the social
+philosopher who wants an answer to this question.  In the meantime, the
+common rooms are perhaps more dreary than of old, in many a college, for
+lack of the presence of men now translated to another place.  As to the
+‘society’ of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much more charming and
+vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly
+champion of celibacy.
+
+Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that
+would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly conscientious industry,
+doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely certain that it
+is not neglecting nobler tasks.  Perhaps Oxford has never been more busy
+with its own work, never less distracted by religious politics.  If we
+are to look for a less happy sign, we shall find it in the tendency to
+run up ‘new buildings.’  The colleges are landowners: they must suffer
+with other owners of real property in the present depression; they will
+soon need all their savings.  That is one reason why they should be chary
+of building; another is, that the fellows of a college at any given
+moment are not necessarily endowed with architectural knowledge and
+taste.  They should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford
+for many centuries the uncomely mark of an unfortunate judgment.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+UNDERGRADUATE LIFE—CONCLUSION
+
+
+A HUNDRED pictures have been drawn of undergraduate life at Oxford, and a
+hundred caricatures.  Novels innumerable introduce some Oxford scenes.
+An author generally writes his first romance soon after taking his
+degree; he writes about his own experience and his own memories; he mixes
+his ingredients at will and tints according to fancy.  This is one of the
+two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from the undergraduate side, are
+generally false.  They are either drawn by an aspirant who is his own
+hero, and who idealises himself and his friends, or they are designed by
+ladies who have read _Verdant Green_, and who, at some period, have paid
+a flying visit to Cambridge.  An exhaustive knowledge of _Verdant Green_,
+and a hasty view of the Fitzwilliam Museum and ‘the backs of the
+Colleges’ (which are to Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do
+not afford sufficient materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford.  The
+picture daubed by the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is
+as unrecognisable.  He makes himself and his friends too large, too
+noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious.  They
+seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate figures, like
+the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the crowd of dons,
+tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side cads.  Often one
+dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances of years ago, in
+University novels.  The mildest of men suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy
+Livingstone type, fellows who ‘screw up’ timid dons, box with colossal
+watermen, and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered
+brows.  These sketches are all nonsense.  Men who do these things do not
+write about them; and men who write about them never did them.
+
+There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of describing
+undergraduate life with truth.  There are very many varieties of
+undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying and amusing
+themselves.  A steady man that reads his five or six hours a day, and
+takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that his path scarcely ever
+crosses that of him who belongs to the Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a
+week, and rarely dines in hall.  Then the ‘pale student,’ who is hard at
+work in his rooms or in the Bodleian all day, and who has only two
+friends, out-college men, with whom he takes walks and tea,—he sees
+existence in a very different aspect.  The Union politician, who is for
+ever hanging about his club, dividing the house on questions of
+blotting-paper and quill pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast,
+intriguing for the place of Librarian, writing rubbish in the
+suggestion-book, to him Oxford is only a soil carefully prepared for the
+growth of that fine flower, the Union.  He never encounters the
+undergraduate who haunts billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry
+for barmaids, and who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled
+a fox-terrier into college in a brown-paper parcel.  There are many other
+species of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in
+manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student resembles
+the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the hereditary war minister
+of Siam (whose career, though brief, was vivacious) resembled the Exeter
+Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who disappeared on the warpath after
+failing to scalp the Junior Proctor.  When The Wet Blanket returned to
+his lodge in the land of Sitting Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life
+in his own way to the other Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words
+and the papooses played around.  His account would vary, in many ways,
+from that of
+
+    ‘Whiskered Tomkins from the hall
+       Of seedy Magdalene.’
+
+And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole, as a
+more cultivated and polished undergraduate might.  Thus there are
+countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the
+University.  The scene is ever the same—boat-races and foot-ball matches,
+scouts, schools, and proctors, are common to all,—but in other respects
+the sketches must always vary, must generally be one-sided, and must
+often seem inaccurate.
+
+It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that are
+passed between the estate of the freshman and that of the Bachelor of
+Arts.  These years are spent in a kind of fairyland, neither quite within
+nor quite outside of the world.  College life is somewhat, as has so
+often been said, like the old Greek city life.  For three years men are
+in the possession of what the world does not enjoy—leisure; and they are
+supposed to be using that leisure for the purposes of perfection.  They
+are making themselves and their characters.  We are all doing that, all
+the days of our lives; but at the Universities there is, or is expected
+to be, more deliberate and conscious effort.  Men are in a position to
+‘try all things’ before committing themselves to any.  Their new-found
+freedom does not merely consist in the right to poke their own fires,
+order their own breakfasts, and use their own cheque-books.  These
+things, which make so much impression on the mind at first, are only the
+outward signs of freedom.  The boy who has just left school, and the
+thoughtless life of routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst
+of books, of thought, and discussion.  He has time to look at all the
+common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind
+hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything.  He can flirt with young
+opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen Entelechy
+in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human thought.  Here
+first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love with that
+enchantress, ‘who sifts time with a fine large blue silk sieve.’  There
+is hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a metaphysician, and has
+designs on the Absolute.  Most fall away very early from this, their
+first love; and they follow Science down one of her many paths, or
+concern themselves with politics, and take a side which, as a rule, is
+the opposite of that to which they afterwards adhere.  Thus your
+Christian Socialist becomes a Court preacher, and puts his trust in
+princes; the young Tory of the old type will lapse into membership of a
+School Board.  It is the time of liberty, and of intellectual attachments
+too fierce to last long.
+
+Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more
+attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure metaphysics.  The
+years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the enigmas
+of religion present themselves.  They bring their boyish faith into a
+place (if one may quote Pantagruel’s voyage once more) like the Isle of
+the Macraeones.  On that mournful island were confusedly heaped the ruins
+of altars, fanes, temples, shrines, sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead,
+pyramids, and tombs.  Through the ruins wandered, now and again, the
+half-articulate words of the Oracle, telling how Pan was dead.  Oxford,
+like the Isle of the Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous
+philosophies, decrepit religions, forlorn beliefs.  The modern system of
+study takes the pupil through all the philosophic and many of the
+religious systems of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past,
+have been fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a day.  You are
+taught to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple
+of thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by
+assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time.  This is
+not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern
+University education.  But no man can think of his own University days,
+or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls and rooms,
+and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how religious doubt
+insists on thrusting itself into the colleges.  And it is fair to say
+that, for this, no set of teachers or tutors is responsible.  It is the
+modern historical spirit that must be blamed, that too clear-sighted
+vision which we are all condemned to share of the past of the race.  We
+are compelled to look back on old philosophies, on India, Athens,
+Alexandria, and on the schools of men who thought so hard within our own
+ancient walls.  We are compelled to see that their systems were only
+plausible, that their truths were but half-truths.  It is the long vista
+of failure thus revealed which suggests these doubts that weary, and
+torture, and embitter the naturally happy life of discussion, amusement,
+friendship, sport, and study.  These doubts, after all, dwell on the
+threshold of modern existence, and on the threshold—namely, at the
+Universities—men subdue them, or evade them.
+
+The amusements of the University have been so often described that little
+need be said of them here.  Unhealthy as the site of Oxford is, the place
+is rather fortunately disposed for athletic purposes.  The river is the
+chief feature in the scenery, and in the life of amusement.  From the
+first day of term, in October, it is crowded with every sort of craft.
+The freshman admires the golden colouring of the woods and Magdalen tower
+rising, silvery, through the blue autumnal haze.  As soon as he appears
+on the river, his weight, strength, and ‘form’ are estimated.  He soon
+finds himself pulling in a college ‘challenge four,’ under the severe eye
+of a senior cox, and by the middle of December he has rowed his first
+race, and is regularly entered for a serious vocation.  The
+thorough-going boating-man is the creature of habit.  Every day, at the
+same hour, after a judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels, making
+for the barge.  He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair, or a four-oar, or to
+a steeplechase through the hedges when Oxford, as in our illustration, is
+under water.  The illustration represents Merton, and the writer
+recognises his old rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr. Ruskin
+denounced.  Chief of all the boating-man goes out in an eight, and rows
+down to Iffley, with the beautiful old mill and Norman church, or
+accomplishes ‘the long course.’  He rows up again, lounges in the barge,
+rows down again (if he has only pulled over the short course), and goes
+back to dinner in hall.  The table where men sit who are in training is a
+noisy table, and the athletes verge on ‘bear-fighting’ even in hall.  A
+statistician might compute how many steaks, chops, pots of beer, and of
+marmalade, an orthodox man will consume in the course of three years.  He
+will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the monotony of boating shop,
+boating society, and broad-blown boating jokes.  But this appears to be a
+harmless affectation.  The old breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the honest
+boating slang, will always have an attraction for him.  The summer term
+will lose its delight when the May races are over.  Boating-men are the
+salt of the University, so steady, so well disciplined, so good-tempered
+are they.  The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for
+their college, or their University; not like running—men, who run, as it
+were, each for his own hand.  Whatever may be his work in life, a
+boating-man will stick to it.  His favourite sport is not expensive, and
+nothing can possibly be less luxurious.  He is often a reading man,
+though it may be doubted whether ‘he who runs may read’ as a rule.
+Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and Strangers’ cups are, or
+lately were, given with injudicious generosity.  To the artist’s eye,
+however, few sights in modern life are more graceful than the University
+quarter-of-a-mile race.  Nowhere else, perhaps, do you see figures so
+full of a Hellenic grace and swiftness.
+
+The cream of University life is the first summer term.  Debts, as yet,
+are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their shadow over the
+unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one o’clock.
+There are so many things to do,—
+
+    ‘When wickets are bowled and defended,
+       When Isis is glad with the eights,
+    When music and sunset are blended,
+       When Youth and the Summer are mates,
+    When freshmen are heedless of “Greats,”
+       When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,
+    Ah! these are the hours that one rates
+       Sweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!’
+
+There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to
+Cowley.  There is the beautiful scenery of the ‘stripling Thames’ to
+explore; the haunts of the immortal ‘Scholar Gipsy,’ and of Shelley, and
+of Clough’s Piper, who—
+
+    ‘Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and
+    Godstowe.’
+
+Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight and
+amuse in Oxford. {221}  What day can be happier than that of which the
+morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a ‘commonising’
+with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music
+and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the college eights
+flash past among cheering and splashing?  Then there is supper in the
+cool halls, darkling, and half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the
+birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look
+unfamiliar in the blue of dawn.  How long the days were then! almost like
+the days of childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used
+to make!  In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college staircase,
+and the ‘oak’ which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor.  She
+comes in many a shape—as debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and often she
+comes as bereavement.  Life and her claims wax importunate; to many men
+the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all proportion to
+the real importance of academic success.  We cannot see things as they
+are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if pleasures are more keen
+then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more desolate, uncertainty more
+gnawing, than in later years, when we have known and survived a good deal
+of the worst of mortal experience.  Often on men still in their pupilage
+the weight of the first misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of
+Dame Fortune’s whip is the most poignant.  We cannot recover the first
+summer term; but it has passed into ourselves and our memories, into
+which Oxford, with her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass.
+He is not to be envied who has known and does not love her.  Where her
+children have quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers.  They
+have chosen the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in
+her grace and charm.  These are crowded and hustled out of modern life;
+the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving
+still, at the Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.
+
+If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been
+spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford cease to be
+herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.
+
+
+
+
+FOOTNOTES
+
+
+{120}  Poems by Ernest Myers.  London, 1877.
+
+{221}  A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in the
+_Cornhill_ for September 1879.
+
+
+
+
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+<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=US-ASCII" />
+<title>Oxford, by Andrew Lang</title>
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+
+The Project Gutenberg eBook, Oxford, by Andrew Lang, Illustrated by George
+F. Carline
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
+other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions 
+whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
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+www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
+to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
+
+
+
+
+Title: Oxford
+
+
+Author: Andrew Lang
+
+
+
+Release Date: January 24, 2015  [eBook #2444]
+[This file was first posted on February 13, 2000]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD***
+</pre>
+<p>Transcribed from the 1922 Seeley, Service &amp; Co. edition by
+David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/coverb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Book cover"
+title=
+"Book cover"
+ src="images/covers.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/fpb.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"St. Mary&rsquo;s Church from the corner of Oriel Street and
+Merton Street, with Oriel College on the right"
+title=
+"St. Mary&rsquo;s Church from the corner of Oriel Street and
+Merton Street, with Oriel College on the right"
+ src="images/fps.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<h1>OXFORD</h1>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br
+/>
+ANDREW LANG<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">SOMETIME FELLOW</span><br />
+<span class="GutSmall">OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">BY</span><br />
+GEORGE F. CARLINE<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">R.B.A.</span></p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center">LONDON<br />
+SEELEY, SERVICE &amp; CO LTD<br />
+38 GREET RUSSELL STREET<br />
+1922</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<p style="text-align: center"><span class="GutSmall">TO</span><br
+/>
+A. M. LEE</p>
+
+<div class="gapspace">&nbsp;</div>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">These</span> papers do not profess even to
+sketch the outlines of a history of Oxford.&nbsp; They are merely
+records of the impressions made by this or that aspect of the
+life of the University as it has been in different ages.&nbsp;
+Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and white, with
+the pen or the etcher&rsquo;s needle.&nbsp; On a wild winter or
+late autumn day (such as Father Faber has made permanent in a
+beautiful poem) the sunshine fleets along the plain, revealing
+towers, and floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery light, and
+leaving them once more in shadow.&nbsp; The melancholy mist
+creeps over the city, the damp soaks into the heart of
+everything, and such suicidal weather ensues as has been
+described, once for all, by the author of
+<i>John-a-Dreams</i>.&nbsp; How different Oxford looks when the
+road to Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat seems
+almost tropical, and by the drowsy banks of the Cherwell you
+might almost expect some shy southern water-beast to come
+crashing through the reeds!&nbsp; And such a day, again, is
+unlike the bright weather of late September, when all the gold
+and scarlet of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that
+cover the walls of Magdalen with an imperial vesture.</p>
+<p>Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of
+Indolence, vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her
+scenery.&nbsp; Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence
+have alternated with days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy,
+of resignation.&nbsp; Our mental pictures of the place are tinged
+by many moods, as the landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine,
+in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather.&nbsp; Oxford,
+that once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may
+become a dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with other
+weary, waiting people.&nbsp; At last, if men linger there too
+late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final condition of the
+loiterer to take &lsquo;this for a hermitage.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is
+well to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry away few but
+kind recollections.&nbsp; If there be any who think and speak
+ungently of their <i>Alma Mater</i>, it is because they have
+outstayed their natural &lsquo;welcome while,&rsquo; or because
+they have resisted her genial influence in youth.</p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>CHAP.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">I.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page19">19</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">II.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE EARLY STUDENTS&mdash;A DAY WITH A MEDIEVAL
+UNDERGRADUATE</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page43">43</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">III.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page67">67</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IV.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>JACOBEAN OXFORD</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page89">89</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">V.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page111">111</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VI.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>HIGH TORY OXFORD</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page133">133</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>GEORGIAN OXFORD</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page153">153</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">VIII.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page171">171</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">IX.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>A GENERAL VIEW</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page191">191</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p style="text-align: center">,,</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right">X.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>UNDERGRADUATE LIFE&mdash;CONCLUSION</p>
+</td>
+<td><p style="text-align: right"><span class="indexpageno"><a
+href="#page209">209</a></span></p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<h2><a name="page19"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+19</span>CHAPTER I<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Most</span> old towns are like
+palimpsests, parchments which have been scrawled over again and
+again by their successive owners.&nbsp; Oxford, though not one of
+the most ancient of English cities, shows, more legibly than the
+rest, the handwriting, as it were, of many generations.&nbsp; The
+convenient site among the interlacing waters of the Isis and the
+Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after
+another.&nbsp; Each generation has used it for its own purpose:
+for war, for trade, for learning, for religion; and war, trade,
+religion, and learning have left on Oxford their peculiar
+marks.&nbsp; No set of its occupants, before the last two
+centuries began, was very eager to deface or destroy the
+buildings of its predecessors.&nbsp; Old things were turned to
+new uses, or altered to suit new tastes; they were not overthrown
+and carted away.&nbsp; Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see
+everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows
+which have been builded up; or again, openings which have been
+cut where none originally existed.&nbsp; The upper part of the
+round Norman arches in the Cathedral has been preserved, and
+converted into the circular bull&rsquo;s-eye lights which the
+last century liked.&nbsp; It is the same everywhere, except where
+modern restorers have had their way.&nbsp; Thus the life of
+England, for some eight centuries, may be traced in the buildings
+of Oxford.&nbsp; Nay, if we are convinced by some antiquaries,
+the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier
+scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages
+who scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in
+the gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand.&nbsp;
+Here half-naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell,
+and hither they may have brought home the boars which they slew
+in the trackless woods of Headington and Bagley.&nbsp; It is with
+the life of historical Oxford, however, and not with these
+fancies, that we are concerned, though these papers have no
+pretension to be a history of Oxford.&nbsp; A series of pictures
+of men&rsquo;s life here is all they try to sketch.</p>
+<p>It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the
+mind of Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by
+history.&nbsp; What she may have been when legend only knows her;
+when St. Frideswyde built a home for religious maidens; when she
+fled from King Algar and hid among the swine, and after a whole
+fairy tale of adventures died in great sanctity, we cannot even
+guess.&nbsp; This legend of St. Frideswyde, and of her
+foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church, is
+not, indeed, without its value and significance for those who
+care for Oxford.&nbsp; This home of religion and of learning was
+a home of religion from the beginning, and her later life is but
+a return, after centuries of war and trade, to her earliest
+purpose.&nbsp; What manner of village of wooden houses may have
+surrounded the earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we
+cannot readily guess, but imagination may look back on Oxford as
+she was when the <i>English Chronicle</i> first mentions
+her.&nbsp; Even then it is not unnatural to think Oxford might
+well have been a city of peace.&nbsp; She lies in the very centre
+of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland, burning
+church and cloister, must have wandered long before they came to
+Oxford.&nbsp; On the other hand, the military importance of the
+site must have made it a town that would be eagerly contended
+for.&nbsp; Any places of strength in Oxford would command the
+roads leading to the north and west, and the secure, raised paths
+that ran through the flooded fens to the ford or bridge, if
+bridge there then was, between Godstowe and the later Norman
+<i>grand pont</i>, where Folly Bridge now spans the Isis.&nbsp;
+Somewhere near Oxford, the roads that ran towards Banbury and the
+north, or towards Bristol and the west, would be obliged to cross
+the river.&nbsp; The water-way, too, and the paths by the
+Thames&rsquo; side, were commanded by Oxford.&nbsp; The Danes, as
+they followed up the course of the Thames from London, would be
+drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place which is
+surrounded by half a dozen deep natural moats.&nbsp; Lastly,
+Oxford lay in the centre of England indeed, but on the very
+marches of Mercia and Wessex.&nbsp; A border town of natural
+strength and of commanding situation, she can have been no mean
+or poor collection of villages in the days when she is first
+spoken of, when Eadward the Elder &lsquo;incorporated with his
+own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling
+Street&rsquo; (Freeman&rsquo;s <i>Norman Conquest</i>, vol. i. p.
+57), and took possession of London and of Oxford as the two most
+important parts of a scientific frontier.&nbsp; If any man had
+stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill that was not yet
+&lsquo;Shotover,&rsquo; and had looked along the plain to the
+place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it
+were in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little
+but &lsquo;the smoke floating up through the oakwood and the
+coppice,&rsquo;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&Kappa;&alpha;&pi;&nu;&#8056;&nu;
+&delta;&rsquo; &#7952;&nu;&#8054;
+&gamma;&#8051;&sigma;&sigma;&#8131;<br />
+&#7956;&delta;&rho;&alpha;&kappa;&omicron;&nu;
+&#8000;&phi;&theta;&alpha;&lambda;&mu;&omicron;&#8150;&sigma;&iota;
+&delta;&iota;&#8048; &delta;&rho;&upsilon;&mu;&#8048;
+&pi;&upsilon;&kappa;&nu;&#8048; &kappa;&alpha;&#8054;
+&#8021;&lambda;&eta;&nu;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds
+trimmed and enclosed.&nbsp; Centuries later, when the early
+students came, they had to ride &lsquo;through the thick forest
+and across the moor, to the East Gate of the city&rsquo;
+(<i>Munimenta Academica</i>, Oxon., vol. i. p. 60).&nbsp; In the
+midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no mean city;
+but the place where the hostile races of the land met to settle
+their differences, to feast together and forget their wrongs over
+the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the
+banquet with fire and sword.</p>
+<p>Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the
+Danes went about burning and wasting England.&nbsp; The wooden
+towns were flaming through the night, and sending up a thick
+smoke through the day, from Thamesmouth to Cambridge.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;And next was there no headman that force would gather, and
+each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there no shire that
+would help another.&rsquo;&nbsp; When the first fury of the
+plundering invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish
+to settle and till the land and have some measure of peace, the
+early meetings between them and the English rulers were held in
+the border-town, in Oxford.&nbsp; Thus Sigeferth and Morkere,
+sons of Earngrim, came to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were
+slain at a banquet, while their followers perished in the attempt
+to avenge them.&nbsp; &lsquo;Into the tower of St. Frideswyde
+they were driven, and as men could not drive them thence, the
+tower was fired, and they perished in the burning.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the
+story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St.
+Frideswyde.&nbsp; There is another version of the story in the
+<i>Codex Diplomaticus</i> (<span
+class="GutSmall">DCCIX.</span>).&nbsp; Aethelred is made to say,
+in a deed of grant of lands to St. Frideswyde&rsquo;s Church
+(&lsquo;mine own minster&rsquo;), that the Danes were slain in
+the massacre of St. Brice.&nbsp; On that day Aethelred, &lsquo;by
+the advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among
+the wheat, the Danes in England.&rsquo;&nbsp; Certain of these
+fled into the minster, as into a fortress, and therefore it was
+burned and the books and monuments destroyed.&nbsp; For this
+cause Aethelred gives lands to the minster, &lsquo;fro Charwell
+brigge andlong the streame, fro Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the
+lawe to the foule putte,&rsquo; and so forth.&nbsp; It is
+pleasant to see how old are the familiar names
+&lsquo;Cherwell,&rsquo; &lsquo;Hedington,&rsquo;
+&lsquo;Couelee&rsquo; or Cowley, where the college
+cricket-grounds are.&nbsp; Three years passed, and the headmen of
+the English and of the Danes met at Oxford again, and more
+peacefully, and agreed to live together, obedient to the laws of
+Eadgar; to the law, that is, as it was administered in older
+days, that seem happier and better ruled to men looking back on
+them from an age of confusion and bloodshed.&nbsp; At Oxford,
+too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English
+claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold
+Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040.&nbsp; The place
+indeed was fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger
+against King Algar, left her curse on it.&nbsp; Just as the old
+Irish kings were forbidden by their customs to do this or that,
+to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the
+winnowing of the night-fowl&rsquo;s wings in the dusk above the
+lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to enter Oxford,
+and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden.&nbsp;
+Harold died there, as we have seen, but there he was not
+buried.&nbsp; His body was laid at Westminster, where it could
+not rest, for his enemies dug it up, and cast it forth upon the
+fens, or threw it into the river.&nbsp; Many years later, when
+Henry <span class="GutSmall">III.</span> entered Oxford, not
+without fear, the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon
+him.&nbsp; He came in 1263, with Edward the prince, and
+misfortune fell upon him, so that his barons defeated and took
+him prisoner at the battle of Lewes.&nbsp; The chronicler of
+Oseney Abbey mentions his contempt of superstitions, and how he
+alone of English kings entered the city: &lsquo;<i>Quod nullus
+rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari</i>,&rsquo; an error, for
+Harold <i>attemptavit</i>, and died.&nbsp; When Edward I. was
+king, he was less audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode
+up to the East Gate and turned his horse&rsquo;s head about, and
+sought a lodging outside the town, <i>reflexis habenis equitans
+extra moenia aulam regiain in suburbio positam
+introivit</i>.&nbsp; In 1280, however, he seems to have plucked
+up courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.</p>
+<p>The last of the meetings between North and South was held at
+Oxford in October 1065.&nbsp; &lsquo;<i>In urle qu&aelig; famoso
+nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur</i>,&rsquo; to quote a document of
+Cnut&rsquo;s.&nbsp; (<i>Cod. Dipl.</i> <span
+class="GutSmall">DCCXLVI</span>. in 1042.)&nbsp; There the
+Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the
+Confessor.&nbsp; With this meeting we leave that Oxford before
+the Conquest, of which possibly not one stone, or one rafter,
+remains.&nbsp; We look back through eight hundred years on a
+city, rich enough, it seems, and powerful, and we see the narrow
+streets full of armed bands of men&mdash;men that wear the
+cognisance of the horse or of the raven, that carry short swords,
+and are quick to draw them; men that dress in short kirtles of a
+bright colour, scarlet or blue; that wear axes slung on their
+backs, and adorn their bare necks and arms with collars and
+bracelets of gold.&nbsp; We see them meeting to discuss laws and
+frontiers, and feasting late when business is done, and
+chaffering for knives with ivory handles, for arrows, and
+saddles, and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens.&nbsp; Through
+the mist of time this picture of ancient Oxford may be
+distinguished.&nbsp; We are tempted to think of a low, grey
+twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up with fire; of the
+tall towers of St. Frideswyde&rsquo;s Minster flaring like a
+torch athwart the night; of poplars waving in the same wind that
+drives the vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes
+who have taken refuge there, and there stand at bay against the
+English and the people of the town.&nbsp; The material Oxford of
+our times is not more unlike the Oxford of low wooden booths and
+houses, and of wooden spires and towers, than the life led in its
+streets was unlike the academic life of to-day.&nbsp; The
+Conquest brought no more quiet times, but the whole city was
+wrecked, stormed, and devastated, before the second period of its
+history began, before it was the seat of a Norman stronghold, and
+one of the links of the chain by which England was bound.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;Four hundred and seventy-eight houses were so ruined as to
+be unable to pay taxes,&rsquo; while, &lsquo;within the town or
+without the wall, there were but two hundred and forty-three
+houses which did yield tribute.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>With the buildings of Robert D&rsquo;Oily, a follower of the
+Conqueror&rsquo;s, and the husband of an English wife, the
+heiress of Wigod of Wallingford, the new Oxford begins.&nbsp;
+Robert&rsquo;s work may be divided roughly into two
+classes.&nbsp; First, there are the strong places he erected to
+secure his possessions, and, second, the sacred places he erected
+to secure the pardon of Heaven for his robberies.&nbsp; Of the
+castle, and its &lsquo;shining coronal of towers,&rsquo; only one
+tower remains.&nbsp; From the vast strength of this picturesque
+edifice, with the natural moat flowing at its feet, we may guess
+what the castle must have been in the early days of the Conquest,
+and during the wars of Stephen and Matilda.&nbsp; We may guess,
+too, that the burghers of Oxford, and the rustics of the
+neighbourhood, had no easy life in those days, when, as we have
+seen, the town was ruined, and when, as the extraordinary
+thickness of the walls of its remaining tower demonstrates, the
+castle was built by new lords who did not spare the forced labour
+of the vanquished.&nbsp; The strength of the position of the
+castle is best estimated after viewing the surrounding country
+from the top of the tower.&nbsp; Through the more modern
+embrasures, or over the low wall round the summit, you look up
+and down the valley of the Thames, and gaze deep into the folds
+of the hills.&nbsp; The prospect is pleasant enough, on an autumn
+morning, with the domes and spires of modern Oxford breaking,
+like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps above the roofs
+of the good town.&nbsp; In the old times, no movement of the
+people who had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of an
+army from any direction could have evaded the watchman.&nbsp; The
+towers guarded the fords and the bridge and were themselves
+almost impregnable, except when a hard winter made the Thames,
+the Cherwell, and the many deep and treacherous streams passable,
+as happened when Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford.&nbsp; This
+natural strength of the site is demonstrated by the vast mound
+within the castle walls, which tradition calls the Jews&rsquo;
+Mound, but which is probably earlier than the Norman
+buildings.&nbsp; Some other race had chosen the castle site for
+its fortress in times of which we know nothing.&nbsp; Meanwhile,
+some of the practical citizens of Oxford wish to level the
+Jews&rsquo; Mound, and to &lsquo;utilise&rsquo; the gravel of
+which it is largely composed.&nbsp; There is nothing to be said
+against this economic project which could interest or affect the
+persons who entertain it.&nbsp; M. Brunet-Debaines&rsquo;
+illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as old as the
+tower.&nbsp; Did the citizens bring their corn to be tolled and
+ground at the lord&rsquo;s mill?</p>
+<p>Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature
+inclined to piety, and, his piety beginning at home, he founded
+the church of St. George within the castle.&nbsp; The crypt of
+the church still remains, and is not without interest for persons
+who like to trace the changing fortunes of old buildings.&nbsp;
+The site of Robert&rsquo;s Castle is at present occupied by the
+County Gaol.&nbsp; When you have inspected the tower (which does
+not do service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the courtesy of
+the Governor, to the crypt, and satisfy your arch&aelig;ological
+curiosity.&nbsp; The place is much lower, and worse lighted, than
+the contemporary crypt of St. Peter&rsquo;s-in-the-East, but not,
+perhaps, less interesting.&nbsp; The square-headed capitals have
+not been touched, like some of those in St. Peter&rsquo;s, by a
+later chisel.&nbsp; The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise
+much as Robert D&rsquo;Oily left it.&nbsp; There is an
+odd-looking arrangement of planks on the floor.&nbsp; It is
+<i>the new drop</i>, which is found to work very well, and gives
+satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it.&nbsp; Sinister
+the Norman castle was in its beginning, &lsquo;it was from the
+castle that men did wrong to the poor around them; it was from
+the castle that they bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and
+tyrant as he might be, was still a protector against smaller
+tyrants.&rsquo;&nbsp; Sinister the castle remains; you enter it
+through ironed and bolted doors, you note the prisoners at their
+dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the engines of the law
+lying in the old crypt you pass out into the place of
+execution.&nbsp; Here, in a corner made by Robert&rsquo;s tower
+and by the wall of the prison, is a dank little quadrangle.&nbsp;
+The ground is of the yellow clay and gravel which floors most
+Oxford quadrangles.&nbsp; A few letters are scratched on the soft
+stone of the wall&mdash;the letters &lsquo;H. R.&rsquo; are the
+freshest.&nbsp; These are the initials of the last man who
+suffered death in this corner&mdash;a young rustic who had
+murdered his sweetheart.&nbsp; &lsquo;H. R.&rsquo; on the prison
+wall is all his record, and his body lies under your feet, and
+the feet of the men who are to die here in after days pass over
+his tomb.&nbsp; It is thus that malefactors are buried,
+&lsquo;within the walls of the gaol.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert&rsquo;s
+place of arms&mdash;as glad as Matilda may have been when
+&lsquo;they let her down at night from the tower with ropes, and
+she stole out, and went on foot to Wallingford.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Robert seems at first to have made the natural use of his
+strength.&nbsp; &lsquo;Rich he was, and spared not rich or poor,
+to take their livelihood away, and to lay up treasures for
+himself.&rsquo;&nbsp; He stole the lands of the monks of
+Abingdon, but of what service were moats, and walls, and
+dungeons, and instruments of torture, against the powers that
+side with monks?</p>
+<p>The <i>Chronicle of Abingdon</i> has a very diverting account
+of Robert&rsquo;s punishment and conversion.&nbsp; &lsquo;He
+filched a certain field without the walls of Oxford that of right
+belonged to the monastery, and gave it over to the soldiers in
+the castle.&nbsp; For which loss the brethren were greatly
+grieved&mdash;the brethren of Abingdon.&nbsp; Therefore, they
+gathered in a body before the altar of St. Michael&mdash;the very
+altar that St. Dunstan the archbishop dedicated&mdash;and cast
+themselves weeping on the ground, accusing Robert D&rsquo;Oily,
+and praying that his robbery of the monastery might be avenged,
+or that he might be led to make atonement.&rsquo;&nbsp; So, in a
+dream, Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady by two brethren
+of Abingdon, and thence carried into the very meadow he had
+coveted, where &lsquo;most nasty little boys,&rsquo;
+<i>turpissimi pueri</i>, worked their will on him.&nbsp; Thereon
+Robert was terrified and cried out, and wakened his wife, who
+took advantage of his fears, and compelled him to make
+restitution to the brethren.</p>
+<p>After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the
+monastery and performing other good works.&nbsp; He it was who
+built a bridge over the Isis, and he restored the many ruined
+parish churches in Oxford&mdash;churches which, perhaps, he and
+his men had helped to ruin.&nbsp; The tower of St.
+Michael&rsquo;s, in &lsquo;the Corn,&rsquo; is said to be of his
+building; perhaps he only &lsquo;restored&rsquo; it, for it is in
+the true primitive style&mdash;gaunt, unadorned, with
+round-headed windows, good for shooting from with the bow.&nbsp;
+St. Michael&rsquo;s was not only a church, but a watchtower of
+the city wall; and here the old northgate, called Bocardo,
+spanned the street.&nbsp; The rooms above the gate were used till
+within quite recent times, and the poor inmates used to let down
+a greasy old hat from the window in front of the passers-by, and
+cry, &lsquo;Pity the Bocardo birds&rsquo;:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Pigons qui sont en l&rsquo;essoine,<br />
+Enserrez soubz trappe voli&egrave;re,&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>as a famous Paris student, Fran&ccedil;ois Villon, would have
+called them.&nbsp; Of Bocardo no trace remains, but St.
+Michael&rsquo;s is likely to last as long as any edifice in
+Oxford.&nbsp; Our illustrations represent it as it was in the
+last century.&nbsp; The houses huddle up to the church, and hide
+the lines of the tower.&nbsp; Now it stands out clear, less
+picturesque than it was in the time of Bocardo prison.&nbsp;
+Within the last two years the windows have been cleared, and the
+curious and most archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may be
+examined.&nbsp; It is worth while to climb the tower and remember
+the times when arrows were sent like hail from the narrow windows
+on the foes who approached Oxford from the north, while prayers
+for their confusion were read in the church below.</p>
+<p>That old Oxford of war was also a trading town.&nbsp; Nothing
+more than the fact that it was a favourite seat of the Jews is
+needed to prove its commercial prosperity.&nbsp; The Jews,
+however, demand a longer notice in connection with the still
+unborn University.&nbsp; Meanwhile, it may be remarked that
+Oxford trade made good use of the river.&nbsp; The <i>Abingdon
+Chronicle</i> (ii. 129) tells us that &lsquo;from each barque of
+Oxford city, which makes the passage by the river Thames past
+Abingdon, a hundred herrings must yearly be paid to the
+cellarer.&nbsp; The citizens had much litigation about land and
+houses with the abbey, and one Roger Maledoctus (perhaps a very
+early sample of the pass-man) gave Abingdon tenements within the
+city.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thus we leave the pre-Academic Oxford a
+flourishing town, with merchants and moneylenders.&nbsp; As for
+the religious, the brethren of St. Frideswyde had lived but
+loosely (<i>pro libito viverunt</i>), says William of Malmesbury,
+and were to be superseded by regular canons, under the headship
+of one Guimond, and the patronage of the Bishop of
+Salisbury.&nbsp; Whoever goes into Christ Church new buildings
+from the river-side, will see, in the old edifice facing him, a
+certain bulging in the wall.&nbsp; That is the mark of the
+pulpit, whence a brother used to read aloud to the brethren in
+the refectory of St. Frideswyde.&nbsp; The new leaven of learning
+was soon to ferment in an easy Oxford, where men lived <i>pro
+libito</i>, under good lords, the D&rsquo;Oilys, who loved the
+English, and built, not churches and bridges only, but the great
+and famous Oseney Abbey, beyond the church of St. Thomas, and not
+very far from the modern station of the Great Western
+Railway.&nbsp; Yet even after public teaching in Oxford certainly
+began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity there
+(1133; cf. <i>Oseney Chronicle</i>), the tower was burned down by
+Stephen&rsquo;s soldiery in 1141 (<i>Oseney Chronicle</i>, p.
+24).</p>
+<h2><a name="page43"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+43</span>CHAPTER II<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE EARLY STUDENTS&mdash;A DAY WITH A
+MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Oxford</span>, some one says, &lsquo;is
+bitterly historical.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is difficult to escape the
+fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of &lsquo;our antiquary,&rsquo;
+Bryan Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the
+University.&nbsp; Indeed, it is impossible to understand the
+strange blending of new and old at Oxford&mdash;the old names
+with the new meanings&mdash;if we avert our eyes from what is
+&lsquo;bitterly historical.&rsquo;&nbsp; For example, there is in
+most, perhaps in all, colleges a custom called
+&lsquo;collections.&rsquo;&nbsp; On the last days of term
+undergraduates are called into the Hall, where the Master and the
+Dean of the Chapel sit in solemn state.&nbsp; Examination papers
+are set, but no one heeds them very much.&nbsp; The real ordeal
+is the awful interview with the Master and the Dean.&nbsp; The
+former regards you with the eyes of a judge, while the Dean says,
+&lsquo;Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown&rsquo;s
+<i>papers</i> are very fair, very fair.&nbsp; But in the matters
+of <i>chapels</i> and of <i>catechetics</i>, Mr. Brown
+sets&mdash;for a <i>scholar</i>&mdash;a very bad example to the
+other undergraduates.&nbsp; He has only once attended divine
+service on Sunday morning, and on that occasion, Master, his
+dress consisted exclusively of a long great-coat and a pair of
+boots.&rsquo;&nbsp; After this accusation the Master will turn to
+the culprit and observe, with emphasis ill represented by
+italics, &lsquo;Mr. Brown, the <i>College</i> cannot hear with
+pleasure of such behaviour on the part of a <i>scholar</i>.&nbsp;
+You are <i>gated</i>, Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next
+term.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now why should this tribunal of the Master and
+the Dean, and this dread examination, be called
+collections?&nbsp; Because (<i>Munimenta Academica</i>, Oxon., i.
+129) in 1331 a statute was passed to the effect that &lsquo;every
+scholar shall pay at least twelve pence a-year for lectures in
+logic, and for physics eighteenpence a-year,&rsquo; and that
+&lsquo;all Masters of Arts except persons of royal or noble
+family, shall be obliged to <i>collect</i> their salary from the
+scholars.&rsquo;&nbsp; This <i>collection</i> would be made at
+the end of term; and the name survives, attached to the solemn
+day of doom we have described, though the college dues are now
+collected by the bursar at the beginning of each term.</p>
+<p>By this trivial example the perversions of old customs at
+Oxford are illustrated.&nbsp; To appreciate the life of the
+place, then, we must glance for a moment at the growth of the
+University.&nbsp; As to its origin, we know absolutely
+nothing.&nbsp; That Master Puleyn began to lecture there in 1133
+we have seen, and it is not likely that he would have chosen
+Oxford if Oxford had possessed no schools.&nbsp; About these
+schools, however, we have no information.&nbsp; They may have
+grown up out of the seminary which, perhaps, was connected with
+St. Frideswyde&rsquo;s, just as Paris University may have had
+some connection with &lsquo;the School of the
+Palace.&rsquo;&nbsp; Certainly to Paris University the academic
+corporation of Oxford, the <i>Universitas</i>, owed many of her
+regulations; while, again, the founder of the college system,
+Walter de Merton (who visited Paris in company with Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">III.</span>), may have compared ideas with
+Robert de Sorbonne, the founder of the college of that
+name.&nbsp; In the early Oxford, however, of the twelfth and most
+of the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their statutes were
+unknown.&nbsp; The University was the only corporation of the
+learned, and she struggled into existence after hard fights with
+the town, the Jews, the Friars, the Papal courts.&nbsp; The
+history of the University begins with the thirteenth
+century.&nbsp; She may be said to have come into being as soon as
+she possessed common funds and rents, as soon as fines were
+assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of
+scholars.&nbsp; Now the first recorded fine is the payment of
+fifty-two shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the
+compensation for the hanging of certain clerks.&nbsp; In the year
+1214 the Papal Legate, in a letter to his &lsquo;beloved sons in
+Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,&rsquo; bade them excuse the
+&lsquo;scholars studying in Oxford&rsquo; half the rent of their
+halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years.&nbsp; The
+burghers were also to do penance, and to feast the poorer
+students once a year; but the important point is, that they had
+to pay that large yearly fine &lsquo;propter suspendium
+clericorum&rsquo;&mdash;all for the hanging of the clerks.&nbsp;
+Twenty-six years after this decision of the Legate, Robert
+Grossteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment
+and distribution of the fine, and founded the first of the
+<i>chests</i>, the chest of St. Frideswyde.&nbsp; These
+<i>chests</i> were a kind of Mont de Pi&eacute;t&eacute;, and to
+found them was at first the favourite form of benefaction.&nbsp;
+Money was left in this or that <i>chest</i>, from which students
+and masters would borrow, on the security of pledges, which were
+generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p48b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Merton College from the Fields"
+title=
+"Merton College from the Fields"
+ src="images/p48s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of
+history, which happily illustrates the growth of the
+University.&nbsp; The beginning of the whole affair was the
+quarrel with the town, which, in 1209, had hanged two clerks,
+&lsquo;in contempt of clerical liberty.&rsquo;&nbsp; The matter
+was taken up by the Legate&mdash;in those bad years of King John
+the Pope&rsquo;s viceroy in England&mdash;and out of the
+humiliation of the town the University gained money, privileges,
+and halls at low rental.&nbsp; These were precisely the things
+that the University wanted.&nbsp; About these matters there was a
+constant strife, in which the Kings, as a rule, took part with
+the University.&nbsp; The University possessed the legal
+knowledge, which the monarchs liked to have on their side, and
+was therefore favoured by them.&nbsp; Thus, in 1231 (Wood,
+<i>Annals</i>, i. 205), &lsquo;the King sent out his Breve to the
+Mayor and Burghers commanding them not to overrate their
+houses&rsquo;; and thus gradually the University got the command
+of the police, obtained privileges which enslaved the city, and
+became masters where they had once been despised, starveling
+scholars.&nbsp; The process was always the same.&nbsp; On the
+feast of St. Scholastica, for example, in 1354, Walter de
+Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered
+into the Swyndlestock tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of
+John de Croydon&rsquo;s wine, and ended by pitching the tankard
+at the head of that vintner.&nbsp; In ten minutes the town bell
+at St. Martin&rsquo;s was rung, and the most terrible of all
+Town-and-Gown rows began.&nbsp; The Chancellor could do no less
+than bid St. Mary&rsquo;s bell reply to St. Martin&rsquo;s, and
+shooting commenced.&nbsp; The Gown held their own very well at
+first, and &lsquo;defended themselves till Vespertide,&rsquo;
+when the citizens called in their neighbours, the rustics of
+Cowley, Headington, and Hincksey.&nbsp; The results have been
+precisely described in anticipation by Homer:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&tau;&#8057;&phi;&rho;&alpha; &delta;&rsquo;
+&#7940;&rho;
+&omicron;&#7984;&chi;&#8057;&mu;&epsilon;&nu;&omicron;&iota;
+&Kappa;&#8055;&kappa;&omicron;&nu;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&Kappa;&iota;&kappa;&#8057;&nu;&epsilon;&sigma;&sigma;&iota;
+&gamma;&epsilon;&gamma;&#974;&nu;&epsilon;&upsilon;&nu;<br />
+&omicron;&#7988; &sigma;&phi;&#8150;&nu;
+&gamma;&epsilon;&#8055;&tau;&omicron;&nu;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&#7974;&sigma;&alpha;&nu; &#7941;&mu;&alpha;
+&pi;&lambda;&#8051;&omicron;&nu;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&kappa;&alpha;&#8054;
+&#7936;&rho;&epsilon;&#8055;&omicron;&upsilon;&sigmaf;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">. . . . .</p>
+<p>&#7974;&mu;&omicron;&sigmaf; &delta;&rsquo;
+&Eta;&#8051;&lambda;&iota;&omicron;&sigmaf;
+&mu;&epsilon;&tau;&epsilon;&nu;&#8055;&sigma;&sigma;&epsilon;&tau;&omicron;
+
+&beta;&omicron;&upsilon;&lambda;&upsilon;&tau;&#8057;&nu;&delta;&epsilon;<br
+/>
+&kappa;&alpha;&#8054; &tau;&#8057;&tau;&epsilon; &delta;&#8052;
+&Kappa;&#8055;&kappa;&omicron;&nu;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&kappa;&lambda;&#8150;&nu;&alpha;&nu;
+&delta;&alpha;&mu;&#8049;&sigma;&alpha;&nu;&tau;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&rsquo;&Alpha;&chi;&alpha;&iota;&omicron;&#8059;&sigmaf;.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Which is as much as to say, &lsquo;The townsfolk call for help
+to their neighbours, the yokels, that were more numerous than
+they, and better men in battle . . . so when the sun turned to
+the time of the loosing of oxen the Town drave in the ranks of
+the Gown, and won the victory.&rsquo;&nbsp; They were strong, the
+townsmen, but not merciful.&nbsp; &lsquo;The crowns of some
+chaplains, viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these
+diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy,&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;some poor innocents these confounded sons of Satan knocked
+down, beat, and most cruelly wounded.&rsquo;&nbsp; The result, in
+the long run, was that the University received from Edward <span
+class="GutSmall">III.</span> &lsquo;a most large charter,
+containing many liberties, some that they had before, and
+<i>others that he had taken away from the town</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Thus Edward granted to the University &lsquo;the custody of the
+assize of bread, wine, and ale,&rsquo; the supervising of
+measures and weights, the sole power of clearing the streets of
+the town and suburbs.&nbsp; Moreover, the Mayor and the chief
+Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and
+humiliation on St. Scholastica&rsquo;s Day.&nbsp; Thus, by the
+middle of the fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had
+ended in the complete victory of the latter.</p>
+<p>Though the University owed its success to its clerkly
+character, and though the Legate backed it with all the power of
+Rome, yet the scholars were Englishmen and Liberals first,
+Catholics next.&nbsp; Thus they had all English sympathy with
+them when they quarrelled with the Legate in 1238, and shot his
+cook (who, indeed, had thrown hot broth at them); and thus, in
+later days, the undergraduates were with Simon de Montfort
+against King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful body of
+archers.&nbsp; The University, too, constantly withstood the
+Friars, who had settled in Oxford on pretence of wishing to
+convert the Jews, and had attempted to get education into their
+hands.&nbsp; &lsquo;The Preaching Friars, who had lately obtained
+from the Pope divers privileges, particularly an exemption, as
+they pretended, from being subject to the jurisdiction of the
+University, began to behave themselves very insolent against the
+Chancellors and Masters.&rsquo;&nbsp; (Wood, <i>Annals</i>, i.
+399.)&nbsp; The conduct of the Friars caused endless appeals to
+Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly national, and
+resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the
+King.&nbsp; The King&rsquo;s Jews, too, the University kept in
+pretty good order, and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched
+the crucifix from the hand of the Chancellor and trod it under
+foot, his tribesmen were compelled to raise &lsquo;a fair and
+stately cross of marble, very curiously wrought,&rsquo; on the
+scene of the sacrilege.</p>
+<p>The growth in power and importance of academic corporations
+having now been sketched, let us try to see what the outer aspect
+of the town was like in these rude times, and what manner of life
+the undergraduates led.&nbsp; For this purpose we may be allowed
+to draw a rude, but not unfaithful, picture of a day in a
+student&rsquo;s life.&nbsp; No incident will be introduced for
+which there is not authority, in Wood, or in Mr. Anstey&rsquo;s
+invaluable documents, the <i>Munimenta Academica</i>, published
+in the collection of the Master of the Rolls.&nbsp; Some latitude
+as to dates must be allowed, it is true, and we are not of course
+to suppose that any one day of life was ever so gloriously
+crowded as that of our undergraduate.</p>
+<p>The time is the end of the fourteenth century.&nbsp; The
+forest and the moor stretch to the east gate of the city.&nbsp;
+Magdalen bridge is not yet built, nor of course the tower of
+Magdalen, which M. Brunet-Debaines has sketched from Christ
+Church walks.&nbsp; Not till about 1473 was the tower built, and
+years would pass after that before choristers saluted with their
+fresh voices from its battlements the dawn of the first of May,
+or sermons were preached from the beautiful stone pulpit in the
+open air.&nbsp; When our undergraduate, Walter de Stoke, or, more
+briefly, Stoke, was at Oxford, the spires of the city were
+few.&nbsp; Where Magdalen stands now, the old Hospital of St.
+John then stood&mdash;a foundation of Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">III.</span>&mdash;but the Jews were no longer
+allowed to bury their dead in the close, which is now the
+&lsquo;Physic Garden.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;In 1289,&rsquo; as Wood
+says, &lsquo;the Jews were banished from England for various
+enormities and crimes committed by them.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Great
+and Little Jewries&mdash;those dim, populous streets behind the
+modern Post Office&mdash;had been sacked and gutted.&nbsp; No
+clerk would ever again risk his soul for a fair Jewess&rsquo;s
+sake, nor lose his life for his love at the hands of that eminent
+theologian, Fulke de Breaut&eacute;.&nbsp; The beautiful tower of
+Merton was still almost fresh, and the spires of St.
+Mary&rsquo;s, of old All Saints, of St. Frideswyde, and the
+strong tower of New College on the city wall, were the most
+prominent features in a bird&rsquo;s-eye view of the town.&nbsp;
+But though part of Merton, certainly the chapel tower as we have
+seen, the odd muniment-room with the steep stone roof, and,
+perhaps, the Library, existed; though New was built; and though
+Balliol and University owned some halls, on, or near, the site of
+the present colleges, Oxford was still an university of poor
+scholars, who lived in town&rsquo;s-people&rsquo;s dwellings.</p>
+<p>Thus, in the great quarrel with the Legate in 1238, John
+Currey, of Scotland, boarded with Will Maynard, while Hugh le
+Verner abode in the house of Osmund the Miller, with Raynold the
+Irishman and seven of his fellows.&nbsp; John Mortimer and Rob
+Norensis lodged with Augustine Gosse, and Adam de Wolton lodged
+in Cat Street, where you can still see the curious arched doorway
+of Catte&rsquo;s, or St. Catherine&rsquo;s Hall.&nbsp; By the
+time of my hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed that
+all scholars of years of discretion should live in the house of
+some sufficient principal (1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall,
+at the corner of the street that leads to New College out of the
+modern Broad Street, which was then the City Ditch.&nbsp; It is
+six o&rsquo;clock on a summer morning, and the bells waken Stoke,
+who is sleeping on a flock bed, in his little
+<i>camera</i>.&nbsp; His room, though he is not one of the
+luxurious clerks whom the University scolds in various statutes,
+is pretty well furnished.&nbsp; His bed alone is worth not less
+than fifteenpence; he has a &lsquo;cofer&rsquo; valued at
+twopence (we have plenty of those old valuations), and in his
+cofer are his black coat, which no one would think dear at
+fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence, &lsquo;a roll of the
+seven Psalms,&rsquo; and twelve books only &lsquo;at his beddes
+heed.&rsquo;&nbsp; Stoke has not</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,<br
+/>
+Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>like Chaucer&rsquo;s Undergraduate, who must have been a
+bibliophile.&nbsp; There are not many records of &lsquo;as many
+as twenty bookes&rsquo; in the old valuations.&nbsp; The great
+ornament of the room is a neat trophy of buckler, bow, arrows,
+and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on the wall.&nbsp;
+Stoke opens his eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes, and
+sees, with no surprise, that his laundress has not sent home his
+clean linen.&nbsp; No; Christina, of the parish of St. Martin,
+who used to be Stoke&rsquo;s <i>lotrix</i>, has been detected at
+last.&nbsp; &lsquo;Under pretence of washing for scholars,
+<i>multa mala perpetrata fuerunt</i>,&rsquo; she has committed
+all manner of crimes, and is now in the Spinning House,
+<i>carcerata fuit</i>.&nbsp; Stoke wastes a malediction on the
+laundress, and, dressing as well as he may, runs down to
+Parson&rsquo;s Pleasure, I hope, and has a swim, for I find no
+tub in his room, or, indeed, in the <i>camera</i> of any other
+scholar.&nbsp; It is now time to go, not to chapel&mdash;for
+Catte&rsquo;s has no chapel&mdash;but to parish Church, and Stoke
+goes very devoutly to St. Peter&rsquo;s, where we shall find him
+again, later in the day, in another mood.&nbsp; About eight
+o&rsquo;clock he &lsquo;commonises&rsquo; with a Paris man,
+Henricus de Bourges, who has an admirable mode of cooking
+omelettes, which makes his company much sought after at
+breakfast-time.&nbsp; The University, in old times, was full of
+French students, as Paris was thronged by Englishmen.&nbsp;
+Lectures begin at nine, and first there is lecture in the hall by
+the principal of Catte&rsquo;s.&nbsp; That scholar receives his
+pupils in a bare room, where it is very doubtful whether the
+students are allowed to sit down.&nbsp; From the curious old seal
+of the University of St. Andrews, however, it appears that the
+luxury of forms was permitted, in Scotland, to all but the
+servitors, who held the lecturer&rsquo;s candles.&nbsp; The
+principal of Catte&rsquo;s is in academic dress, and wears a
+black cape, boots, and a hood.&nbsp; The undergraduates have no
+distinguishing costume.&nbsp; After an hour or two of
+<i>viv&acirc; voce</i> exercises in the grammar of Priscian,
+preparatory lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to
+the &lsquo;schools,&rsquo; a set of low-roofed buildings between
+St. Mary&rsquo;s and Brasenose.&nbsp; There he will find the
+Divinity &lsquo;school&rsquo; or lecture-room in the place of
+honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the
+lecture-rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music,
+geometry, and astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and &lsquo;the
+tongues,&rsquo; stretching down School Street on either
+side.&nbsp; Here the Pr&aelig;lectors are holding forth, and all
+newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their subject
+<i>regere scholas</i>, whether they like it or not.&nbsp; Our
+friend, Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to
+pay his fine of twopence for omitting lecture, and go off to the
+festival of his <i>nation</i> (he is of the Southern nation, and
+hates Scotch, Welsh, and Irish) in the parish Church.&nbsp; He
+stops in the Flower Market and at a barber&rsquo;s shop on his
+way to St. Peter&rsquo;s, and comes forth a wonderful pagan
+figure with a Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance, with
+horns protruding through a wig of tow, with vine-leaves twisted
+in and out of the horns, and roses stuck wherever there is room
+for roses.&nbsp; Henricus de Bourges, and half a dozen Picardy
+men, with some merry souls from the Southern side of the Thames,
+are jigging down the High, playing bag-pipes and guitars.&nbsp;
+To these Stoke joins himself, and they waltz joyously into the
+church, and in and out of the gateways of the different halls,
+singing,&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Mihi est propositum in taberna mori,<br />
+Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,<br />
+Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori<br />
+Deus sit propitius huic potatori.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The students of the Northern nations mock, of course, at these
+revellers, thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged, and we shall see
+what comes of the quarrel.&nbsp; But the hall bells chime
+half-past noon; it is dinner-time in Oxford, and Stoke, as he
+throws off his mask (<i>larva</i>) and vine-leaves, mutters to
+himself the equivalent for &lsquo;there <i>will</i> be a row
+about this.&rsquo;&nbsp; There will, indeed, for the penalty is
+not &lsquo;crossing at the buttery,&rsquo; nor
+&lsquo;gating,&rsquo; but&mdash;excommunication!&nbsp; (<i>Munim.
+Academ.</i>, i. 18.)&nbsp; Dinner is not a very quiet affair, for
+the Catte&rsquo;s men have had to fight for their beer in the
+public streets with some Canterbury College fellows who were set
+on by their Warden, of all people, to commit this violence (<i>ut
+vi et violentia raperent cerevisiam aliorum scholarum in
+vico</i>): however, Catte&rsquo;s has had the best of it, and
+there is beer in plenty.&nbsp; It is possible, however, that fish
+is scarce, for certain &lsquo;forestallers&rsquo;
+(<i>regratarii</i>) have been buying up salmon and soles, and
+refusing to sell them at less than double the proper price.&nbsp;
+On the whole, however, there a rude abundance of meat and bread;
+indeed, Stoke may have fared better in Catte&rsquo;s than the
+modern undergraduate does in the hall of the college protected by
+St. Catherine.&nbsp; After dinner there would be lecture in Lent,
+but we are not in Lent.&nbsp; A young man&rsquo;s fancy lightly
+turns to the Beaumont, north of the modern Beaumont Street, where
+there are wide playing-fields, and space for archery, foot-ball,
+stool-ball, and other sports.&nbsp; Stoke rushes out of hall, and
+runs upstairs into the <i>camera</i> of Roger de Freshfield, a
+reading man, but a good fellow.&nbsp; He knocks and enters, and
+finds Freshfield over his favourite work, the <i>Posterior
+Analytics</i>, and a pottle of strawberries.&nbsp; &lsquo;Come
+down to the Beaumont, old man,&rsquo; he says, &lsquo;and play
+pyked staffe.&rsquo;&nbsp; Roger is disinclined to move, he
+<i>must</i> finish the <i>Posterior Analytics</i>.&nbsp; Stoke
+lounges about, in the eternal fashion of undergraduates after
+luncheon, and picking up the <i>Philobiblon</i> of Richard de
+Bury (then quite a new book), clinches his argument in favour of
+pyke and staffe with a quotation: &lsquo;You will perhaps see a
+stiff-necked youth lounging sluggishly in his study . . . He is
+not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to
+transfer his cup from side to side upon it.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thus
+addressed, Roger lays aside his <i>Analytics</i>, and the pair
+walk down by Balliol, to the Beaumont, where pyked staffe, or
+sword and buckler, is played.&nbsp; At the Beaumont they find two
+men who say that &lsquo;sword and buckler can be played sofft and
+ffayre,&rsquo; that is, without hard hitting, and with one of
+these Stoke begins to fence.&nbsp; Alas! a dispute arose about a
+stroke, the by-standers interfered, and Stoke&rsquo;s opponent
+drew his hanger (<i>extraxit cultellum vocatum hangere</i>), and
+hit one John Felerd over the sconce.&nbsp; On this the Proctors
+come up, and the assailant is put in Bocardo, while Stoke goes
+off to a &lsquo;pass-supper&rsquo; given by an <i>inceptor</i>,
+who has just taken his degree.&nbsp; These suppers were not
+voluntary entertainments, but enforced by law.&nbsp; At supper
+the talk ranges over University gossip, they tell of the scholar
+who lately tried to raise the devil in Grope Lane, and was
+pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul fiend.&nbsp; They
+speak of the Queen&rsquo;s man, who has just been plucked for
+maintaining that <i>Ego currit</i>, or <i>ego est currens</i>, is
+as good Latin as <i>ego curro</i>.&nbsp; Then the party breaks
+up, and Stoke goes towards Merton, with some undergraduates of
+that college, Bridlington, Alderberk, and Lymby.&nbsp; At the
+corner of Grope Lane, out come many men of the Northern nations,
+armed with shields, and bows and arrows.&nbsp; Stoke and his
+friends run into Merton for weapons, and &lsquo;standing in a
+window of that hall, shot divers arrows, and one that Bridlington
+shot hit Henry de l&rsquo;Isle, and David Kirkby unmercifully
+perished, for after John de Benton had given him a dangerous
+wound in the head with his faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and
+wounded him in the knee with his sword.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke
+had a brush with the Town before he got safely back to
+Catte&rsquo;s Hall.&nbsp; The old rudeness gave way gradually, as
+the colleges swallowed up the irregular halls, and as the
+scholars unattached, <i>infando nomine Chamber-Dekyns</i>, ceased
+to exist.&nbsp; Learning, however, dwindled, as colleges
+increased, under the clerical and reactionary rule of the House
+of Lancaster.</p>
+<h2><a name="page67"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+67</span>CHAPTER III<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">THE RENAISSANCE AND THE
+REFORMATION</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> have now arrived at a period in
+the history of Oxford which is confused and unhappy, but for us
+full of interest, and perhaps of instruction.&nbsp; The hundred
+years that passed by between the age of Chaucer and the age of
+Erasmus were, in Southern Europe, years of the most eager
+life.&nbsp; We hear very often&mdash;too often, perhaps&mdash;of
+what is called the Renaissance.&nbsp; The energy of delight with
+which Italy welcomed the new birth of art, of literature, of
+human freedom, has been made familiar to every reader.&nbsp; It
+is not with Italy, but with England and with Oxford, that we are
+concerned.&nbsp; How did the University and the colleges prosper
+in that strenuous time when the world ran after loveliness of
+form and colour, as, in other ages, it has run after warlike
+renown, or the far-off rewards of the saintly life?&nbsp; What
+was Oxford doing when Florence, Venice, and Rome were striving
+towards no meaner goal than perfection?</p>
+<p>It must be said that &lsquo;the spring came slowly up this
+way.&rsquo;&nbsp; The University merely reflected the very
+practical character of the people.&nbsp; In contemplating the
+events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their
+influence on English civilisation, we are reminded once more of
+the futility of certain modern aspirations.&nbsp; No amount of
+University Commissions, nor of well-meant reforms, will change
+the nature of Englishmen.&nbsp; It is impossible, by
+distributions of University prizes and professorships, to attract
+into the career of letters that proportion of industry and
+ingenuity which, in Germany for example, is devoted to the
+scholastic life.&nbsp; Politics, trade, law, sport, religion,
+will claim their own in England, just as they did at the Revival
+of Letters.&nbsp; The illustrious century which Italy employed in
+unburying, appropriating, and enjoying the treasures of Greek
+literature and art, our fathers gave, in England, to dynastic and
+constitutional squabbles, and to religious broils.&nbsp; The
+Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a bitter
+and changeful spring.&nbsp; There was an hour of genial warmth,
+there breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer;
+then came frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court
+favour shone on literature for a while, when Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">VIII.</span> encouraged study, and Wolsey and
+Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more
+the bad days of religious strife returned, and the promise of
+learning was destroyed.&nbsp; Thus the chief result of the
+awakening thought of the fourteenth century in England was not a
+lively delight in literature, but the appearance of the
+Lollards.&nbsp; The intensely practical genius of our race turned
+not to letters, but to questions about the soul and its future,
+about property and its distribution.&nbsp; The Lollards were put
+down in Oxford; &lsquo;the tares were weeded out&rsquo; by the
+House of Lancaster, and in the process the germs of free thought,
+of originality, and of a rational education, were
+destroyed.&nbsp; &lsquo;Wyclevism did domineer among us,&rsquo;
+says Wood; and, in fact, the intellect of the University was
+absorbed, like the intellect of France during the heat of the
+Jansenist controversy, in defending or assailing &lsquo;267
+damned conclusions,&rsquo; drawn from the books of Wyclif.&nbsp;
+The University &lsquo;lost many of her children through the
+profession of Wyclevism.&rsquo;&nbsp; Those who remained were
+often &lsquo;beneficed clerks.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Friars lifted up
+their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large ecclesiastical
+school.&nbsp; As the University declared to Archbishop Chichele
+(1438), &lsquo;Our noble mother, that was blessed in so goodly an
+offspring, is all but utterly destroyed and
+desolate.&rsquo;&nbsp; Presently the foreign wars and the wars of
+the Roses drained the University of the youth of England.&nbsp;
+The country was overrun with hostile forces, or infested by
+disbanded soldiers.&nbsp; Plague and war, war and plague, and
+confusion, alternate in the annals.&nbsp; Sickly as Oxford is
+to-day by climate and situation, she is a city of health compared
+to what she was in the middle ages.&nbsp; In 1448 &lsquo;a
+pestilence broke out, occasioned by the overflowing of waters, .
+. . also by the lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory
+in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells, and
+consequently diseases.&rsquo;&nbsp; In the general dulness and
+squalor two things were remarkable: one, the last splendour of
+the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the new learning
+from Italy.&nbsp; In 1452, George Neville of Balliol, brother of
+the King-maker, gave the most prodigious pass-supper that was
+ever served in Oxford.&nbsp; On the first day there were 600
+messes of meat, divided into three courses.&nbsp; The second
+course is worthy of the attention of the epicure:</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">SECOND COURSE</p>
+<table>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Vian in brase.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Carcell.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Crane in sawce.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Partrych.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Young Pocock.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Venson baked.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Coney.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Fryed meat in paste.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Pigeons.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>Lesh Lumbert.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Byttor.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>A Frutor.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td><p>Curlew.</p>
+</td>
+<td><p>A Sutteltee.</p>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+<p>Against this prodigious gormandising we must set that noble
+gift, the Library presented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of
+Gloucester.&nbsp; In the Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark
+many books of the utmost value to the impoverished
+students.&nbsp; Here are the works of Plato, and the
+<i>Ethics</i> and <i>Politics</i> of Aristotle, translated by
+Leonard the Aretine.&nbsp; Here, among the numerous writings of
+the Fathers, are Tully and Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna,
+<i>Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum</i>, Apuleius, Aulus
+Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch.&nbsp; Here, with Ovid&rsquo;s
+verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his <i>Divine
+Comedy</i>.&nbsp; Here, rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the
+silent father of Liddel&rsquo;s and Scott&rsquo;s to be.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p72b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Broad Street, a fine wide street containing many historic
+buildings, and showing the Sheldonian and the old Clarendon
+Building on the right"
+title=
+"Broad Street, a fine wide street containing many historic
+buildings, and showing the Sheldonian and the old Clarendon
+Building on the right"
+ src="images/p72s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift
+of those manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their
+illuminations proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the
+establishment of a printing-press at Oxford, and the arrival of
+certain Italians, &lsquo;to propagate and settle the studies of
+true and genuine humanity among us.&rsquo;&nbsp; The exact date
+of the introduction of printing let us leave to be determined by
+the learned writer who is now at work on the history of
+Oxford.&nbsp; The advent of the Italians is dated by Wood in
+1488.&nbsp; Polydore Virgil had lectured in New College.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;He first of all taught literature in Oxford.&nbsp;
+Cyprianus and Nicholaus, <i>Italici</i>, also arrived and dined
+with the Vice-President of Magdalen on Christmas Day.&nbsp; Lily
+and Colet, too, one of them the founder, the other the first Head
+Master, of St. Paul&rsquo;s School, were about this time studying
+in Italy, under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus.&nbsp;
+Oxford, which had so long been in hostile communication with
+Italy as represented by the Papal Courts, at last touched, and
+was thrilled by the electric current of Italian
+civilisation.&nbsp; At this conjuncture of affairs, who but is
+reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua?&nbsp; Till
+the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that
+&lsquo;huge barbarian pupil,&rsquo; and had revelled in vast
+Rabelaisian suppers: &lsquo;of fat beeves he had killed three
+hundred sixty seven thousand and fourteen, that in the entering
+in of spring he might have plenty of powdered beef.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The bill of fare of George Neville&rsquo;s feast is like one of
+the catalogues dear to the Cur&eacute; of Meudon.&nbsp; For
+Oxford, as for Gargantua, &lsquo;they appointed a great
+sophister-doctor, that read him Donatus, Theodoletus, and Alanus,
+in <i>parabolis</i>.&rsquo;&nbsp; Oxford spent far more than
+Gargantua&rsquo;s eighteen years and eleven months over
+&lsquo;the book de Modis significandis, with the commentaries of
+Berlinguandus and a rabble of others.&rsquo;&nbsp; Now, under
+Colet, and Erasmus (1497), Oxford was put, like Gargantua, under
+new masters, and learned that the old scholarship &lsquo;had been
+but brutishness, and the old wisdom but blunt, foppish toys
+serving only to bastardise noble spirits, and to corrupt all the
+flower of youth.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The prospects of classical learning at Oxford (and, whatever
+may be the case to-day, on classical learning depended, in the
+fifteenth century, the fortunes of European literature) now
+seemed fair enough.&nbsp; People from the very source of
+knowledge were lecturing in Oxford.&nbsp; Wolsey was Bursar of
+Magdalen.&nbsp; The colleges, to which B. N. C. was added in
+1509, and C. C. C. in 1516, were competing with each other for
+success in the New Learning.&nbsp; Fox, the founder of C. C. C.,
+established in his college two chairs of Greek and Latin,
+&lsquo;to extirpate barbarism.&rsquo;&nbsp; Meanwhile, Cambridge
+had to hire an Italian to write public speeches at twenty pence
+each!&nbsp; Henry <span class="GutSmall">VIII.</span> in his
+youth was, like Francis I., the patron of literature, as
+literature was understood in Italy.&nbsp; He saw in learning a
+new splendour to adorn his court, a new source of intellectual
+luxury, though even Henry had an eye on the theological aspect of
+letters.&nbsp; Between 1500 and 1530 Oxford was noisy with the
+clink of masons&rsquo; hammers and chisels.&nbsp; Brasenose,
+Corpus, and the magnificent kitchen of Christ Church, were being
+erected.&nbsp; (The beautiful staircase, which M. Brunet-Debaines
+has sketched, was not finished till 1640.&nbsp; The world owes it
+to Dr. Fell.&nbsp; The Oriel niches, designed in the
+illustration, are of rather later date.)&nbsp; The streets were
+crowded with carts, dragging in from all the neighbouring
+quarries stones for the future homes of the fair
+humanities.&nbsp; Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute
+for the Platonic Society of Florence.&nbsp; &lsquo;He would
+hardly care much about going to Italy at all, except for the sake
+of having been there.&nbsp; When I listen to Colet, it seems to
+me like listening to Plato himself&rsquo;; and he praises the
+judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and Linacre,
+who had been taught in Italy.</p>
+<p>In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was
+rotten at the root.&nbsp; Theology killed it, or, at the least,
+breathed on it a deadly blight.&nbsp; Our academic forefathers
+&lsquo;drove at practice,&rsquo; and saw everything with the eyes
+of party men, and of men who recognised no interest save that of
+religion.&nbsp; It is Mr. Seebohm (<i>Oxford Reformers</i>,
+1867), I think, who detects, in Colet&rsquo;s concern with the
+religious side of literature, the influence of Savonarola.&nbsp;
+When in Italy &lsquo;he gave himself entirely to the study of the
+Holy Scriptures.&rsquo;&nbsp; He brought to England from Italy,
+not the early spirit of Pico of Mirandola, the delightful freedom
+of his youth, but his later austerity, his later concern with the
+harmony of scripture and philosophy.&nbsp; The book which the
+dying Petrarch held wistfully in his hands, revering its very
+material shape, though he could not spell its contents, was the
+<i>Iliad</i> of Homer.&nbsp; The book which the young Renaissance
+held in its hands in England, with reverence and eagerness as
+strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul.&nbsp; It
+was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in 1496&ndash;97, when
+doctors and abbots flocked to hear him, with their note-books in
+their hands.&nbsp; Thus Oxford differed from Florence, England
+from Italy: the former all intent on what it believed to be the
+very Truth, the latter all absorbed on what it knew to be no
+other than Beauty herself.</p>
+<p>We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford
+made.&nbsp; The search for Truth was as certain to bring
+&lsquo;not peace but a sword&rsquo; as the search for Beauty was
+to bring the decadence of Italy, the corruption of manners, the
+slavery of two hundred years.&nbsp; Still, our practical
+earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of the
+Renaissance.&nbsp; It is not possible here to tell the story of
+religious and social changes, which followed so hard upon each
+other, in the reigns of Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">VIII.</span>, Edward <span
+class="GutSmall">VI.</span>, Mary, and Elizabeth.&nbsp; A few
+moments in these stormy years are still memorable for some
+terrible or ludicrous event.</p>
+<p>That Oxford was rather &lsquo;Trojan&rsquo; than
+&lsquo;Greek,&rsquo; that men were more concerned about their
+dinners and their souls than their prosody and philosophy, in
+1531, is proved by the success of Grynaeus.&nbsp; He visited the
+University and carried off quantities of MSS., chiefly
+Neoplatonic, on which no man set any value.&nbsp; Yet, in 1535,
+Layton, a Commissioner, wrote to Cromwell that he and his
+companions had established the New Learning in the
+University.&nbsp; A Lecture in Greek was founded in Magdalen, two
+chairs of Greek and Latin in New, two in All Souls, and two
+already existed, as we have seen, in C. C. C.&nbsp; This Layton
+is he that took a Rabelaisian and unquotable revenge on that old
+tyrant of the Schools, Duns Scotus.&nbsp; &lsquo;We have set
+Dunce in Bocardo, and utterly banished him from Oxford for ever,
+with all his blind glosses . . . And the second time we came to
+New College we found all the great quadrant full of the leaves of
+Dunce, the wind blowing them into every corner.&nbsp; And there
+we found a certain Mr. Greenfield, a gentleman of
+Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the same books&rsquo;
+leaves, as he said, therewith to make him <i>sewers</i> or
+<i>blanshers</i>, to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to
+have the better cry with his hounds.&rsquo;&nbsp; Ah! if the
+University Commissioners would only set Aristotle, and Messrs.
+Ritter and Preller, &lsquo;in Bocardo,&rsquo; many a young
+gentleman out of Buckinghamshire and other counties would
+joyously help in the good work, and use the pages, if not for
+<i>blanshers</i>, for other sportive purposes!</p>
+<p>&lsquo;<i>Habent sua fata libelli</i>,&rsquo; as Terentianus
+Maurus says, in a frequently quoted verse.&nbsp; If
+Cromwell&rsquo;s Commissioners were hard on Duns, the Visitors of
+Edward <span class="GutSmall">VI.</span> were ruthless in their
+condemnation of everything that smacked of Popery or of
+magic.&nbsp; Evangelical religion in England has never been very
+favourable to learning.&nbsp; Thus, in 1550 &lsquo;the ancient
+libraries were by their appointment rifled.&nbsp; Many
+manuscripts, guilty of no other superstition than red letters in
+the front or titles, were condemned to the fire . . . Such books
+wherein appeared angles were thought sufficient to be destroyed,
+because accounted Papish or diabolical, or both.&rsquo;&nbsp; A
+cart-load of MSS., lucubrations of the Fellows of Merton, chiefly
+in controversial divinity, was taken away; but, by the good
+services of one Herks, a Dutchman, many books were preserved,
+and, later, entered the Bodleian Library.&nbsp; The world can
+spare the controversial manuscripts of the Fellows of Merton, but
+who knows what invaluable scrolls may have perished in the
+Puritan bonfire!&nbsp; Persons, the librarian of Balliol, sold
+old books to buy Protestant ones.&nbsp; Two noble libraries were
+sold for forty shillings, for waste paper.&nbsp; Thus the reign
+of Edward <span class="GutSmall">VI.</span> gave free play to
+that ascetic and intolerable hatred of letters which had now and
+again made its voice heard under Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">VIII.</span>&nbsp; Oxford was almost
+empty.&nbsp; The schools were used by laundresses, as a place
+wherein clothes might conveniently be dried.&nbsp; The citizens
+encroached on academic property.&nbsp; Some schools were quite
+destroyed, and the sites converted into gardens.&nbsp; Few men
+took degrees.&nbsp; The college plate and the jewels left by
+pious benefactors were stolen, and went to the melting-pot.&nbsp;
+Thus flourished Oxford under Edward <span
+class="GutSmall">VI.</span></p>
+<p>The reign of Mary was scarcely more favourable to
+letters.&nbsp; No one knew what to be at in religion.&nbsp; In
+Magdalen no one could be found to say Mass, the fellows were
+turned out, the undergraduates were whipped&mdash;boyish
+martyrs&mdash;and crossed at the buttery.&nbsp; What most
+pleases, in this tragic reign, is the anecdote of Edward Anne of
+Corpus.&nbsp; Anne, with the conceit of youth, had written a
+Latin satire on the Mass.&nbsp; He was therefore sentenced to be
+publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one
+lash for each line in his satire.&nbsp; Never, surely, was a poet
+so sharply taught the merit of brevity.&nbsp; How Edward Anne
+must have regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a
+biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting of the wit in
+the tail!</p>
+<p>Oxford still retains a memory of the hideous crime of this
+reign.&nbsp; In Broad Street, under the windows of Balliol, there
+is a small stone cross in the pavement.&nbsp; This marks the
+place where, some years ago, a great heap of wooden ashes was
+found.&nbsp; These ashes were the remains of the fire of October
+16th, 1555&mdash;the day when Ridley and Latimer were
+burned.&nbsp; &lsquo;They were brought,&rsquo; says Wood,
+&lsquo;to a place over against Balliol College, where now stands
+a row of poor cottages, a little before which, under the town
+wall, ran so clear a stream that it gave the name of Canditch,
+<i>candida fossa</i>, to the way leading by it.&rsquo;&nbsp; To
+recover the memory of that event, let the reader fancy himself on
+the top of the tower of St. Michael&rsquo;s, that is, immediately
+above the city wall.&nbsp; No houses interfere between him and
+the open country, in which Balliol stands; not with its present
+frontage, but much farther back.&nbsp; A clear stream runs
+through the place where is now Broad Street, and the road above
+is dark with a swaying crowd, out of which rises the vapour of
+smoke from the martyrs&rsquo; pile.&nbsp; At your feet, on the
+top of Bocardo prison (which spanned the street at the North
+Gate), Cranmer stands manacled, watching the fiery death which is
+soon to purge away the memory of his own faults and crimes.&nbsp;
+He, too, joined that &lsquo;noble army of martyrs&rsquo; who
+fought all, though they knew it not, for one cause&mdash;the
+freedom of the human spirit.</p>
+<p>It was in a night-battle that they fell, and &lsquo;confused
+was the cry of the p&aelig;an,&rsquo; but they won the victory,
+and we have entered into the land for which they contended.&nbsp;
+When we think of these martyrdoms, can we wonder that the Fellows
+of Lincoln did not spare to ring a merry peal on their gaudy-day,
+the day of St. Hugh, even though Mary the Queen had just left her
+bitter and weary life?</p>
+<p>It would be pleasant to have to say that learning returned to
+Oxford on the rising of &lsquo;that bright Occidental star, Queen
+Elizabeth.&rsquo;&nbsp; On the other hand, the University
+recovered slowly, after being &lsquo;much troubled,&rsquo; as
+Wood says, &lsquo;<i>and hurried up and down</i> by the changes
+of religion.&rsquo;&nbsp; We get a glimpse, from Wood, of the
+Fellows of Merton singing the psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins
+round a fire in the College Hall.&nbsp; We see the sub-warden
+snatching the book out of the hands of a junior fellow, and
+declaring &lsquo;that he would never dance after that
+pipe.&rsquo;&nbsp; We find Oxford so illiterate, that she could
+not even provide an University preacher!&nbsp; A country
+gentleman, Richard Taverner of Woodeaton, would stroll into St.
+Mary&rsquo;s, with his sword and damask gown, and give the
+Academicians, destitute of academical advice, a sermon beginning
+with these words:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Arriving at the mount of St. Mary&rsquo;s,
+I have brought you some fine bisketts baked in the Oven of
+Charitie, carefully conserved for the chickens of the Church, the
+sparrows of the spirit, and the sweet swallows of
+salvation.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In spite of these evil symptoms, a Greek oration and plenty of
+Latin plays were ready for Queen Elizabeth when she visited
+Oxford in 1566.&nbsp; The religious refugees, who had
+&lsquo;eaten mice at Zurich&rsquo; in Mary&rsquo;s time, had
+returned, and their influence was hostile to learning.&nbsp; A
+man who had lived on mice for his faith was above Greek.&nbsp;
+The court which contained Sydney, and which welcomed Bruno, was
+strong enough to make the classics popular.&nbsp; That famed
+Polish Count, Alasco, was &lsquo;received with Latin orations and
+disputes (1583) in the best manner,&rsquo; and only a scoffing
+Italian, like Bruno, ventured to call the Heads of Houses <i>the
+Drowsy heads</i>&mdash;<i>dormitantes</i>.&nbsp; Bruno was a man
+whom nothing could teach to speak well of people in
+authority.&nbsp; Oxford enjoyed the religious peace (not extended
+to &lsquo;Seminarists&rsquo;) of Elizabeth&rsquo;s and
+James&rsquo;s reigns, and did not foresee that she was about to
+become the home of the Court and a place of arms.</p>
+<h2><a name="page89"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+89</span>CHAPTER IV<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">JACOBEAN OXFORD</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> gardens of Wadham College on a
+bright morning in early spring are a scene in which the memory of
+old Oxford pleasantly lingers, and is easily revived.&nbsp; The
+great cedars throw their secular shadow on the ancient turf, the
+chapel forms a beautiful background; the whole place is exactly
+what it was two hundred and sixty years ago.&nbsp; The stones of
+Oxford walls, when they do not turn black and drop off in flakes,
+assume tender tints of the palest gold, red, and orange.&nbsp;
+Along a wall, which looks so old that it may well have formed a
+defence of the ancient Augustinian priory, the stars of the
+yellow jasmine flower abundantly.&nbsp; The industrious hosts of
+the bees have left their cells, to labour in this first morning
+of spring; the doves coo, the thrushes are noisy in the
+trees.&nbsp; All breathes of the year renewal, and of the coming
+April; and all that gladdens us may have gladdened some indolent
+scholar in the time of King James.</p>
+<p>In the reign of the first Stuart king of England, Oxford
+became the town that we know.&nbsp; Even in Elizabeth&rsquo;s
+days, could we ascend the stream of centuries, we should find
+ourselves much at home in Oxford.&nbsp; The earliest trustworthy
+map, that of Agas (1578), is worth studying, if we wish to
+understand the Oxford that Elizabeth left, and that the
+architects of James embellished, giving us the most interesting
+examples of collegiate buildings, which are both stately and
+comfortable.&nbsp; Let us enter Oxford by the Iffley Road, in the
+year 1578.&nbsp; We behold, as Agas enthusiastically writes:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;A citie seated, rich in everything,<br />
+Girt with wood and water, meadow, corn, and hill.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The way is not bordered, of course, by the long, straggling
+streets of rickety cottages, which now stretch from the bridge
+half-way to Cowley and Iffley.&nbsp; The church, called by
+ribalds &lsquo;the boiled rabbit,&rsquo; from its peculiar shape,
+lies on the right; there is a gate in the city wall, on the place
+where the road now turns to Holywell.&nbsp; At this time the
+walls still existed, and ran from Magdalen past &lsquo;St.
+Mary&rsquo;s College, called Newe,&rsquo; through Exeter, through
+the site of Mr. Parker&rsquo;s shop, and all along the south side
+of Broad Street to St. Michael&rsquo;s, and Bocardo Gate.&nbsp;
+There the wall cut across to the castle.&nbsp; On the southern
+side of the city, it skirted Corpus and Merton Gardens, and was
+interrupted by Christ Church.&nbsp; Probably if it were possible
+for us to visit Elizabethan Oxford, the walls and the five castle
+towers would seem the most curious features in the place.&nbsp;
+Entering the East Gate, Magdalen and Magdalen Grammar School
+would be familiar objects.&nbsp; St. Edmund&rsquo;s Hall would be
+in its present place, and Queen&rsquo;s would present its ancient
+Gothic front.&nbsp; It is easy to imagine the change in the High
+Street which would be produced by a Queen&rsquo;s not unlike
+Oriel, in the room of the highly classical edifice of Wren.&nbsp;
+All Souls would be less remarkable; at St. Mary&rsquo;s we should
+note the absence of the &lsquo;scandalous image&rsquo; of Our
+Lady over the door.&nbsp; At Merton the fellows&rsquo; quadrangle
+did not yet exist, and a great wood-yard bordered on
+Corpus.&nbsp; In front of Oriel was an open space with trees, and
+there were a few scattered buildings, such as Peckwater&rsquo;s
+Inn (on the site of &lsquo;Peck&rsquo;), and Canterbury
+College.&nbsp; Tom Quad was stately but incomplete.&nbsp; Turning
+from St. Mary&rsquo;s past B. N. C., we miss the attics in
+Brasenose front, we miss the imposing Radcliffe, we miss all the
+quadrangle of the Schools, except the Divinity school, and we
+miss the Theatre.&nbsp; If we go down South Street, past Ch. Ch.
+we find an open space where Pembroke stands.&nbsp; Where Wadham
+is now, the most uniform, complete, and unchanged of all the
+colleges, there are only the open pleasances, and perhaps a few
+ruins of the Augustinian priory.&nbsp; St. John&rsquo;s lacks its
+inner quadrangle, and Balliol, in place of its new buildings, has
+its old delightful grove.&nbsp; As to the houses of the town,
+they are not unlike the tottering and picturesque old roofs and
+gables of King Street.</p>
+<p>To the Oxford of Elizabeth&rsquo;s reign, then, the founders
+and architects of her successor added, chiefly, the
+Schools&rsquo; quadrangle, with the great gate of the five
+orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in its own
+despite.&nbsp; They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort,
+at Merton; they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful
+achievement.&nbsp; Their taste was a medley of new and old: they
+made a not uninteresting effort to combine the exquisiteness of
+Gothic decoration with the proportions of Greek
+architecture.&nbsp; The tower of the five orders reminds the
+spectator, in a manner, of the style of Milton.&nbsp; It is rich
+and overloaded, yet its natural beauty is not abated by the
+relics out of the great treasures of Greece and Rome, which are
+built into the mass.&nbsp; The Ionic and Corinthian pillars are
+like the Latinisms of Milton, the double-gilding which once
+covered the figures and emblems of the upper part of the tower
+gave them the splendour of Miltonic ornament.&nbsp; &lsquo;When
+King James came from Woodstock to see this quadrangular pile, he
+commanded the gilt figures to be whitened over,&rsquo; because
+they were so dazzling, or, as Wood expresses it, &lsquo;so
+glorious and splendid that none, especially when the sun shone,
+could behold them.&rsquo;&nbsp; How characteristic of James is
+this anecdote!&nbsp; He was by no means <i>le roi soleil</i>, as
+courtiers called Louis <span class="GutSmall">XIV.</span>, as
+divines called the pedantic Stuart.&nbsp; It is easy to fancy the
+King issuing from the Library of Bodley, where he has been
+turning over books of theology, prosing, and displaying his
+learning for hours.&nbsp; The rheumy, blinking eyes are dazzled
+in the sunlight, and he peevishly commands the gold work to be
+&lsquo;whitened over.&rsquo;&nbsp; Certainly the translators of
+the Bible were but ill-advised when they compared his Majesty to
+the rising sun in all his glory.</p>
+<p>James was rather fond of visiting Oxford and the royal
+residence at Woodstock.&nbsp; We shall see that his Court, the
+most dissolute, perhaps, that England ever tolerated, corrupted
+the manners of the students.&nbsp; On one of his Majesty&rsquo;s
+earliest visits he had a chance of displaying the penetration of
+which he was so proud.&nbsp; James was always finding out
+something or somebody, till it almost seemed as if people had
+discovered that the best way to flatter him was to try to deceive
+him.&nbsp; In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard
+Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic.&nbsp; This Haydock practised his
+profession during the day like other mortals, but varied from the
+kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching all
+night.&nbsp; It was Haydock&rsquo;s contention that he preached
+unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a text with
+the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as were
+revealed to him in slumber, &lsquo;his preaching coming by
+revelation.&rsquo;&nbsp; Though people went to hear Haydock, they
+were chiefly influenced by curiosity.&nbsp; &lsquo;His auditory
+were willing to silence him by pulling, haling, and pinching him,
+yet would he pertinaciously persist to the end, and sleep
+still.&rsquo;&nbsp; The King was introduced into Haydock&rsquo;s
+bedroom, heard him declaim, and next day cross-examined him in
+private.&nbsp; Awed by the royal acuteness, Haydock confessed
+that he was a humbug, and that he had taken to preaching all
+night by way of getting a little notoriety, and because he felt
+himself to be &lsquo;a buried man in the University.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p96b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"New College Cloisters and Tower"
+title=
+"New College Cloisters and Tower"
+ src="images/p96s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>That a man should hope to get reputation by preaching all
+night is itself a proof that the University, under James, was too
+theologically minded.&nbsp; When has it been otherwise?&nbsp; The
+religious strife of the reigns of Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">VIII.</span>, Edward <span
+class="GutSmall">VI.</span>, and Mary, was not asleep; the
+troubles of Charles&rsquo;s time were beginning to stir.&nbsp;
+Oxford was as usual an epitome of English opinion.&nbsp; We see
+the struggle of the wildest Puritanism, of Arminianism, of
+Pelagianism, of a dozen &lsquo;isms,&rsquo; which are dead
+enough, but have left their pestilent progeny to disturb a place
+of religion, learning, and amusement.&nbsp; By whatever names the
+different sects were called, men&rsquo;s ideas and tendencies
+were divided into two easily recognisable classes.&nbsp;
+Calvinism and Puritanism on one side, with the Puritanic haters
+of letters and art, were opposed to Catholicism in germ, to
+literature, and mundane studies.&nbsp; How difficult it is to
+take a side in this battle, where both parties had one foot on
+firm ground, the other in chaos, where freedom, or what was to
+become freedom of thought, was allied with narrow bigotry, where
+learning was chained to superstition!</p>
+<p>As early as 1606, Mr. William Laud, B.D., of St. John&rsquo;s
+College, began to disturb the University.&nbsp; The young man
+preached a sermon which was thought to look Romewards.&nbsp; Laud
+became <i>suspect</i>, it was thought a &lsquo;scandalous&rsquo;
+thing to give him the usual courteous greetings in the street or
+in the college quadrangle.&nbsp; From this time the history of
+Oxford, for forty years, is mixed up with the history of
+Laud.&nbsp; The divisions of Roundhead and of Cavalier have
+begun.&nbsp; The majority of the undergraduates are on the side
+of Laud; and the Court, the citizens, and many of the elder
+members of the University, are with the Puritans.</p>
+<p>The Court and the King, we have said, were fond of being
+entertained in the college halls.&nbsp; James went from libraries
+to academic disputations, thence to dinner, and from dinner to
+look on at comedies played by the students.&nbsp; The Cambridge
+men did not care to see so much royal favour bestowed on
+Oxford.&nbsp; When James visited the University in 1641, a
+Cambridge wit produced a remarkable epigram.&nbsp; For some
+mysterious reason the playful fancies of the sister University
+have never been greatly admired at Oxford, where the brisk air,
+men flatter themselves, breeds nimbler humours.&nbsp; Here is
+part of the Cantab&rsquo;s epigram:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;To Oxenford the King has gone,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; With all his mighty peers,<br />
+That hath in peace maintained us,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; These five or six long years.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The poem maunders on for half a dozen lines, and &lsquo;loses
+itself in the sands,&rsquo; like the River Rhine, without coming
+to any particular point or conclusion.&nbsp; How much more lively
+is the Oxford couplet on the King, who, being bored by some
+amateur theatricals, twice or thrice made as if he would leave
+the hall, where men failed dismally to entertain him.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;&ldquo;The King himself did
+offer,&rdquo;&mdash;&ldquo;What, I pray?&rdquo;<br />
+&ldquo;He offered twice or thrice&mdash;to go
+away!&rdquo;&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to
+wear love-locks.&nbsp; In Elizabeth&rsquo;s time, when men wore
+their hair &lsquo;no longer than their ears,&rsquo; long locks
+had been a mark, says Wood, of &lsquo;swaggerers.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Drinking and gambling were now very fashionable, undergraduates
+were whipped for wearing boots, while &lsquo;Puritans were many
+and troublesome,&rsquo; and Laud publicly declared (1614) that
+&lsquo;Presbyterians were as bad as Papists.&rsquo;&nbsp; Did
+Laud, after all, think Papists so very bad?&nbsp; In 1617 he was
+President of his college, St. John&rsquo;s, on which he set his
+mark.&nbsp; It is to Laud and to Inigo Jones that Oxford owes the
+beautiful garden-front, perhaps the most lovely thing in
+Oxford.&nbsp; From the gardens&mdash;where for so many summers
+the beauty of England has rested in the shadow of the
+chestnut-trees, amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy
+with the scent of the acacia flowers&mdash;from the gardens,
+Laud&rsquo;s building looks rather like a country-house than a
+college.</p>
+<p>If St. John&rsquo;s men have lived in the University too much
+as if it were a large country-house, if they have imitated rather
+the Toryism than the learning of their great Archbishop, the
+blame is partly Laud&rsquo;s.&nbsp; How much harm to study he and
+Waynflete have unwittingly done, and how much they have added to
+the romance of Oxford!&nbsp; It is easy to understand that men
+find it a weary task to read in sight of the beauty of the groves
+of Magdalen and of St. John&rsquo;s.&nbsp; When Kubla Khan
+&lsquo;a stately pleasure-dome decreed,&rsquo; he did not mean to
+settle students there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays,
+and for Greek and Latin prose compositions.&nbsp; Kubla Khan
+would have found a palace to his desire in the gardens of Laud,
+or where Cherwell, &lsquo;meandering with a mazy motion,&rsquo;
+stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the mill-wheel, and flows
+to the Isis through meadows white and purple with
+fritillaries.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;And here are gardens bright with sinuous
+rills,<br />
+Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree&rsquo;;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>but here is scarcely the proper training-ground of first-class
+men!</p>
+<p>Oxford returned to her ancient uses in 1625.&nbsp; Soon after
+the accession of Charles I. the plague broke out in London, and
+Oxford entertained the Parliament, as six hundred years before
+she had received the Witan.&nbsp; There seemed something ominous
+in all that Charles did in his earlier years&mdash;the air, or
+men&rsquo;s minds, was full of the presage of fate.&nbsp; It was
+observed that the House of Commons met in the Divinity School,
+and that the place seemed to have infected them with theological
+passion.&nbsp; After 1625 there was never a Parliament but had
+its committee to discuss religion, and to stray into the devious
+places of divinity.&nbsp; The plague pursued Charles to
+Oxford.&nbsp; In those days, and long afterwards, it was a common
+complaint that the citizens built rows of poor cottages within
+the walls, and that these cottages were crowded by dirty and
+indigent people.&nbsp; Plague was bred almost yearly at Oxford,
+and Charles really seems to have improved the sanitary
+arrangements of the city.</p>
+<p>Laud, the President of St. John&rsquo;s, became, by some
+intrigue, Chancellor of the University.&nbsp; He made Oxford many
+presents of Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic MSS.&nbsp;
+There may have been&mdash;let us hope there were&mdash;quiet
+bookworms who enjoyed these gifts, while the town and University
+were bubbling over with religious feuds.&nbsp; People grumbled
+that &lsquo;Popish darts were whet afresh on a Dutch
+grindstone.&rsquo;&nbsp; A series of anti-Romish and anti-Royal
+sermons and pamphlets, followed as a rule by a series of
+recantations, kept men&rsquo;s minds in a ferment.&nbsp; The good
+that Laud did by his gifts&mdash;and he was a munificent patron
+of learning&mdash;he destroyed by his dogmatism.&nbsp; Scholars
+could not decipher Greek texts while they were torturing biblical
+ones into arguments for and against the opinions of the
+Chancellor.&nbsp; What is the true story about the gorgeous
+vestments which were found in a box in the house of the President
+of St. John&rsquo;s, and which are now preserved in the library
+of that college?&nbsp; Did they belong to the last of the old
+Catholic presidents of what was Chichele&rsquo;s College of St.
+Bernard before the Reformation?&nbsp; Were they, on the other
+hand, the property of Laud himself?&nbsp; It has been said that
+Laud would not have known how to wear them.&nbsp; Fancy sees him
+treasuring that bright ecclesiastical raiment,
+&pi;&#8051;&pi;&lambda;&omicron;&iota;
+&pi;&alpha;&mu;&pi;&omicron;&#8055;&kappa;&iota;&lambda;&omicron;&iota;,
+in some place of security.&nbsp; At night, perhaps, when candles
+were lit and curtains drawn, and he was alone, he may have
+arrayed himself in the gorgeous chasuble before the mirror, as
+Hetty wore her surreptitious finery.&nbsp; &lsquo;There is a
+great deal of human nature in man.&rsquo;&nbsp; If Laud really
+strutted in solitude, draped rather at random in these vestments,
+the ecclesiastical gear is even more interesting than the thin
+ivory-headed staff which supported him on his way to the
+scaffold; more curious than the diary in which he recorded the
+events of night and day, of dreaming hours and waking.&nbsp; In
+the library at St. John&rsquo;s they show his bust&mdash;a
+tarnished, gilded work of art.&nbsp; He has a neat little
+cocked-up moustache, not like a prelate&rsquo;s; the face is that
+of a Bismarck without strength of character.</p>
+<p>In speaking of Oxford before the civil war, let us not forget
+that true students and peaceable men found a welcome retreat
+beyond the din of theological fictions.&nbsp; Lord
+Falkland&rsquo;s house was within ten miles of the town.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;In this time,&rsquo; says Clarendon, in his immortal
+panegyric, &lsquo;in this time he contracted familiarity and
+friendship with the most polished men of the University, who
+found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment
+in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical
+ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in
+anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known
+nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in
+a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a
+university in a less volume, whither they came not so much for
+repose as study; and to examine and refine those grosser
+propositions, which laziness and consent made current in vulgar
+conversation.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The signs of the times grew darker.&nbsp; In 1636 the King and
+Queen visited Oxford, &lsquo;with no applause.&rsquo;&nbsp; In
+1640 Laud sent the University his last present of
+manuscripts.&nbsp; He was charged with many offences.&nbsp; He
+had repaired crucifixes; he had allowed the &lsquo;scandalous
+image&rsquo; to be set up in the porch of St. Mary&rsquo;s; and
+Alderman Nixon, the Puritan grocer, had seen a man bowing to the
+scandalous image&mdash;so he declared.&nbsp; In 1642 Charles
+asked for money from the colleges, for the prosecution of the war
+with the Parliament.&nbsp; The beautiful old college plate began
+its journey to the melting-pot.&nbsp; On August 9th the scholars
+armed themselves.&nbsp; There were two bands of musqueteers, one
+of pikemen, one of halberdiers.&nbsp; In the reign of Henry <span
+class="GutSmall">III.</span> the men had been on the other
+side.&nbsp; Magdalen bridge was blocked up with heaps of
+wood.&nbsp; Stones, for the primitive warfare of the time, were
+transported to the top of Magdalen tower.&nbsp; The stones were
+never thrown at any foemen.&nbsp; Royalists and Roundheads in
+turn occupied the place; and while grocer Nixon fled before the
+Cavaliers, he came back and interceded for All Souls College
+(which dealt with him for figs and sugar) when the Puritans
+wished to batter the graven images on the gate.&nbsp; On October
+29th the King came, after Edgehill fight, the Court assembled,
+and Oxford was fortified.&nbsp; The place was made impregnable in
+those days of feeble artillery.&nbsp; The author of the <i>Gesta
+Stephani</i> had pointed out, many centuries before, that Oxford,
+if properly defended, could never be taken, thanks to the network
+of streams that surrounds her.&nbsp; Though the citizens worked
+grudgingly and slowly, the trenches were at last completed.&nbsp;
+The earthworks&mdash;a double line&mdash;ran in and out of the
+interlacing streams.&nbsp; A Parliamentary force on Headington
+Hill seems to have been unable to play on the city with
+artillery.&nbsp; Barbed arrows were served out to the scholars,
+who formed a regiment of more than six hundred men.&nbsp; The
+Queen held her little court in Merton, in the Warden&rsquo;s
+lodgings.&nbsp; Clarendon gives rather a humorous account of the
+discontent of the fine ladies &lsquo;The town was full of lords
+(besides those of the Council), and of persons of the best
+quality, with very many ladies, who, when not pleased themselves,
+kept others from being so.&rsquo;&nbsp; Oxford never was so busy
+and so crowded; letters, society, war, were all confused; there
+were excursions against Brown at Abingdon, and alarms from
+Fairfax on Headington Hill.&nbsp; The siege, from May 22nd to
+June 5th, was almost a farce.&nbsp; The Parliamentary generals
+&lsquo;fought with perspective glasses.&rsquo;&nbsp; Neither
+Cromwell at Wytham, nor Brown at Wolvercot, pushed matters too
+hard.&nbsp; When two Puritan regiments advanced on Hinksey, Mr.
+Smyth blazed away at them from his house.&nbsp; As in Zululand,
+any building made a respectable fort, when cannon-balls had so
+little penetrative power, or when artillery was not at the
+front.&nbsp; Oxford was surrendered, with other places of arms,
+after Naseby, and&mdash;Presbyterians became heads of
+colleges!</p>
+<h2><a name="page111"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+111</span>CHAPTER V<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">SOME SCHOLARS OF THE
+RESTORATION</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">In</span> Merton Chapel a little mural
+tablet bears the crest, the name, and the dates of the birth and
+death, of Antony Wood.&nbsp; He has been our guide in these
+sketches of Oxford life, as he must be the guide of the gravest
+and most exact historians.&nbsp; No one who cares for the past of
+the University should think without pity and friendliness of this
+lonely scholar, who in his lifetime was unpitied and
+unbefriended.&nbsp; We have reached the period in which he lived
+and died, in the midst of changes of Church and State, and
+surrounded by more worldly scholars, whose letters remain to
+testify that, in the reign of the Second Charles, Oxford was
+modern Oxford.&nbsp; In the epistles of Humphrey Prideaux,
+student of Christ Church, we recognise the foibles of the modern
+University, the love of gossip, the internecine criticism, the
+greatness of little men whom <i>rien ne peut plaire</i>.</p>
+<p>Antony Wood was a scholar of a different sort, of a sort that
+has never been very common in Oxford.&nbsp; He was a perfect
+dungeon of books; but he wrote as well as read, which has never
+been a usual practice in his University.&nbsp; Wood was born in
+1632, in one of the old houses opposite Merton, perhaps in the
+curious ancient hall which has been called Beham, Bream, and
+<i>Bohemi&aelig; Aula</i>, by various corruptions of the original
+spelling.&nbsp; As a boy, Wood must have seen the siege of
+Oxford, which he describes not without humour.&nbsp; As a young
+man, he watched the religious revolution which introduced
+Presbyterian Heads of Houses, and sent Puritanical captains of
+horse, like Captain James Wadsworth, to hunt for
+&lsquo;Papistical reliques&rsquo; and &lsquo;massing
+stuffs&rsquo; among the property of the President of C. C. C. and
+the Dean of Ch. Ch. (1646&ndash;1648).&nbsp; In 1650 he saw the
+Chancellorship of Oliver Cromwell; in 1659 he welcomed the
+Restoration, and rejoiced that &lsquo;the King had come to his
+own again.&rsquo;&nbsp; The tastes of an antiquary combined, with
+the natural reaction against Puritanism, to make Antony Wood a
+High Churchman, and not averse to Rome, while he had sufficient
+breadth of mind to admire Thomas Hobbes, the patriarch of English
+learning.&nbsp; But Wood had little room in his heart or mind for
+any learning save that connected with the University.&nbsp;
+Oxford, the city, and the colleges, the remains of the old
+religious art, the customs, the dresses&mdash;these things he
+adored with a loverlike devotion, which was utterly
+unrewarded.&nbsp; He owed no office to the University, and he was
+even expelled (1693) for having written sharply against
+Clarendon.&nbsp; This did not abate his zeal, nor prevent him
+from passing all his days, and much of his nights, in the study
+and compilation of University history.</p>
+<p>The author of Wood&rsquo;s biography has left a picture of his
+sombre and laborious old age.&nbsp; He rose at four o&rsquo;clock
+every morning.&nbsp; He scarcely tasted food till
+supper-time.&nbsp; At the hour of the college dinner he visited
+the booksellers&rsquo; shops, where he was sure not to be
+disturbed by the gossip of dons, young and old.&nbsp; After
+supper he would smoke his pipe and drink his pot of ale in a
+tavern.&nbsp; It was while he took this modest refreshment,
+before old age came upon him, that Antony once fell in, and fell
+out, with Dick Peers.&nbsp; This Dick was one of the men employed
+by Dr. Fell, the Dean of Ch. Ch., to translate Wood&rsquo;s
+History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford into
+Latin.&nbsp; The translation gave rise to a number of literary
+quarrels.&nbsp; As Dean of Ch. Ch., Dr. Fell yielded to the
+besetting sin of deans, and fancied himself the absolute master
+of the University, if not something superior to mortal
+kind.&nbsp; An autocrat of this sort had no scruples about
+changing Wood&rsquo;s copy whenever he differed from Wood in
+political or religious opinion.&nbsp; Now Antony, as we said, had
+eyes to discern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the Dean considered
+no better than a Deist or an Atheist.&nbsp; The Dean therefore
+calmly altered all that Wood had written of the Philosopher of
+Malmesbury, and so maligned Hobbes that the old man, meeting the
+King in Pall Mall, begged leave to reply in his own
+defence.&nbsp; Charles allowed the dispute to go on, and Hobbes
+hit Fell rather hard.&nbsp; The Dean retorted with the famous
+expression about <i>irritabile illud et vanissimum Malmesburiense
+animal</i>.&nbsp; This controversy amused Oxford, but bred bad
+feeling between Antony Wood and Dick Peers, the translator of his
+work, and the tool of the Dean of Ch. Ch.&nbsp; Prideaux
+(<i>Letters to John Ellis</i>; Camden Society, 1875) describes
+the battles in city taverns between author and translator:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I suppose that you have heard of the
+continuall feuds, and often battles, between the author and the
+translator; they had a skirmish at Sol Hardeing [keeper of a
+tavern in All Saints&rsquo; parish], another at the printeing
+house [the Sheldonian theatre], and several other
+places.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>From the record of these combats, we learn that the recluse
+Antony was a man of his hands:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;As Peers always cometh off with a bloody
+nose or a black eye, he was a long time afraid to goe annywhere
+where he might chance to meet his too powerful adversary, for
+fear of another drubbing, till he was pro-proctor, and now Woods
+(<i>sic</i>) is as much afraid to meet him, least he should
+exercise his authority upon him.&nbsp; And although he be a good
+bowzeing blad, yet it hath been observed that never since his
+adversary hath been in office hath he dared to be out after nine,
+least he should meet him and exact the rigor of the statute upon
+him.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The statute required all scholars to be in their rooms before
+Tom had ceased ringing.&nbsp; It was, perhaps, too rash to say
+that the Oxford of the Restoration was already modern
+Oxford.&nbsp; The manners of the students were, so to speak, more
+accentuated.&nbsp; However much the lecturer in Idolology may
+dislike the method and person of the Reader in the Mandingo
+language, these two learned men do not box in taverns, nor take
+off their coats if they meet each other at the Clarendon
+Press.&nbsp; People are careful not to pitch into each other in
+that way, though the temper which confounds opponents for their
+theory of irregular verbs is not at all abated.&nbsp; As Wood
+grew in years he did not increase in honours.&nbsp; &lsquo;He was
+a mere scholar,&rsquo; and consequently might expect from the
+greater number of men disrespect.&nbsp; When he was but
+sixty-four, he looked eighty at least.&nbsp; His dress was not
+elegant, &lsquo;cleanliness being his chief object.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He rarely left his rooms, that were papered with MSS., and where
+every table and chair had its load of books and yellow parchments
+from the College muniment rooms.&nbsp; When strangers came to
+Oxford with letters of recommendation, the recluse would leave
+his study, and gladly lead them about the town, through Logic
+Lane to Queen&rsquo;s, which had not then the sublimely classical
+front, built by Hawksmoor, &lsquo;but suggested by Sir
+Christopher Wren.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is worthy of his genius.&nbsp;
+Wood died in 1695, &lsquo;forgiving every one.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+could well afford to do so.&nbsp; In his <i>Athen&aelig;
+Oxonienses</i> he had written the lives of all his enemies.</p>
+<p>Wood, &lsquo;being a mere scholar,&rsquo; could, of course,
+expect nothing but disrespect in a place like Oxford.&nbsp; His
+younger contemporary, Humphrey Prideaux, was, in the Oxford
+manner, a man of the world.&nbsp; He was the son of a Cornish
+squire, was educated at Westminster under Busby (that awful
+pedagogue, whose birch seems so near a memory), got a studentship
+at Christ Church in 1668, and took his B.A. degree in 1672.&nbsp;
+Here it may be observed that men went up quite as late in life
+then as they do now, for Prideaux was twenty-four years old when
+he took his degree.&nbsp; Fell was Dean of Christ Church, and was
+showing laudable zeal in working the University Press.&nbsp; What
+a pity it is that the University Press of to-day has become a
+trading concern, a shop for twopenny manuals and penny
+primers!&nbsp; It is scarcely proper that the University should
+at once organise examinations and sell the manuals which contain
+the answers to the questions most likely to be set.&nbsp; To
+return to Fell; he made Prideaux edit Lucius Florus, and publish
+the <i>Marmora Oxoniensia</i>, which came out 1676.&nbsp; We must
+not suppose, however, that Prideaux was an enthusiastic
+arch&aelig;ologist.&nbsp; He did the <i>Marmora</i> because the
+Dean commanded it, and because educated people were at that
+period not uninterested in Greek art.&nbsp; At the present hour
+one may live a lifetime in Oxford and only learn, by the accident
+of examining passmen in the Arundel Room, that the University
+possesses any marbles.&nbsp; In the walls of the Arundel Room (on
+the ground-floor in the Schools&rsquo; quadrangle) these touching
+remains of Hellas are interred.&nbsp; There are the funereal
+stel&aelig;, with their quiet expression of sorrow, of hope, of
+resignation.&nbsp; The young man, on his tombstone, is
+represented in the act of rising and taking the hand of a
+friend.&nbsp; He is bound on his latest journey.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;He goeth forth unto the unknown land,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Where wife nor child may follow; thus far tell<br />
+The lingering clasp of hand in faithful hand,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; And that brief carven legend, <i>Friend</i>,
+<i>farewell</i>.</p>
+<p>O pregnant sign, profound simplicity!<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; All passionate pain and fierce remonstrating<br />
+Being wholly purged, leave this mere memory,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Deep but not harsh, a sad and sacred thing.&rsquo;
+<a name="citation120"></a><a href="#footnote120"
+class="citation">[120]</a></p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The lady chooses from a coffer a trinket, or a ribbon.&nbsp;
+It is her last toilette she is making, with no fear and no
+regret.&nbsp; Again, the long-severed souls are meeting with
+delight in the home of the just made perfect.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p120b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Trinity College Gates, Parks&rsquo; Road"
+title=
+"Trinity College Gates, Parks&rsquo; Road"
+ src="images/p120s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>Even in the Schools these scraps of Greek lapidary&rsquo;s
+work seem beautiful to us, in their sober and cheerful acceptance
+of life and death.&nbsp; We hope, in Oxford, that the study of
+ancient art, as well as of ancient literature, may soon be made
+possible.&nbsp; These tangible relics of the past bring us very
+near to the heart and the life of Greece, and waken a kindly
+enthusiasm in every one who approaches them.&nbsp; In Humphrey
+Prideaux&rsquo;s letters there is not a trace of any such
+feeling.&nbsp; He does his business, but it is hack-work.&nbsp;
+In this he differs from the modern student, but in his caustic
+description of the rude and witless society of the place he is
+modern enough.&nbsp; In his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of
+the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants to get
+preferment.&nbsp; His taste and his ambition alike made him
+detest the heavy, beer-drinking doctors, the fast &lsquo;All
+Souls gentlemen,&rsquo; and the fossils of stupidity who are
+always plentifully imbedded in the soil of University life.&nbsp;
+Fellowships were then sold, at Magdalen and New, when they were
+not given by favour.&nbsp; Prideaux grumbles (July 28th, 1674) at
+the laxness of the Commissioners, who should have exposed this
+abuse: &lsquo;In town, one of their inquirys is whether any of
+the scholars weare pantaloons or periwigues, or keep
+dogs.&rsquo;&nbsp; The great dispute about dogs, which raged at a
+later date in University College, had already begun to disturb
+dons and undergraduates.&nbsp; The choice language of Oxford
+contempt was even then extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison in
+<i>Daniel Deronda</i>, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not
+like as &lsquo;brutes.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;Pembroke&mdash;the
+fittest colledge in the town for brutes.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+University did not encourage certain &lsquo;players&rsquo; who
+had paid the place a visit, and the players, in revenge, had gone
+about the town at night and broken the windows.</p>
+<p>When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed,
+it is amusing to read of Prideaux&rsquo;s miserable adventures,
+in the diligence, between a lady of easy manners, a
+&lsquo;pitiful rogue,&rsquo; and two undergraduates who
+&lsquo;sordidly affected debauchery.&rsquo;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;This ill company made me very miserable all
+the way.&nbsp; Only once I could not but heartily laugh to see
+Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by five or six carmen with whips
+and prong staves for provoking them with some of his extravagant
+frolics.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The &lsquo;violent affection to vice&rsquo; in the University,
+or in the country, was, of course, the reaction against the
+godliness of Puritan captains of horse.&nbsp; Another form of the
+reaction is discernible in the revived High Church sentiments of
+Prideaux, Wood, and most of the students of the time.</p>
+<p>The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than
+those of the pot-house-haunting seniors.&nbsp; Dr. Good, the
+Master of Balliol, &lsquo;a good old toast,&rsquo; had much
+trouble with his students.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;There is, over against Balliol College, a
+dingy, horrid, scandalous ale-house, fit for none but draymen and
+tinkers, and such as, by going there, have made themselves
+equally scandalous.&nbsp; Here the Balliol men continually, and
+by perpetuall bubbing, add art to their natural stupidity, to
+make themselves perfect sots.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The envy and jealousy of the inferior colleges, alas! have put
+about many things, in these latter days, to the discredit of the
+Balliol men, but not even Humphrey Prideaux would, out of all his
+stock of epithets, choose &lsquo;sottish&rsquo; and
+&lsquo;stupid.&rsquo;&nbsp; In these old times, however, Dr. Good
+had to call the men together, and&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Inform them of the mischiefs of that
+hellish liquor called ale; but one of them, not so tamely to be
+preached out of his beloved liquor, made answer that the
+Vice-Chancelour&rsquo;s men drank ale at the &ldquo;Split
+Crow,&rdquo; and why should not they too?&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>On this, old Dr. Good posted off to the Vice-Chancellor, who,
+&lsquo;being a lover of old ale&rsquo; himself, returned a short
+answer to the head of Balliol.&nbsp; The old man went back to his
+college, and informed his fellows, &lsquo;that he was assured
+there were no hurt in ale, so that now they may be sots by
+authority.&rsquo;&nbsp; Christ Church men were not more
+sober.&nbsp; David Whitford, who had been the tutor of Shirley
+the poet, was found lying dead in his bed: &lsquo;he had been
+going to take a dram for refreshment, but death came between the
+cup and the lips, and this is the end of Davy.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Prideaux records, in the same feeling style, that smallpox
+carried off many of the undergraduates, &lsquo;besides my
+brother,&rsquo; a student at Corpus.</p>
+<p>The University Press supplied Prideaux with gossip.&nbsp; They
+printed &lsquo;a book against Hobs,&rsquo; written by
+Clarendon.&nbsp; Hobbes was the heresiarch of the time, and when
+an unhappy fellow of Merton hanged himself, the doctrines of
+Hobbes were said to have prompted him to the deed.&nbsp; To
+return to the Press.&nbsp; &lsquo;Our Christmas book will be
+Cornelius Nepos . . . Our marbles are now printing.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Prideaux, as has been said, took no interest in his own work.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;I coat (quote) a multitude of authors; if
+people think the better of me for that, I will think the worse of
+them for their judgement.&nbsp; It beeing soe easyly a thinge to
+make this specious show, he must be a fool that cannot gain
+whatsoever repute is to be gotten by it.&nbsp; If people will
+admire him for this, they may; I shall admire such for nothing
+else but their good indexs.&nbsp; As long as books have these, on
+what subject may we not coat as many others as we please, and
+never have read one of them?&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>It is not easy to gather from this confession whether Prideaux
+had or had not read the books he &lsquo;coated.&rsquo;&nbsp; It
+is certain that Dean Aldrich (and here again we recognise the
+eternal criticism of modern Oxford) held a poor opinion of
+Humphrey Prideaux.&nbsp; Aldrich said Prideaux was
+&lsquo;incorrect,&rsquo; &lsquo;muddy-headed,&rsquo; &lsquo;he
+would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes&rsquo;;
+&lsquo;as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any, but
+rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former
+editors.&rsquo;&nbsp; This habit of carping, this trick of
+collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this
+dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man
+knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the
+air.&nbsp; Oxford is a discouraging place.&nbsp; College drudgery
+absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their
+conscientiousness.&nbsp; They have only the waste odds-and-ends
+of time for their own labours.&nbsp; They live in an atmosphere
+of criticism.&nbsp; They collect notes, they wait, they dream;
+their youth goes by, and the night comes when no man can
+work.&nbsp; The more praise to the tutors and lecturers who
+decipher the records of Assyria, or patiently collate the
+manuscripts of the <i>Iliad</i>, who not only teach what is
+already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and advance the
+boundaries of scholarship and science.</p>
+<p>One lesson may be learned from Prideaux&rsquo;s cynical
+letters, which is still worth the attention of every young Oxford
+student who is conscious of ambition, of power, and of real
+interest in letters.&nbsp; He can best serve his University by
+coming out of her, by declining college work, and by devoting
+himself to original study in some less exhausted air, in some
+less critical society.</p>
+<p>Among the aversions of Humphrey Prideaux were the
+&lsquo;gentlemen of All Souls.&rsquo;&nbsp; They certainly showed
+extraordinary impudence when they secretly employed the
+University Press to print off copies of Marc Antonio&rsquo;s
+engravings after Giulio Romano&rsquo;s drawings.&nbsp; It chanced
+that Fell visited the press rather late one evening, and found
+&lsquo;his press working at such an imployment.&nbsp; The prints
+and plates he hath seased, and threatened the owners of them with
+expulsion.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;All Souls,&rsquo; adds Prideaux,
+&lsquo;is a scandalous place.&rsquo;&nbsp; Yet All Souls was the
+college of young Mr. Guise, an Arabic scholar, &lsquo;the
+greatest miracle in the knowledge of that I ever heard
+of.&rsquo;&nbsp; Guise died of smallpox while still very
+young.</p>
+<p>Thus Prideaux prattles on, about Admiral Van Tromp, &lsquo;a
+drunken greazy Dutchman,&rsquo; whom Speed, of St. John&rsquo;s,
+conquered in boozing; of the disputes about races in Port Meadow;
+of the breaking into the Mermaid Tavern.&nbsp; &lsquo;We Christ
+Church men bear the blame of it, our ticks, as the noise of the
+town will have it, amounting to &pound;1,500.&rsquo;&nbsp; Thus
+Christ Church had little cause to throw the first stone at
+Balliol.&nbsp; Prideaux shows little interest in letters, little
+in the press, though he lived in palmy days of printing, in the
+time of the Elzevirs; none at all in the educational work of the
+place.&nbsp; He sneers at the Puritans, and at the controversy on
+&lsquo;The Foundations of Hell Torments shaken and
+removed.&rsquo;&nbsp; He admits that Locke &lsquo;is a man of
+very good converse,&rsquo; but is chiefly concerned to spy out
+the movements of the philosopher, suspected of sedition, and to
+report them to Ellis in town.&nbsp; About the new buildings, as
+of the beautiful western gateway, where Great Tom is hung, the
+work of Wren, Prideaux says little; St. Mary&rsquo;s was
+suffering restoration, and &lsquo;the old men,&rsquo; including
+Wood, we may believe, &lsquo;exceedingly exclaim against
+it.&rsquo;&nbsp; That is the way of Oxford, a college is
+constantly rebuilding amid the protests of the rest of the
+University.&nbsp; There is no question more common, or less
+agreeable than this, &lsquo;What are you doing to your
+tower?&rsquo; or &lsquo;What are you doing to your hall, library,
+or chapel?&rsquo;&nbsp; No one ever knows; but we are always
+doing something, and working men for ever sit, and drink beer, on
+the venerable roofs.</p>
+<p>Long intercourse with Prideaux&rsquo;s letters, and mournful
+memories of Oxford new buildings, tempt a writer to imitate
+Prideaux&rsquo;s spirit.&nbsp; Let us shut up his book, where he
+leaves Oxford, in 1686, to become rector of Saham-Toney, in
+Norfolk, and marry a wife, though, says he, &lsquo;I little
+thought I should ever come to this.&rsquo;</p>
+<h2><a name="page133"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+133</span>CHAPTER VI<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">HIGH TORY OXFORD</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">The</span> name of her late Majesty Queen
+Anne has for some little time been a kind of party
+watch-word.&nbsp; Many harmless people have an innocent loyalty
+to this lady, make themselves her knights (as Mary Antoinette has
+still her sworn champions in France and Mary Stuart in Scotland),
+buy the plate of her serene period, and imitate the dress.&nbsp;
+To many moral critics in the press, however, Queen Anne is a kind
+of abomination.&nbsp; I know not how it is, but the terms
+&lsquo;Queen Anne furniture and blue china&rsquo; have become
+words of almost slanderous railing.&nbsp; Any didactic journalist
+who uses them is certain at once to fall heavily on the artistic
+reputation of Mr. Burne Jones, to rebuke the philosophy of Mr.
+Pater, and to hint that the entrance-hall of the Grosvenor
+Gallery is that &lsquo;by-way&rsquo; with which Bunyan has made
+us familiar.&nbsp; In the changes of things our admiration of the
+Augustan age of our literature, the age of Addison and Steele, of
+Marlborough and Aldrich, has become a sort of reproach.&nbsp; It
+may be that our modern preachers know but little of that which
+they traduce.&nbsp; At all events, the Oxford of Queen
+Anne&rsquo;s time was not what they call
+&lsquo;un-English,&rsquo; but highly conservative, and as dull
+and beer-bemused as the most manly taste could wish it to be.</p>
+<p>The <i>Spectator</i> of the ingenious Sir Richard Steele gives
+us many a glimpse of non-juring Oxford.&nbsp; The old fashion of
+Sanctity (Mr. Addison says, in the <i>Spectator</i>, No. 494) had
+passed away; nor were appearances of Mirth and Pleasure looked
+upon as the Marks of a Carnal Mind.&nbsp; Yet the Puritan Rule
+was not so far forgotten, but that Mr. Anthony Henley (a
+Gentleman of Property) could remember how he had stood for a
+Fellowship in a certain College whereof a great Independent
+Minister was Governor.&nbsp; As Oxford at this Moment is much
+vexed in her Mind about Examinations, wherein, indeed, her whole
+Force is presently expended, I make no scruple to repeat the
+account of Mr. Henley&rsquo;s Adventure:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;The Youth, according to Custom, waited on
+the Governor of his College, to be examined.&nbsp; He was
+received at the Door by a Servant, who was one of that gloomy
+Generation that were then in Fashion.&nbsp; He conducted him with
+great Silence and Seriousness to a long Gallery which was
+darkened at Noon-day, and had only a single Candle burning in
+it.&nbsp; After a short stay in this melancholy Apartment, he was
+led into a Chamber hung with black, where he entertained himself
+for some time by the glimmering of a Taper, till at length the
+Head of the College came out to him from an inner Room, with half
+a dozen Night Caps upon his Head, and a religious Horror in his
+Countenance.&nbsp; The Young Man trembled; but his Fears
+increased when, instead of being asked what progress he had made
+in Learning, he was ask&rsquo;d &ldquo;how he abounded in
+Grace?&rdquo;&nbsp; His <i>Latin</i> and <i>Greek</i> stood him
+in little stead.&nbsp; He was to give an account only of the
+state of his Soul&mdash;whether he was of the Number of the
+Elect; what was the Occasion of his Conversion; upon what Day of
+the Month and Hour of the Day it happened; how it was carried on,
+and when completed.&nbsp; The whole Examination was summed up in
+one short Question, namely, <i>Whether he was prepared for
+Death</i>?&nbsp; The Boy, who had been bred up by honest Parents,
+was frighted out of his wits by the solemnity of the Proceeding,
+and by the last dreadful Interrogatory, so that, upon making his
+Escape out of this House of Mourning, he could never be brought a
+second Time to the Examination, as not being able to go through
+the Terrors of it.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund&rsquo;s Hall,
+began to keep his diary, the &lsquo;honest folk&rsquo;&mdash;that
+is, the High Churchmen&mdash;had the better of the Independent
+Ministers.&nbsp; The Dissenters had some favour at Court, but in
+the University they were looked upon as utterly reprobate.&nbsp;
+From the <i>Reliqui&aelig;</i> of Hearne (an antiquarian
+successor of Antony Wood, a <i>bibliophile</i>, an
+arch&aelig;ologist, and as honest a man as Jacobitism could make
+him) let us quote an example of Heaven&rsquo;s wrath against
+Dissenters:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;<i>Aug.</i> 6, 1706.&nbsp; We have an
+account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire, that the Dissenters there
+having prepared a great quantity of bricks to erect a spacious
+conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and spoiled them
+all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to their great
+mortification.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Hearne&rsquo;s common-place books are an amusing source of
+information about Oxford society in the years of Queen Anne, and
+of the Hanoverian usurper.&nbsp; Tom Hearne was a Master of Arts
+of St. Edmund&rsquo;s Hall, and at one time Deputy-Librarian of
+the Bodleian.&nbsp; He lost this post because he would not take
+&lsquo;the wicked oaths&rsquo; required of him, but he did not
+therefore leave Oxford.&nbsp; His working hours were passed in
+preparing editions of antiquarian books, to be printed in very
+limited number, on ordinary and <span class="smcap">Large
+Paper</span>.&nbsp; It was the joy of Tom&rsquo;s existence to
+see his editions become first scarce, then <span
+class="smcap">Very Scarce</span>, while the price augmented in
+proportion to the rarity.&nbsp; When he was not reading in his
+rooms he was taking long walks in the country, tracing Roman
+walls and roads, and exploring Woodstock Park for the remains of
+&lsquo;the labyrinth,&rsquo; as he calls the Maze of Fair
+Rosamund.&nbsp; In these strolls he was sometimes accompanied by
+undergraduates, even gentlemen of noble family, &lsquo;which gave
+cause to some to envy our happiness.&rsquo;&nbsp; Hearne was a
+social creature, and had a heart, as he shows by the entry about
+the death of his &lsquo;very dear friend, Mr. Thomas Cherry,
+A.M., to the great grief of all that knew him, being a gentleman
+of great beauty, singular modesty, of wonderful good nature, and
+most excellent principles.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>The friends of Hearne were chiefly, perhaps solely, what he
+calls &lsquo;honest men,&rsquo; supporters of the Stuart family,
+and always ready to drink his Majesty&rsquo;s (King James&rsquo;)
+health.&nbsp; They would meet in &lsquo;Antiquity Hall,&rsquo; an
+old house near Wadham, and smoke their honest pipes.&nbsp; They
+held certain of the opinions of &lsquo;the Hebdomadal
+Meeting,&rsquo; satirised by Steele in the <i>Spectator</i> (No.
+43).&nbsp; &lsquo;We are much offended at the Act for importing
+<i>French</i> wines.&nbsp; A bottle or two of good solid Edifying
+Port, at honest <i>George&rsquo;s</i>, made a Night cheerful, and
+threw off Reserve.&nbsp; But this plaguy <i>French</i> Claret
+will not only cost us more Money but do us less
+good.&rsquo;&nbsp; Hearne had a poor opinion of &lsquo;Captain
+Steele,&rsquo; and of &lsquo;one Tickle: this Tickle is a
+pretender to poetry.&rsquo;&nbsp; He admits that, though
+&lsquo;Queen&rsquo;s people are angry at the <i>Spectator</i>,
+and the common-room say &rsquo;tis silly dull stuff, men that are
+indifferent commend it highly, as it deserves.&rsquo;&nbsp; Some
+other satirist had a plate etched, representing Antiquity
+Hall&mdash;a caricature of Tom&rsquo;s antiquarian
+engravings.&nbsp; It may be seen in Skelton&rsquo;s book.</p>
+<p>Thanks to Hearne, it is easy to reproduce the common-room
+gossip, and the more treasonable talk of honest men at Antiquity
+Hall.&nbsp; The learned were much interested, as they usually are
+at Oxford, in theological discussion.&nbsp; Some one proved, by
+an ingenious syllogism, that all men are to be saved; but Hearne
+had the better of this Latitudinarian, easily demonstrating that
+the comfortable argument does not meet the case of madmen, and of
+deaf-mutes, whom Tom did not expect to meet in a future
+state.&nbsp; The ingenious, though depressing speculations of Mr.
+Dodwell were also discussed: &lsquo;He makes the air the
+receptacle of all souls, good and bad, and that they are under
+the power of the D&mdash;l, he being prince of the
+air.&rsquo;&nbsp; &lsquo;The less perfectly good&rsquo; hang out,
+if we may say so, &lsquo;in the space between earth and the
+clouds,&rsquo; all which is subtle, and creditable to Mr.
+Dodwell&rsquo;s invention, but not susceptible of exact
+demonstration.&nbsp; The whole controversy is an interesting
+specimen of Queen Anne philosophy, which, with all respect for
+the taste of the period, we need not wish to see revived.&nbsp;
+The Bishop of Worcester, for example, &lsquo;expects the end of
+the world about nine years hence.&rsquo;&nbsp; While the theology
+of Oxford is being mentioned, the zeal of Dr. Miller, Regius
+Professor of Greek, must not be forgotten.&nbsp; The learned
+Professor endeavoured to convert, and even &lsquo;writ a Letter
+to Mrs. Bracegirdle, giving her great encomiums (as having
+himself been often to see plays acted whilst they continued here)
+upon account of her excellent qualifications, and persuading her
+to give over this loose way of living, and betake herself to such
+a kind of life as was more innocent, and would gain her more
+credit.&rsquo;&nbsp; The Professor&rsquo;s advice was wasted on
+&lsquo;Bracegirdle the brown.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Politics were naturally much discussed in these doubtful
+years, when the Stuarts, it was thought, had still a chance to
+win their own again.&nbsp; In 1706, Tom says, &lsquo;The great
+health now is &ldquo;The Cube of Three,&rdquo; which is the
+number 27, i.e. the number of the protesting Lords.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+The University was most devoted, as far as drinking toasts
+constitutes loyalty.&nbsp; In Hearne&rsquo;s common-place book is
+carefully copied out this &lsquo;Scotch Health to K.
+J.&rsquo;:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;He&rsquo;s o&rsquo;er the seas and far
+awa&rsquo;,<br />
+He&rsquo;s o&rsquo;er the seas and far awa&rsquo;;<br />
+Altho&rsquo; his back be at the wa&rsquo;<br />
+We&rsquo;ll drink his health that&rsquo;s far
+awa&rsquo;.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The words live, and ring strangely out of that dusty
+past.&nbsp; The song survives the throne, and sounds
+pathetically, somehow, as one has heard it chanted, in days as
+dead as the year 1711, at suppers that seem as ancient almost as
+the festivities of Thomas Hearne.&nbsp; It is not unpleasant to
+remember that the people who sang could also fight, and spilt
+their blood as well as their &lsquo;edifying port.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+If the Southern &lsquo;honest men&rsquo; had possessed hearts for
+anything but tippling, the history of England would have been
+different.</p>
+<p>When &lsquo;the allyes and the French fought a bloudy battle
+near Mons&rsquo; (1709, &lsquo;Malplaquet&rsquo;), the Oxford
+honest men, like Colonel Henry Esmond, thought &lsquo;there was
+not any the least reason of bragging.&rsquo;&nbsp; The young King
+of England, under the character of the Chevalier St. George,
+&lsquo;shewed abundance of undaunted courage and resolution, led
+up his troups with unspeakable bravery, appeared in the utmost
+dangers, and at last was wounded.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Marlborough&rsquo;s victories were sneered at, his new palace of
+Blenheim was said to be not only ill-built, but haunted by signs
+of evil omen.</p>
+<p>It was not always safe to say what one thought about politics
+at Oxford.&nbsp; One Mr. A. going to one Mr. Tonson, a barber,
+put the barber and his wife in a ferment (they being rascally
+Whigs) by maintaining that the hereditary right was in the P. of
+W.&nbsp; Tonson laid information against the gentleman;
+&lsquo;which may be a warning to honest men not to enter into
+topicks of this nature with barbers.&rsquo;&nbsp; One would not
+willingly, even now, discuss the foreign policy of her
+Majesty&rsquo;s Ministers with the person who shaves one.&nbsp;
+There are opportunities and temptations to which no decent person
+should be wantonly exposed.&nbsp; The bad effect of Whiggery on
+the temper was evident in this, that &lsquo;the Mohocks are all
+of the Whiggish gang, and indeed all Whigs are looked upon as
+such Mohocks, their principles and doctrines leading thus to all
+manner of barbarity and inhumanity.&rsquo;&nbsp; So true is it
+that Conservatives are all lovers of peace and quiet, that (May
+29th, 1715) &lsquo;last night a good part of the Presbyterian
+meeting-house in Oxford was pulled down.&nbsp; The people ran up
+and down the streets, crying, <i>King James the Third</i>!&nbsp;
+<i>The true king</i>!&nbsp; <i>No Usurper</i>.&nbsp; In the
+evening they pulled a good part of the Quakers&rsquo; and
+Anabaptists&rsquo; meeting-houses down.&nbsp; The heads of houses
+have represented that it was begun by the Whiggs.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Probably the heads of houses reasoned on <i>&agrave; priori</i>
+principles when they arrived at this remarkable conclusion.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p144b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Cottages, Trinity College"
+title=
+"The Cottages, Trinity College"
+ src="images/p144s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>In consequence of the honesty, frankness, and consistency of
+his opinions, Mr. Hearne ran his head in danger when King George
+came to the throne, which has ever since been happily settled in
+the possession of the Hanoverian line.&nbsp; A Mr. Urry, a
+Non-juror, had to warn him, saying, &lsquo;Do you not know that
+they have a mind to hang you if they can, and that you have many
+enemies who are very ready to do it?&rsquo;&nbsp; In spite of
+this, Hearne, in his diaries, still calls George I. the Duke of
+Brunswick, and the Whigs, &lsquo;that fanatical
+crew.&rsquo;&nbsp; John, Duke of Marlborough, he styles
+&lsquo;that villain the Duke.&rsquo;&nbsp; We have had enough,
+perhaps, of Oxford politics, which were not much more prejudiced
+in the days of the Duke than in those of Mr. Gladstone.&nbsp;
+Hearne&rsquo;s allusions to the contemporary state of buildings
+and of college manners are often rather instructive.&nbsp; In All
+Souls the Whigs had a feast on the day of King Charles&rsquo;s
+martyrdom.&nbsp; They had a dinner dressed of woodcock,
+&lsquo;whose heads they cut off, in contempt of the memory of the
+blessed martyr.&rsquo;&nbsp; These men were &lsquo;low Churchmen,
+more shame to them.&rsquo;&nbsp; The All Souls men had already
+given up the custom of wandering about the College on the night
+of January 14th, with sticks and poles, in quest of the
+mallard.&nbsp; That &lsquo;swopping&rsquo; bird, still justly
+respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college
+of which he is the protector.&nbsp; But now all hope of
+recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the
+excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the
+&lsquo;swopping, swopping mallard.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne&rsquo;s
+reign&mdash;quite a different thing from the
+&lsquo;Neo-paganism&rsquo; which now causes so much anxiety to
+the moral press-man&mdash;let us note the affecting instance of
+Geffery Ammon.&nbsp; &lsquo;He was a merry companion, and his
+conversation was much courted.&rsquo;&nbsp; Geffery had but
+little sense of religion.&nbsp; He is now buried on the west side
+of Binsey churchyard, near St. Margaret&rsquo;s well.&nbsp;
+Geffery selected Binsey for the place of his sepulchre, because
+he was partial to the spot, having often shot snipe there.&nbsp;
+In order to moisten his clay, he desired his friend Will Gardner,
+a boatman of Oxford, who was accustomed to row him down the
+river, to put now and then a bottle of ale by his grave when he
+came that way; an injunction which was punctually complied
+with.</p>
+<p>Oxford lost in Hearne&rsquo;s time many of her old
+buildings.&nbsp; It is said, with a dreadful appearance of truth,
+that Oxford is now to lose some of the few that are left.&nbsp;
+Corpus and Merton, if they are not belied, mean to pull down the
+old houses opposite Merton, halls and houses consecrated to the
+memory of Antony Wood, and to build lecture-rooms <i>and houses
+for married dons</i> on the site.&nbsp; The topic, for one who is
+especially bound to pray for Merton (and who now does so with
+unusual fervour), is most painful.&nbsp; A view of the
+&lsquo;proposed new buildings,&rsquo; in the Exhibition of the
+Royal Academy (1879), depresses the soul.&nbsp; In the same
+spirit Hearne says (March 28th, 1671), &lsquo;It always grieves
+me when I go through Queen&rsquo;s College, to see the ruins of
+the old chapell next to High Street, the area of which now lies
+open (the building being most of it pulled down) and trampled
+upon by dogs, etc., as if the ground had never been
+consecrated.&nbsp; Nor do the Queen&rsquo;s Coll. people take any
+care, but rather laught at it when &rsquo;tis
+mentioned.&rsquo;&nbsp; In 1722 &lsquo;the famous postern-gate
+called the <i>Turl</i> Gate&rsquo; (a corruption for
+<i>Thorold</i> Gate) was &lsquo;pulled down by one Dr. Walker,
+who lived by it, and pretended that it was a detriment to his
+house.&nbsp; As long ago as 1705, they had pulled down the
+building of Peckwater quadrangle, in Ch. Ch.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+Queen&rsquo;s also &lsquo;pulled down the old refectory, which
+was on the west side of the old quadrangle, and was a fine old
+structure that I used to admire much.&rsquo;&nbsp; It appears
+that the College was also anxious to pull down the chamber of
+King Henry V.&nbsp; This is a strange craze for destruction, that
+some time ago endangered the beautiful library of Merton, a place
+where one can fancy that Chaucer or Wyclif may have
+studied.&nbsp; Oxford will soon have little left of the beauty
+and antiquity of <i>Patey&rsquo;s Quad</i> in Merton, as
+represented in our illustration.&nbsp; What the next generation
+will think of the multitudinous new buildings, it is not hard to
+conjecture.&nbsp; Imitative experiments, without style or fancy
+in structure or decoration, and often more than medievally
+uncomfortable, they will seem but evidences of Oxford&rsquo;s
+love of destruction.&nbsp; People of Hearne&rsquo;s way of
+thinking, people who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and,
+like Hearne, must be content sadly to enjoy what is left of grace
+and dignity.&nbsp; He died before Oxford had quite become the
+Oxford of Gibbon&rsquo;s autobiography.</p>
+<h2><a name="page153"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+153</span>CHAPTER VII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">GEORGIAN OXFORD</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">Oxford</span> has usually been described
+either by her lovers or her malcontents.&nbsp; She has suffered
+the extremes of filial ingratitude and affection.&nbsp; There is
+something in the place that makes all her children either adore
+or detest her; and it is difficult, indeed, to pick out the truth
+concerning her past social condition from the satires and the
+encomiums.&nbsp; Nor is it easy to say what qualities in Oxford,
+and what answering characteristics in any of her sons, will beget
+the favourable or the unfavourable verdict.&nbsp; Gibbon, one
+might have thought, saw the sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of
+the University.&nbsp; With youth, and wealth, and liberty, with a
+set of three beautiful rooms in that &lsquo;stately pile, the new
+building of Magdalen College,&rsquo; Gibbon found nothing in
+Oxford to please him&mdash;nothing to admire, nothing to
+love.&nbsp; From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gate-tower
+the hypochondriac Johnson&mdash;rugged, anxious, and conscious of
+his great unemployed power&mdash;looked down on a much more
+pleasant Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased to
+regard with affection.&nbsp; This contrast is found in the
+opinions of our contemporaries.&nbsp; One man will pass his time
+in sneering at his tutors and his companions, in turning
+listlessly from study to study, in following false tendencies,
+and picking up scraps of knowledge which he despises, and in
+later life he will detest his University.&nbsp; There are wiser
+and more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge against
+the stately mother of us all, that so easily can disregard our
+petty spleens and ungrateful rancour.&nbsp; Mr. Lowe&rsquo;s most
+bitter congratulatory addresses to the &lsquo;happy Civil
+Engineers,&rsquo; and his unkindest cuts at ancient history, and
+at the old philosophies which &lsquo;on Argive heights divinely
+sung,&rsquo; move her not at all.&nbsp; Meanwhile, the majority
+of men are more kindly compact, and have more natural affections,
+and on them the memory of their earliest friendships, and of that
+beautiful environment which Oxford gave to their years of youth,
+is not wholly wasted.</p>
+<p>There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than
+Gibbons.&nbsp; There is little need to repeat the familiar story
+of Johnson&rsquo;s life at Pembroke.&nbsp; He went up in the
+October term of 1728, being then nineteen years of age, and
+already full of that wide and miscellaneous classical reading
+which the Oxford course, then as now, somewhat discouraged.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;His figure and manner appeared strange&rsquo; to the
+company in which he found himself; and when he broke silence it
+was with a quotation from Macrobius.&nbsp; To his tutor&rsquo;s
+lectures, as a later poet says, &lsquo;with freshman zeal he
+went&rsquo;; but his zeal did not last out the discovery that the
+tutor was &lsquo;a heavy man,&rsquo; and the fact that there was
+&lsquo;sliding on Christ Church Meadow.&rsquo;&nbsp; Have any of
+the artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes
+in the Doctor&rsquo;s life&mdash;drawn him sliding on Christ
+Church meadows, sliding in these worn and clouted shoes of his,
+and with that figure which even the exercise of skating could not
+have made &lsquo;swan-like,&rsquo; to quote the young lady in
+&lsquo;Pickwick&rsquo;?&nbsp; Johnson was &lsquo;sconced&rsquo;
+in the sum of twopence for cutting lecture; and it is rather
+curious that the amount of the fine was the same four hundred
+years earlier, when Master Stoke, of Catte Hall (whose career we
+touched on in the second of these sketches), deserted his
+lessons.&nbsp; It was when he was thus sconced that Johnson made
+that reply which Boswell preserves &lsquo;as a specimen of the
+antithetical character of his wit&rsquo;&mdash;&lsquo;Sir, you
+have sconced me twopence for non-attendance on a lecture not
+worth a penny.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very
+various in degree.&nbsp; &lsquo;A young fellow of Balliol College
+having, upon some discontent, cut his throat very dangerously,
+the master of his College sent his servitor to the buttery-book
+to sconce him five shillings; and,&rsquo; says the Doctor,
+&lsquo;tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I&rsquo;ll
+sconce him ten!&rsquo;&nbsp; This prosaic punishment might
+perhaps deter some Werthers from playing with edged tools.</p>
+<p>From Boswell&rsquo;s meagre account of Johnson&rsquo;s Oxford
+career we gather some facts which supplement the description of
+Gibbon.&nbsp; The future historian went into residence
+twenty-three years after Johnson departed without taking his
+degree.&nbsp; Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted
+by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he
+pleased.&nbsp; He &lsquo;eloped,&rsquo; as he says, from Oxford,
+as often as he chose, and went up to town, where he was by no
+means the ideal of &lsquo;the Manly Oxonian in
+London.&rsquo;&nbsp; The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a
+revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to
+&pound;30,000, took no interest in their pupils.&nbsp;
+Gibbon&rsquo;s tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a
+style of dry and literal translation.&nbsp; The other fellows,
+less conscientious, passed their lives in tippling and tattling,
+discussing the &lsquo;Oxford Toasts,&rsquo; and drinking other
+toasts to the king over the water.&nbsp; &lsquo;Some
+duties,&rsquo; says Gibbon, &lsquo;may possibly have been imposed
+on the poor scholars,&rsquo; but &lsquo;the velvet cap was the
+cap of liberty,&rsquo; and the gentleman commoner consulted only
+his own pleasure.&nbsp; Johnson was a poor scholar, and on him
+duties were imposed.&nbsp; He was requested to write an ode on
+the Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks &lsquo;his vivacity and
+imagination must have produced something fine.&rsquo;&nbsp; He
+neglected, however, with his usual indolence, this opportunity of
+producing something fine.&nbsp; Another exercise imposed on the
+poor was the translation of Mr. Pope&rsquo;s
+&lsquo;Messiah,&rsquo; in which the young Pembroke man succeeded
+so well that, by Mr. Pope&rsquo;s own generous confession, future
+ages would doubt whether the English or the Latin piece was the
+original.&nbsp; Johnson complained that no man could be properly
+inspired by the Pembroke &lsquo;coll,&rsquo; or college beer,
+which was then commonly drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless
+of Rhine wines, and of collecting Chinese monsters.</p>
+<blockquote><p><i>Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora
+poet&aelig;</i><br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; <i>Ingenium jubeas purior baustus alat</i>.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the
+&lsquo;bitterness mistaken for frolic,&rsquo; with which Johnson
+entertained the other undergraduates round Pembroke gate, he
+never ceased to respect his college.&nbsp; &lsquo;His love and
+regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last,&rsquo; while of
+his old tutor he said, &lsquo;a man who becomes Jorden&rsquo;s
+pupil becomes his son.&rsquo;&nbsp; Gibbon&rsquo;s sneer is a
+foil to Johnson&rsquo;s kindliness.&nbsp; &lsquo;I applaud the
+filial piety which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To
+the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she
+will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to
+disclaim her for a mother.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth,
+and, to judge by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of
+the eighteenth century was excessively rough.&nbsp; Manners were
+rather primitive: a big fire burned in the centre of Balliol
+Hall, and round this fire, one night in every year, it is said
+that all the world was welcome to a feast of ale and bread and
+cheese.&nbsp; Every guest paid his shot by singing a song or
+telling a story; and one can fancy Johnson sharing in this
+barbaric hospitality.&nbsp; &lsquo;What learning can they have
+who are destitute of all principles of civil behaviour?&rsquo;
+says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746) Southey has
+made some extracts.&nbsp; The diarist was a Puritan of the old
+leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson&rsquo;s period,
+and who speaks of &lsquo;a power of gross darkness that may be
+felt constantly prevailing in that place of wisdom and of
+subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked place the scholars
+are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and most
+mischievous.&rsquo;&nbsp; But this strange and unfriendly critic
+was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their
+piety by wrecking chapels and &lsquo;rabbling&rsquo;
+ministers.&nbsp; In our days only the Davenport Brothers and
+similar professors of strange creeds suffer from the manly piety
+of the undergraduates.</p>
+<p>Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish
+assailants of <i>Alma Mater</i>, the author of <i>Terr&aelig;
+Filius</i> was the most persistent.&nbsp; The first little volume
+which contains the numbers of this bi-weekly periodical (printed
+for R. Franklin, under Tom&rsquo;s Coffee-house, in Russell
+Street, Covent Garden, <span class="GutSmall">MDCCXXVI.</span>)
+is not at all rare, and is well worth a desultory reading.&nbsp;
+What strikes one most in <i>Terr&aelig; Filius</i> is the
+religious discontent of the bilious author.&nbsp; One thinks,
+foolishly of course, of even Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at
+least in their undergraduate days.&nbsp; The mere aspect of Mr.
+Leslie Stephen&rsquo;s work on the philosophers of the eighteenth
+century is enough to banish this pleasing delusion.&nbsp; The
+Deists and Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson&rsquo;s
+day among the undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery,
+was unpopular, and might be punished.&nbsp; Johnson says, that
+when he was a boy he was a lax <i>talker</i>, rather than a lax
+<i>thinker</i>, against religion; &lsquo;but lax talking against
+religion at Oxford would not be suffered.&rsquo;&nbsp; The author
+of <i>Terr&aelig; Filius</i>, however, never omits a chance of
+sneering at our faith, and at the Church of England as by law
+established.&nbsp; In his description of the exercises of the
+Club of Wits, only one respectably clever epigram is quoted,
+beginning,&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Since in religion all men disagree,<br />
+And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>This production &lsquo;was voted heretical,&rsquo; and burned
+by the hands of the small-beer drawer, while the author was
+expelled.&nbsp; In the author&rsquo;s advice to freshmen, he
+gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary
+creatures.&nbsp; The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a
+University sermon, &lsquo;never, in his wildest moments, dreamed
+of being a butterfly&rsquo;; but the public schoolboy of the last
+century sometimes came up in what he conceived to be gorgeous
+attire.&nbsp; &lsquo;I observe, in the first place, that you no
+sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to
+distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new
+drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a
+brazen-hilted sword.&rsquo;&nbsp; As soon as they arrived in
+Oxford, these youths were hospitably received &lsquo;amongst a
+parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in
+honour and common civility, to make you <i>damnable drunk</i>,
+and carry you, as they call it, a <span
+class="GutSmall">CORPSE</span> to bed.&rsquo;&nbsp; When this
+period of jollity is ended, the freshman must declare his
+views.&nbsp; He must see that he is in the fashion; &lsquo;and
+let your declarations be, that you are <i>Churchmen</i>, and that
+you believe as the <i>Church</i> believes.&nbsp; For instance,
+you have subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture
+to explain the sense in which you subscribed them, because there
+are various senses; so many, indeed, that scarce two men
+understand them in the same, and no <i>true Churchman</i> in that
+which the words bear, and in that which they were
+written.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>This is pretty plain speaking, and <i>Terr&aelig; Filius</i>
+enforces, by an historical example, the dangers of even political
+freethought.&nbsp; In 1714 the Constitution Club kept King
+George&rsquo;s birthday.&nbsp; The Constitutional Party was then
+the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though, thanks to
+the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon the
+same.&nbsp; The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club,
+sallying forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as
+seen in our illustration), where the &lsquo;silly statue,&rsquo;
+as Hearne calls it, was about that time erected.&nbsp; The Whigs
+took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted the gates, and an
+Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman of
+Brasenose.&nbsp; The Tories, &lsquo;under terror of this
+dangerous and unexpected resistance, retreated from
+Oriel.&rsquo;&nbsp; Yet such was the academic strength of the
+Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a
+&lsquo;Constitutioner,&rsquo; could scarcely take his degree.</p>
+<p><i>Terr&aelig; Filius</i>, who lashes the dons for
+covetousness, greed, dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often
+corroborates the Puritan&rsquo;s report about the bad manners of
+the undergraduates.&nbsp; Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack
+her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair.&nbsp;
+<i>Terr&aelig; Filius</i> thus describes a &lsquo;smart,&rsquo;
+as these dandies were called&mdash;Mr. Frippery:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;He is one of those who come in their
+academical undress, every morning between ten and eleven, to
+Lyne&rsquo;s Coffee-house; after which he takes a turn or two
+upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst the dull
+<i>regulars</i> are at dinner in their hall, according to
+statute; about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled
+chicken or some pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour
+at least to dress in, to make his afternoon&rsquo;s appearance at
+Lyne&rsquo;s; from whence he adjourns to Hamilton&rsquo;s about
+five; from whence (after strutting about the room for a while,
+and drinking a dram of citron), he goes to chapel, to show how
+genteelly he dresses, and how well he can chaunt.&nbsp; After
+prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast, and then waits
+upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and back
+again.&nbsp; He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything
+but novels and romances.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the
+streets more gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our
+boating men.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk
+gown, which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flax
+tie-wig, or sometimes a long natural one, which reaches down
+below his [well, say below his waist]; a broad bully-cock&rsquo;d
+hat, or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white
+stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes.&nbsp; His clothes lined
+with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as
+at the wrists.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>These &lsquo;smarts&rsquo; cut no such gallant figure when
+they first arrived in Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old
+country farmers), in linsey-woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt
+heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings, flapping hats, with
+silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-cloths run with red at the
+bottom.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p166b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Magdalen College and Bridge from the Cherwell"
+title=
+"Magdalen College and Bridge from the Cherwell"
+ src="images/p166s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the
+contemporary account-book of a Proctor.&nbsp; In 1752 Gilbert
+White of Selborne was Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of
+Magdalen, who little thought that Oxford boasted an official who
+was to become an English classic.&nbsp; White paid some attention
+to dress, and got a feather-topp&rsquo;d, grizzled wig from
+London; cost him &pound;2, 5s.&nbsp; He bought &lsquo;mountain
+wine, very old and good,&rsquo; and had his crest engraved on his
+teaspoons, that everything might be handsome about him.&nbsp;
+When he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall they ate a
+hundred pounds weight of biscuits&mdash;not, we trust, without
+marmalade.&nbsp; &lsquo;A bowl of rum-punch from
+Horsman&rsquo;s&rsquo; cost half a crown.&nbsp; Fancy a jolly
+Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in
+April!&nbsp; Eggs cost a penny each, and &lsquo;three oranges and
+a mouse-trap&rsquo; ninepence.</p>
+<p>White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor &lsquo;seven
+pounds of double-refined white sugar.&rsquo;&nbsp; I like to
+fancy my learned friend, the Proctor, going to the present
+Vice-Chancellor&rsquo;s with a donation of white sugar!&nbsp;
+Manners have certainly changed in the direction of
+severity.&nbsp; &lsquo;Share of the expense for Mr.
+Butcher&rsquo;s release&rsquo; came to ten and sixpence.&nbsp;
+What had Mr. Butcher been doing?&nbsp; The Proctor went &lsquo;to
+Blenheim with Nan,&rsquo; and it cost him fifteen and
+sixpence.&nbsp; Perhaps she was one of the &lsquo;Oxford
+Toasts&rsquo; of a contemporary satire.&nbsp; Strawberries were
+fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on November 6, White
+lost one shilling &lsquo;at cards, in common room.&rsquo;&nbsp;
+He went from Selborne to Oxford, &lsquo;in a post-chaise with
+Jenny Croke&rsquo;; and he gave Jenny a &lsquo;round
+Chinaturene.&rsquo;&nbsp; Tea cost eight shillings a pound in
+1752, while rum-punch was but half a crown a bowl.&nbsp;
+White&rsquo;s highest terminal battels were but &pound;12, though
+he was a hospitable man, and would readily treat the other
+Proctor to a bowl of punch.&nbsp; It is well to remember White
+and Johnson when the Gibbon of that or any other day bewails the
+intellectual poverty of Oxford.</p>
+<h2><a name="page171"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+171</span>CHAPTER VIII<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND
+LANDOR</span></h2>
+<p><span class="smcap">At</span> any given time a large number of
+poets may be found among the undergraduates at Oxford, and the
+younger dons.&nbsp; It is not easy to say what becomes of all
+these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar people while
+they remain in residence.&nbsp; The undergraduate poet is a not
+uninteresting study.&nbsp; He wears his hair long, and divides it
+down the middle.&nbsp; His eye is wild and wandering, and his
+manner absent, especially when he is called on to translate a
+piece of an ancient author in lecture.&nbsp; He does not
+&lsquo;read&rsquo; much, in the technical sense of the term, but
+consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor
+poetry.&nbsp; His own verses the poet may be heard declaiming
+aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been
+known to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all
+that remained of the cold meats of a supper party, without
+interfering with the divine <i>afflatus</i>.&nbsp; When the
+college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it
+to the Editor of the <i>Nineteenth Century</i>, and it returns to
+him after many days.&nbsp; At last it appears in print, in
+<i>College Rhymes</i>, a collection of mild verse, which is (or
+was) printed at regular or irregular intervals, and was never
+seen except in the rooms of contributors.&nbsp; The poet also
+speaks at the Union, where his sentiments are either
+revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on Magna
+Charta as the first step on the path that leads to
+England&rsquo;s ruin.&nbsp; As a politician, the undergraduate
+poet knows no mean between Mr. Peter Taylor and King John.&nbsp;
+He has been known to found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards to
+swallow the formul&aelig; of Mr. Bradlaugh.</p>
+<p>The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare
+with his dons.&nbsp; He cannot conform himself to pedantic rules,
+which demand his return to college before midnight.&nbsp; Though
+often the possessor of a sweet vein of clerical and Kebleian
+verse, the poet does not willingly attend chapel; for indeed, as
+he sits up all night, it is cruel to expect him to arise before
+noon.&nbsp; About the poet&rsquo;s late habits a story is told,
+which seems authentic.&nbsp; A remarkable and famous contemporary
+singer was known to his fellow-undergraduates only by this
+circumstance, that his melodious voice was heard declaiming
+anapaests all through the ambrosial night.&nbsp; When the voice
+of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the
+silence.&nbsp; This noise was produced by the bard&rsquo;s Scotch
+friend and critic in knocking the ashes out of his pipe.&nbsp;
+These feasts of reason are almost incompatible with the early
+devotion which, strangely enough, Shelley found time and
+inclination to attend.</p>
+<p>Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might
+break the decalogue and the laws of man in every direction with
+safety and the approval of the dons, if you only went regularly
+to chapel.&nbsp; As the poet cannot do this (unless he is a
+&lsquo;sleepless man&rsquo;), his existence is a long struggle
+with the fellows and tutors of his college.&nbsp; The manners of
+poets vary, of course, with the tastes of succeeding
+generations.&nbsp; I have heard of two (Thyrsis and Corydon)
+&lsquo;who lived in Oxford as if it were a large
+country-house.&rsquo;</p>
+<p>Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is
+invidiously said that they build shrines to Blue China and other
+ceramic abominations of the Philistine, and worship the same in
+their rooms.&nbsp; Of this sort it is not the moment to
+speak.&nbsp; Time has not proved them.&nbsp; But the old poets of
+ten years ago lived a militant life; they rarely took good
+classes (though they competed industriously for the Newdigate,
+writing in the metre of <i>Dolores</i>), and it not uncommonly
+happened that they left Oxford without degrees.&nbsp; They were
+often very agreeable fellows, as long as one was in no way
+responsible for them; but it was almost impossible&mdash;human
+nature being what it is&mdash;that they should be much
+appreciated by tutors, proctors, and heads of houses.&nbsp; How
+could these worthy, learned, and often kind and courteous persons
+know when they were dealing with a lad of genius, and when they
+had to do with an affected and pretentious donkey?</p>
+<p>These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a
+consideration of the existence of Shelley and Landor at
+Oxford&mdash;the Oxford of 1793&ndash;1810.&nbsp; Whatever the
+effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be said that,
+to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less
+than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type.&nbsp; In
+Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier
+specimen of the same class.&nbsp; People who have to do with
+hundreds of young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to
+generalise.&nbsp; No don, that was a don, could have seen Shelley
+or Landor as they are described to us without hastily classing
+them in the category of poets who would come to no good and do
+little credit to the college.&nbsp; Landor went up to Trinity
+College in 1793.&nbsp; It was the dreadful year of the Terror,
+when good Englishmen hated the cruel murderers of kings and
+queens.&nbsp; Landor was a good Englishman, of course, and he
+never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie
+Antoinette.&nbsp; But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his
+own unpowdered hair&mdash;the Poet thus declaring himself at once
+in the regular recognised fashion.&nbsp; &lsquo;For a portion of
+the time he certainly read hard, but the results he kept to
+himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything in the
+shape of competition.&rsquo;&nbsp; (Now competition is the
+essence of modern University study.)&nbsp; &lsquo;Though I wrote
+better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the
+University,&rsquo; says Landor, &lsquo;I could never be persuaded
+by my tutor or friends to contend for any prize
+whatever.&rsquo;&nbsp; The pleasantest and most profitable hours
+that Landor could remember at Oxford &lsquo;were passed with
+Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the half-hidden
+Cherwell.&rsquo;&nbsp; Hours like these are indeed the
+pleasantest and most profitable that any of us pass at
+Oxford.&nbsp; The one duty which that University, by virtue of
+its very nature, has never neglected, is the assembling of young
+men together from all over England, and giving them three years
+of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes
+which are classical and peaceful.&nbsp; For these hours, the most
+fruitful of our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as
+friendship lives; that is, as long as life and memory remain with
+us.&nbsp; And, &lsquo;if anything endure, if hope there
+be,&rsquo; our conscious existence in the after-world would ask
+for no better companions than those who walked with us by the
+Isis and the Cherwell.</p>
+<p>Landor called himself &lsquo;a Jacobin,&rsquo; though his own
+letters show that he was as far as the most insolent young
+&lsquo;tuft&rsquo; from relishing doctrines of human
+equality.&nbsp; He had the reputation, however, of being not only
+a Jacobin, but &lsquo;a mad Jacobin&rsquo;; too mad for Southey,
+who was then young, and a Liberal.&nbsp; &lsquo;Landor was
+obliged to leave the University for shooting at one of the
+Fellows through a window,&rsquo; is the account which Southey
+gave of Landor&rsquo;s rustication.&nbsp; Now fellows often put
+up with a great deal of horse-play.&nbsp; There is scarcely a
+more touching story than that of the don who for the first time
+found himself &lsquo;screwed up,&rsquo; and fastened within his
+own oak.&nbsp; &lsquo;What am I to do?&rsquo; the victim asked
+his sympathising scout, who was on the other, the free side of
+the oak.&nbsp; &lsquo;Well, sir, Mr. Muff, sir, when
+&rsquo;e&rsquo;s screwed up &rsquo;e sends for the
+blacksmith,&rsquo; replied the servant.&nbsp; What a position for
+a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of sending
+for the blacksmith!&nbsp; Fellows have not very unfrequently been
+fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with soda-water bottles
+full of gunpowder.&nbsp; One has also known sparrows shot from
+Balliol windows on the Martyrs&rsquo; Memorial of our
+illustration.&nbsp; In this case, too, the sportsman was a
+poet.&nbsp; But deliberately to pot at a fellow, &lsquo;to go for
+him with a shot gun,&rsquo; as the repentant American said he
+would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly
+a strong measure.&nbsp; No college which pretended to maintain
+discipline could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly.&nbsp; In
+truth, Landor&rsquo;s offence has been exaggerated by
+Southey.&nbsp; It was nothing out of the common.&nbsp; The poet
+was giving &lsquo;an after-dinner party&rsquo; in his
+rooms.&nbsp; The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor
+was intimate, he says, with only one undergraduate of his own
+college, Trinity.&nbsp; On the opposite side of the quadrangle a
+Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom the
+Jacobin Landor calls &lsquo;servitors and other raff of every
+description.&rsquo;&nbsp; The guests at the rival wine-parties
+began to &lsquo;row&rsquo; each other, Landor says, adding,
+&lsquo;All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have
+blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out
+of a window.&nbsp; But my gun was lying on a table in the room,
+and I had in a back closet some little shot.&nbsp; I proposed, as
+they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the
+outside, to fire a volley.&nbsp; It was thought a good trick, and
+accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr.
+Leeds very superfluously complained to the President.&nbsp;
+Landor adopted the worst possible line of defence, and so the
+University and this poet parted company.</p>
+<p>It seems to have been generally understood that Landor&rsquo;s
+affair was a boyish escapade.&nbsp; A copious literature is
+engaged with the subject of Shelley&rsquo;s expulsion.&nbsp; As
+the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the
+<i>Life of Shelley</i>, that poet&rsquo;s career at Oxford was a
+typical one.&nbsp; There are in every generation youths like him,
+in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of
+course, in genius.&nbsp; The divine spark has not touched them,
+but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has
+not tamed.&nbsp; As Mr. Hogg&rsquo;s book is out of print, and
+rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce
+some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford
+as she was in 1810.&nbsp; The University has changed in many
+ways, and in most ways for the better.&nbsp; Perhaps that old,
+indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of
+such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley.&nbsp; When his Eton
+friends asked him whether he still meant to be &lsquo;the
+Atheist,&rsquo; that is, the rebel he had been at school, he
+said, &lsquo;No; the college authorities were civil, and left him
+alone.&rsquo;&nbsp; Let us remember this when the learned
+Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley
+&lsquo;an Atheist.&rsquo;&nbsp; Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that
+undergraduates were left too much alone.&nbsp; But who could have
+safely advised or securely guided Shelley?</p>
+<p>Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as
+reading goes, than perhaps they like&mdash;certainly much more
+than Shelley would have liked.&nbsp; But when we turn from study
+to the conduct of life, is it not plain that no <i>official</i>
+interference can be of real value?&nbsp; Friendship and
+confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and
+pupils.&nbsp; There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy,
+and with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that
+they become the friends of generation after generation of
+freshmen.&nbsp; This is fortunate; but who can wonder that
+middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each
+other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of
+aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their own
+resources?&nbsp; One has occasionally heard clever men complain
+that they were neglected by their seniors, that their hearts and
+brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to
+unpack.&nbsp; And it is true that modern education, when it meets
+the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the
+minds of men.&nbsp; To put it shortly, clever students have to go
+through their age of <i>Sturm und Drang</i>, and they are
+sometimes disappointed when older people, their tutors, for
+example, do not help them to weather the storm.&nbsp; It is a
+tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and
+Shelley &lsquo;was borne darkly, fearfully afar,&rsquo; into
+unplumbed seas of thought and experience.&nbsp; When Mr. Hogg
+complains that his friend was too much left to himself to study
+and think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have
+helped Shelley.&nbsp; He was better at Oxford without his old Dr.
+Lind, &lsquo;with whom he used to curse George <span
+class="GutSmall">III.</span> after tea.&rsquo;</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p182b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"In the Garden of Worcester College.  By Richard Seeley"
+title=
+"In the Garden of Worcester College.  By Richard Seeley"
+ src="images/p182s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating
+than those which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford.&nbsp; We
+see him entering the hall of University College&mdash;a tall, shy
+stripling, bronzed with the September sun, with long
+elf-locks.&nbsp; He takes his seat by a stranger, and in a moment
+holds him spell-bound, while he talks of Plato, and Goethe, and
+Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek philosophy.&nbsp; Mr. Hogg
+draws a curious sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, where
+seven-shilling pieces were being dissolved in acid in the
+teacups, where there was a great hole in the floor that the poet
+had burned with his chemicals.&nbsp; The one-eyed scout,
+&lsquo;the Arimaspian,&rsquo; must have had a time of tribulation
+(being a conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd
+master.&nbsp; How characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the
+glow of his fancy to science, to declare that things, not
+thoughts, mineralogy, not literature, must occupy human minds for
+the future, and then to leave a lecture on mineralogy in the
+middle, and admit that &lsquo;stones are dull things after
+all!&rsquo;&nbsp; Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on
+Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from
+which Oxford, with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city
+of the Arabian Nights&mdash;a town of palaces and princesses,
+rather than of proctors.</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;One Sunday we had been reading Plato
+together so diligently, that the usual hour of exercise passed
+away unperceived: we sallied forth hastily to take the air for
+half-an-hour before dinner.&nbsp; In the middle of Magdalen
+Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms.&nbsp; Shelley was
+more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life that was
+past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present,
+according to the established usages of society, in that fleeting
+moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century.&nbsp;
+With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child.&nbsp; The
+mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown over
+the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it
+fast by its long train.</p>
+<p>&lsquo;&ldquo;Will your baby tell us anything about
+pre-existence, Madam?&rdquo; he asked, in a piercing voice, and
+with a wistful look.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life
+of the Scholar Gipsy.&nbsp; In Mr. Arnold&rsquo;s poem, which has
+made permanent for all time the charm, the sentiment of
+Oxfordshire scenery, the poet seems to be following the track of
+Shelley.&nbsp; In Mr. Hogg&rsquo;s memoirs we hear little of
+summer; it seems always to have been in winter that the friends
+took their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in talk, his
+inspiration.&nbsp; One thinks of him</p>
+<blockquote><p>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&lsquo;in
+winter, on the causeway chill,<br />
+Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>returning to the supper in Hogg&rsquo;s rooms, to the curious
+desultory meals, the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring
+fire, the small head lying perilously near the flames.&nbsp; One
+would not linger here over the absurd injustice of his expulsion
+from the University.&nbsp; It is pleasant to know, on Mr.
+Hogg&rsquo;s testimony, that &lsquo;residence at Oxford was
+exceedingly delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most
+beneficial.&rsquo;&nbsp; At Oxford, at least, he seems to have
+been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness, and who, if he made
+another suffer, himself suffered so much for others.&nbsp; The
+memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of
+Oxford.&nbsp; Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his
+residence here, may we not say, with the shepherd in Theocritus,
+of the divine singer:</p>
+<blockquote><p>&alpha;&#7984;&theta;&rsquo; &#7952;&pi;&rsquo;
+&#7952;&gamma;&mu;&#8166; &zeta;&omega;&omicron;&#8150;&sigmaf;
+&#7952;&nu;&alpha;&rho;&#8055;&theta;&mu;&iota;&omicron;&sigmaf;
+&#8036;&phi;&epsilon;&lambda;&epsilon;&sigmaf;
+&epsilon;&#7990;&mu;&epsilon;&nu;,<br />
+&#8037;&sigmaf; &tau;&omicron;&iota; &#7952;&gamma;&#8060;&nu;
+&#7952;&nu;&#8057;&mu;&epsilon;&upsilon;&omicron;&nu; &#7936;&nu;
+&#8036;&rho;&epsilon;&alpha; &tau;&#8048;&sigmaf;
+&kappa;&alpha;&lambda;&#8048;&sigmaf;
+&alpha;&#7990;&gamma;&alpha;&sigmaf;<br />
+&phi;&omega;&nu;&#8118;&sigmaf;
+&epsilon;&#7984;&sigma;&alpha;&#8055;&omega;&nu;, &tau;&#8058;
+&delta;&rsquo; &#8017;&pi;&#8056;
+&delta;&rho;&upsilon;&sigma;&#8054;&nu; &#7974;
+&#8017;&pi;&#8056;
+&pi;&epsilon;&#8059;&kappa;&alpha;&iota;&sigmaf;<br />
+&#7937;&delta;&#8058;
+&mu;&epsilon;&lambda;&iota;&sigma;&delta;&#8057;&mu;&epsilon;&nu;&omicron;&sigmaf;
+
+&kappa;&alpha;&tau;&epsilon;&kappa;&#8051;&kappa;&lambda;&iota;&sigma;&omicron;,
+&theta;&epsilon;&#8150;&epsilon;
+&Kappa;&omicron;&mu;&#8118;&tau;&alpha;.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>&lsquo;Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with
+the living, how gladly on the hills would I have herded thy
+pretty she-goats, and listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under
+oaks and pine-trees lying, didst sweetly sing, divine
+Comatas!&rsquo;</p>
+<h1><a name="page191"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+191</span>CHAPTER IX<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">A GENERAL VIEW</span></h1>
+<p><span class="smcap">We</span> have looked at Oxford life in so
+many different periods, that now, perhaps, we may regard it, like
+our artist, as a whole, and take a bird&rsquo;s-eye view of its
+present condition.&nbsp; We may ask St. Bernard&rsquo;s question,
+<i>Whither hast thou come</i>? a question to which there are so
+many answers readily given, from within and without the
+University.&nbsp; It is not probable that the place will vary, in
+essential character, from that which has all along been its
+own.&nbsp; We shall have considered Oxford to very little
+purpose, if it is not plain that the University has been less a
+home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English
+intellectual life.&nbsp; At Oxford the men have been thinking
+what England was to think a few months later, and they have been
+thinking with the passion and the energy of youth.&nbsp; The
+impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been given by any
+mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from
+without&mdash;from Italy, from France, from London, from a
+country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering
+preacher.&nbsp; Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so
+small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily,
+and promptly distributed the new forces, religious or
+intellectual, throughout England.</p>
+<p>It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the
+questions that move the people most, have always been religious,
+or deeply tinctured with religion.&nbsp; Conservative as Oxford
+is, the home of &lsquo;impossible causes,&rsquo; she has always
+given asylum to new doctrines, to all the thoughts which
+comfortable people call &lsquo;dangerous.&rsquo;&nbsp; We have
+seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps,
+till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was fused
+into the fire of the Reformation.&nbsp; Oxford was literally
+devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and
+then was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of
+Puritanism, and of Tory Anglicanism.&nbsp; The latter had
+scarcely had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by
+her pipe of port, when Evangelical religion came to vex all that
+was moderate, mature, and fond of repose.&nbsp; The revolutionary
+enthusiasm of Shelley&rsquo;s time was comparatively feeble,
+because it had no connection with religion; or, at least, no
+connection with the religion to which our countrymen were
+accustomed.&nbsp; Between the era of the Revolution and our own
+day, two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have
+swept over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may
+say so, like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more
+tranquil than it really is.</p>
+<p>The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the
+religious disturbances to which we refer, and much the most
+powerful.</p>
+<p>It is curious to read about that movement in the
+<i>Apologia</i>, for example, of Cardinal Newman.&nbsp; On what
+singular topics men&rsquo;s minds were bent! what queer survivals
+of the speculations of the Schools agitated them as they walked
+round Christ Church meadows!&nbsp; They enlightened each other on
+things transcendental, yet material, on matters unthinkable, and,
+properly speaking, unspeakable.&nbsp; It is as if they
+&lsquo;spoke with tongues,&rsquo; which had a meaning then, and
+for them, but which to us, some forty years later, seem as
+meaningless as the inscriptions of Easter Island.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p195b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"Old Episcopal Palace.  From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas"
+title=
+"Old Episcopal Palace.  From a Drawing by R. Kent Thomas"
+ src="images/p195s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in
+which the great Romantic reaction laid hold on England and
+Oxford.&nbsp; The father of all the revival of old doctrines and
+old rituals in our Church, the originator of that wistful return
+to things beautiful and long dead, was&mdash;Walter Scott.&nbsp;
+Without him, and his wonderful wand which made the dry bones of
+history live, England and France would not have known this
+picturesque reaction.&nbsp; The stir in these two countries was
+curiously characteristic of their genius.&nbsp; In France it put
+on, in the first place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting,
+sculpture.&nbsp; Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit
+for ten years.&nbsp; The religious reaction was a punier thing;
+the great Abb&eacute;, who was the Newman of France, was himself
+unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of
+medieval ruins.&nbsp; In England, and especially in Oxford, the
+&aelig;sthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted
+into religion.&nbsp; Doctrines which men thought dead were
+resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but
+the sermons of Newman, the <i>Tracts</i>, the whole religious
+force which has transformed and revivified the Church of
+England.&nbsp; That force is still working, it need hardly be
+said, in the University of to-day, under conditions much changed,
+but not without thrills of the old volcanic energy.</p>
+<p>Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully
+agitating of intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845.&nbsp; A
+new current came in from Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold
+and the natural tide of reaction began to run very strong.&nbsp;
+If we had the <i>apologi&aelig;</i> of the men who thought most,
+about the time when Clough was an undergraduate, we should see
+that the influence of the Anglican divines had become a thing of
+sentiment and curiosity.&nbsp; The life had not died out of it,
+but the people whom it could permanently affect were now limited
+in number and easily recognisable.&nbsp; This form of religion
+might tempt and attract the strongest men for a while, but it
+certainly would not retain them.&nbsp; It is by this time a
+matter of history, though we are speaking of our contemporaries,
+that the abyss between the <i>Lives of the English Saints</i>,
+and the <i>Nemesis of Faith</i>, was narrow, and easily
+crossed.&nbsp; There was in Oxford that enthusiasm for certain
+German ideas which had previously been felt for medieval
+ideas.&nbsp; Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion was
+the ruling power; and people believed in Liberalism.&nbsp; What
+is, or used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some
+ten or fifteen years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford.&nbsp;
+The <i>Essays and Reviews</i> were what the <i>Tracts</i> had
+been; and Homeric battles were fought over the income of the
+Regius Professor of Greek.&nbsp; When that affair was settled
+Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single
+dominant intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly
+subsiding, left the ship of the University lurching and rolling
+in a heavy swell.</p>
+<p>People believed in Liberalism!&nbsp; Their faith worked
+miracles; and the great University Commission performed many
+wonderful works, bidding close fellowships be open, and giving
+all power into the hands of Examiners.&nbsp; Their dispensation
+still survives; the large examining-machine works night and day,
+in term time and vacation, and yet we are not happy.&nbsp; The
+age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the age of collapsed
+opinions.&nbsp; Never men believed more fervidly in any
+revelation than the men of twenty years ago believed in political
+economy, free trade, open competition, and the reign of
+Common-sense and of Mr. Cobden.&nbsp; Where is that faith
+now?&nbsp; Many of the middle-aged disciples of the Church of
+Common-sense are still in our midst.&nbsp; They say the old
+sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that
+scepticism is abroad; it seems that the world is wider than their
+system.&nbsp; Not even open examinations for fellowships and
+scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the
+Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art, have made Oxford that
+ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like
+the New Jerusalem.</p>
+<p>We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if
+we have not learned that it is an eminently discontented
+place.&nbsp; There is room in colleges and common rooms for both
+sorts of discontent&mdash;the ignoble, which is the child of
+vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the unassuaged
+thirst for perfection.&nbsp; The present result of the last forty
+years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to
+improve the working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of
+the University.&nbsp; There are more ways than one in which this
+feeling gets vent.&nbsp; The simplest, and perhaps the most
+honest and worthy impulse, is that which makes the best of the
+present arrangements.&nbsp; Great religious excitement and
+religious discussion being in abeyance, for once, the energy of
+the place goes out in teaching.&nbsp; The last reforms have made
+Oxford a huge collection of schools, in which physical science,
+history, philosophy, philology, scholarship, theology, and almost
+everything in the world but arch&aelig;ology, are being taught
+and learned with very great vigour.&nbsp; The hardest worked of
+men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all tutors are
+conscientious.&nbsp; The professors being an ornamental, but
+(with few exceptions) <i>merely</i> ornamental, order of beings,
+the tutors have to do the work of a University, which, for the
+moment, is a teaching-machine.&nbsp; They deliver I know not how
+many sets of lectures a year, and each lecture demands a fresh
+and full acquaintance with the latest ideas of French, German,
+and Italian scholars.&nbsp; No one can afford, or is willing, to
+lag behind; every one is &lsquo;gladly learning,&rsquo; like
+Chaucer&rsquo;s clerk, as well as earnestly teaching.&nbsp; The
+knowledge and the industry of these gentlemen is a perpetual
+marvel to the &lsquo;bellelettristic trifler.&rsquo;&nbsp; New
+studies, like that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental
+tongues, have sprung up during recent years, have grown into
+strength and completeness.&nbsp; It is unnecessary to say,
+perhaps, that these facts dispose of the popular idea about the
+luxury of the long vacation.&nbsp; During the more part of the
+long vacation the conscientious teacher must be toiling after the
+great mundane movement in learning.&nbsp; He must be acquiring
+the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham
+characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek
+inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to
+reading the familiar classics by the light of the latest
+commentaries.</p>
+<p style="text-align: center">
+<a href="images/p200b.jpg">
+<img alt=
+"The Ante Chapel, New College"
+title=
+"The Ante Chapel, New College"
+ src="images/p200s.jpg" />
+</a></p>
+<p>What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these
+labours?&nbsp; The answer is the secret of University
+discontent.&nbsp; All this accumulated knowledge goes out in
+teaching, is scattered abroad in lectures, is caught up in
+note-books, and is poured out, with a difference, in
+examinations.&nbsp; There is not an amount of original literary
+work produced by the University which bears any due proportion to
+the solid materials accumulated.&nbsp; It is just the reverse of
+Falstaff&rsquo;s case&mdash;but one halfpenny-worth of sack to an
+intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of the spirit of learning
+to cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge.&nbsp; The time and
+energy of men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing, and
+then in eternal examinations.&nbsp; Even if the results are
+satisfactory on the whole, even if a hundred well-equipped young
+men are turned out of the examining-machine every year, these
+arrangements certainly curb individual ambition.&nbsp; If a
+resident in Oxford is to make an income that seems adequate, he
+must lecture, examine, and write manuals and primers, till he is
+grey, and till the energy that might have added something new and
+valuable to the acquisitions of the world has departed.</p>
+<p>This state of things has produced the demand for the
+&lsquo;Endowment of Research.&rsquo;&nbsp; It is not necessary to
+go into that controversy.&nbsp; Englishmen, as a rule, believe
+that endowed cats catch no mice.&nbsp; They would rather endow a
+theatre than a <i>Gelehrter</i>, if endow something they
+must.&nbsp; They have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if
+useless beings, the heads of houses, whom it would be necessary
+to abolish if Researchers were to get the few tens of thousands
+they require.&nbsp; Finally, it is asked whether the learned
+might not find great endowment in economy; for it is a fact that
+a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian will &lsquo;research&rsquo;
+for life on no larger income than a simple fellowship
+bestows.</p>
+<p>The great obstacle to this &lsquo;plain living&rsquo; is
+perhaps to be found in the traditional hospitality of
+Oxford.&nbsp; All her doors are open, and every stranger is
+kindly entreated by her, and she is like the &lsquo;discreet
+housewife&rsquo; in Homer&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p style="text-align:
+center">&epsilon;&#7988;&delta;&alpha;&tau;&alpha;
+&pi;&#8057;&lambda;&lambda;&rsquo;
+&#7952;&pi;&iota;&theta;&epsilon;&#8150;&sigma;&alpha;,
+&chi;&alpha;&rho;&iota;&zeta;&omicron;&mu;&#8051;&nu;&eta;
+&pi;&alpha;&rho;&epsilon;&#8057;&nu;&tau;&omega;&nu;.</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>In some languages the same word serves for
+&lsquo;stranger&rsquo; and &lsquo;enemy,&rsquo; but in the Oxford
+dialect &lsquo;stranger&rsquo; and &lsquo;guest&rsquo; are
+synonymous.&nbsp; Such is the custom of the place, and it does
+not make plain living very easy.&nbsp; Some critics will be
+anxious here to attack the &lsquo;&aelig;sthetic&rsquo;
+movement.&nbsp; One will be expected to say that, after the ideas
+of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those
+of the wicked, the extravagant, the effeminate, the immoral
+&lsquo;Blue China School.&rsquo;&nbsp; Perhaps there is something
+in this, but sermons on the subject are rather luxuries than
+necessaries in the present didactic mood of the Press.&nbsp;
+&lsquo;They were friends of ours, moreover,&rsquo; as Aristotle
+says, &lsquo;who brought these ideas in&rsquo;; so the subject
+may be left with this brief notice.&nbsp; As a piece of practical
+advice, one may warn the young and ardent advocate of the
+Endowment of Research that he will find it rather easier to
+curtail his expenses than to get a subsidy from the
+Commission.</p>
+<p>The last important result of the &lsquo;modern spirit&rsquo;
+at Oxford, the last stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was
+the removal of the celibate condition from certain
+fellowships.&nbsp; One can hardly take a bird&rsquo;s-eye view of
+Oxford without criticising the consequences of this
+innovation.&nbsp; The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons,
+very difficult to handle.&nbsp; One reason is, that the
+experiment has not been completely tried.&nbsp; It is easy enough
+to marry on a fellowship, a tutorship, and a few small
+miscellaneous offices.&nbsp; But how will it be when you come to
+forty years, or even fifty?&nbsp; No materials exist which can be
+used by the social philosopher who wants an answer to this
+question.&nbsp; In the meantime, the common rooms are perhaps
+more dreary than of old, in many a college, for lack of the
+presence of men now translated to another place.&nbsp; As to the
+&lsquo;society&rsquo; of Oxford, that is, no doubt, very much
+more charming and vivacious than it used to be in the days when
+Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy.</p>
+<p>Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an
+activity that would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly
+conscientious industry, doing that which its hand finds to do,
+but not absolutely certain that it is not neglecting nobler
+tasks.&nbsp; Perhaps Oxford has never been more busy with its own
+work, never less distracted by religious politics.&nbsp; If we
+are to look for a less happy sign, we shall find it in the
+tendency to run up &lsquo;new buildings.&rsquo;&nbsp; The
+colleges are landowners: they must suffer with other owners of
+real property in the present depression; they will soon need all
+their savings.&nbsp; That is one reason why they should be chary
+of building; another is, that the fellows of a college at any
+given moment are not necessarily endowed with architectural
+knowledge and taste.&nbsp; They should think twice, or even
+thrice, before leaving on Oxford for many centuries the uncomely
+mark of an unfortunate judgment.</p>
+<h2><a name="page209"></a><span class="pagenum">p.
+209</span>CHAPTER X<br />
+<span class="GutSmall">UNDERGRADUATE
+LIFE&mdash;CONCLUSION</span></h2>
+<p>A <span class="smcap">hundred</span> pictures have been drawn
+of undergraduate life at Oxford, and a hundred caricatures.&nbsp;
+Novels innumerable introduce some Oxford scenes.&nbsp; An author
+generally writes his first romance soon after taking his degree;
+he writes about his own experience and his own memories; he mixes
+his ingredients at will and tints according to fancy.&nbsp; This
+is one of the two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from the
+undergraduate side, are generally false.&nbsp; They are either
+drawn by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises
+himself and his friends, or they are designed by ladies who have
+read <i>Verdant Green</i>, and who, at some period, have paid a
+flying visit to Cambridge.&nbsp; An exhaustive knowledge of
+<i>Verdant Green</i>, and a hasty view of the Fitzwilliam Museum
+and &lsquo;the backs of the Colleges&rsquo; (which are to
+Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford
+sufficient materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford.&nbsp; The
+picture daubed by the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in
+fiction is as unrecognisable.&nbsp; He makes himself and his
+friends too large, too noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too
+extravagant, too pugnacious.&nbsp; They seem to stride down the
+High, prodigious, disproportionate figures, like the kings of
+Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the crowd of dons,
+tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side cads.&nbsp;
+Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances of
+years ago, in University novels.&nbsp; The mildest of men
+suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who
+&lsquo;screw up&rsquo; timid dons, box with colossal watermen,
+and read all night with wet towels bound round their fevered
+brows.&nbsp; These sketches are all nonsense.&nbsp; Men who do
+these things do not write about them; and men who write about
+them never did them.</p>
+<p>There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of
+describing undergraduate life with truth.&nbsp; There are very
+many varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of
+occupying and amusing themselves.&nbsp; A steady man that reads
+his five or six hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the
+river, finds that his path scarcely ever crosses that of him who
+belongs to the Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely
+dines in hall.&nbsp; Then the &lsquo;pale student,&rsquo; who is
+hard at work in his rooms or in the Bodleian all day, and who has
+only two friends, out-college men, with whom he takes walks and
+tea,&mdash;he sees existence in a very different aspect.&nbsp;
+The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his club,
+dividing the house on questions of blotting-paper and quill pens,
+discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place of
+Librarian, writing rubbish in the suggestion-book, to him Oxford
+is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine
+flower, the Union.&nbsp; He never encounters the undergraduate
+who haunts billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry for
+barmaids, and who is admired for the audacity with which he
+smuggled a fox-terrier into college in a brown-paper
+parcel.&nbsp; There are many other species of undergraduate,
+scarcely more closely resembling each other in manners and modes
+of thought than the little Japanese student resembles the
+metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the hereditary war
+minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was vivacious)
+resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who
+disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior
+Proctor.&nbsp; When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the
+land of Sitting Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life in his
+own way to the other Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words
+and the papooses played around.&nbsp; His account would vary, in
+many ways, from that of</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Whiskered Tomkins from the hall<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Of seedy Magdalene.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it
+whole, as a more cultivated and polished undergraduate
+might.&nbsp; Thus there are countless pictures of the works and
+ways of undergraduates at the University.&nbsp; The scene is ever
+the same&mdash;boat-races and foot-ball matches, scouts, schools,
+and proctors, are common to all,&mdash;but in other respects the
+sketches must always vary, must generally be one-sided, and must
+often seem inaccurate.</p>
+<p>It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three
+years that are passed between the estate of the freshman and that
+of the Bachelor of Arts.&nbsp; These years are spent in a kind of
+fairyland, neither quite within nor quite outside of the
+world.&nbsp; College life is somewhat, as has so often been said,
+like the old Greek city life.&nbsp; For three years men are in
+the possession of what the world does not enjoy&mdash;leisure;
+and they are supposed to be using that leisure for the purposes
+of perfection.&nbsp; They are making themselves and their
+characters.&nbsp; We are all doing that, all the days of our
+lives; but at the Universities there is, or is expected to be,
+more deliberate and conscious effort.&nbsp; Men are in a position
+to &lsquo;try all things&rsquo; before committing themselves to
+any.&nbsp; Their new-found freedom does not merely consist in the
+right to poke their own fires, order their own breakfasts, and
+use their own cheque-books.&nbsp; These things, which make so
+much impression on the mind at first, are only the outward signs
+of freedom.&nbsp; The boy who has just left school, and the
+thoughtless life of routine in work and play, finds himself in
+the midst of books, of thought, and discussion.&nbsp; He has time
+to look at all the common problems of the hour, and yet he need
+not make up his mind hurriedly, nor pledge himself to
+anything.&nbsp; He can flirt with young opinions, which come to
+him with candid faces, fresh as Queen Entelechy in Rabelais,
+though, like her, they are as old as human thought.&nbsp; Here
+first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love with that
+enchantress, &lsquo;who sifts time with a fine large blue silk
+sieve.&rsquo;&nbsp; There is hardly a clever lad but fancies
+himself a metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute.&nbsp;
+Most fall away very early from this, their first love; and they
+follow Science down one of her many paths, or concern themselves
+with politics, and take a side which, as a rule, is the opposite
+of that to which they afterwards adhere.&nbsp; Thus your
+Christian Socialist becomes a Court preacher, and puts his trust
+in princes; the young Tory of the old type will lapse into
+membership of a School Board.&nbsp; It is the time of liberty,
+and of intellectual attachments too fierce to last long.</p>
+<p>Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems
+more attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure
+metaphysics.&nbsp; The years of undergraduate life are those in
+which, to many men, the enigmas of religion present
+themselves.&nbsp; They bring their boyish faith into a place (if
+one may quote Pantagruel&rsquo;s voyage once more) like the Isle
+of the Macraeones.&nbsp; On that mournful island were confusedly
+heaped the ruins of altars, fanes, temples, shrines, sacred
+obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs.&nbsp; Through
+the ruins wandered, now and again, the half-articulate words of
+the Oracle, telling how Pan was dead.&nbsp; Oxford, like the Isle
+of the Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philosophies,
+decrepit religions, forlorn beliefs.&nbsp; The modern system of
+study takes the pupil through all the philosophic and many of the
+religious systems of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer
+past, have been fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a
+day.&nbsp; You are taught to mark each system crumbling, to watch
+the rise of the new temple of thought on its ruins, and to see
+that also perish, breached by assaults from without or sapped by
+the slow approaches of Time.&nbsp; This is not the place in which
+we can well discuss the merits of modern University
+education.&nbsp; But no man can think of his own University days,
+or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls and
+rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how
+religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the
+colleges.&nbsp; And it is fair to say that, for this, no set of
+teachers or tutors is responsible.&nbsp; It is the modern
+historical spirit that must be blamed, that too clear-sighted
+vision which we are all condemned to share of the past of the
+race.&nbsp; We are compelled to look back on old philosophies, on
+India, Athens, Alexandria, and on the schools of men who thought
+so hard within our own ancient walls.&nbsp; We are compelled to
+see that their systems were only plausible, that their truths
+were but half-truths.&nbsp; It is the long vista of failure thus
+revealed which suggests these doubts that weary, and torture, and
+embitter the naturally happy life of discussion, amusement,
+friendship, sport, and study.&nbsp; These doubts, after all,
+dwell on the threshold of modern existence, and on the
+threshold&mdash;namely, at the Universities&mdash;men subdue
+them, or evade them.</p>
+<p>The amusements of the University have been so often described
+that little need be said of them here.&nbsp; Unhealthy as the
+site of Oxford is, the place is rather fortunately disposed for
+athletic purposes.&nbsp; The river is the chief feature in the
+scenery, and in the life of amusement.&nbsp; From the first day
+of term, in October, it is crowded with every sort of
+craft.&nbsp; The freshman admires the golden colouring of the
+woods and Magdalen tower rising, silvery, through the blue
+autumnal haze.&nbsp; As soon as he appears on the river, his
+weight, strength, and &lsquo;form&rsquo; are estimated.&nbsp; He
+soon finds himself pulling in a college &lsquo;challenge
+four,&rsquo; under the severe eye of a senior cox, and by the
+middle of December he has rowed his first race, and is regularly
+entered for a serious vocation.&nbsp; The thorough-going
+boating-man is the creature of habit.&nbsp; Every day, at the
+same hour, after a judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels,
+making for the barge.&nbsp; He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair,
+or a four-oar, or to a steeplechase through the hedges when
+Oxford, as in our illustration, is under water.&nbsp; The
+illustration represents Merton, and the writer recognises his old
+rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr. Ruskin denounced.&nbsp;
+Chief of all the boating-man goes out in an eight, and rows down
+to Iffley, with the beautiful old mill and Norman church, or
+accomplishes &lsquo;the long course.&rsquo;&nbsp; He rows up
+again, lounges in the barge, rows down again (if he has only
+pulled over the short course), and goes back to dinner in
+hall.&nbsp; The table where men sit who are in training is a
+noisy table, and the athletes verge on
+&lsquo;bear-fighting&rsquo; even in hall.&nbsp; A statistician
+might compute how many steaks, chops, pots of beer, and of
+marmalade, an orthodox man will consume in the course of three
+years.&nbsp; He will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the
+monotony of boating shop, boating society, and broad-blown
+boating jokes.&nbsp; But this appears to be a harmless
+affectation.&nbsp; The old breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the
+honest boating slang, will always have an attraction for
+him.&nbsp; The summer term will lose its delight when the May
+races are over.&nbsp; Boating-men are the salt of the University,
+so steady, so well disciplined, so good-tempered are they.&nbsp;
+The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for
+their college, or their University; not like running&mdash;men,
+who run, as it were, each for his own hand.&nbsp; Whatever may be
+his work in life, a boating-man will stick to it.&nbsp; His
+favourite sport is not expensive, and nothing can possibly be
+less luxurious.&nbsp; He is often a reading man, though it may be
+doubted whether &lsquo;he who runs may read&rsquo; as a
+rule.&nbsp; Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and
+Strangers&rsquo; cups are, or lately were, given with injudicious
+generosity.&nbsp; To the artist&rsquo;s eye, however, few sights
+in modern life are more graceful than the University
+quarter-of-a-mile race.&nbsp; Nowhere else, perhaps, do you see
+figures so full of a Hellenic grace and swiftness.</p>
+<p>The cream of University life is the first summer term.&nbsp;
+Debts, as yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their
+shadow over the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is
+over, at one o&rsquo;clock.&nbsp; There are so many things to
+do,&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;When wickets are bowled and defended,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When Isis is glad with the eights,<br />
+When music and sunset are blended,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When Youth and the Summer are mates,<br />
+When freshmen are heedless of &ldquo;Greats,&rdquo;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,<br />
+Ah! these are the hours that one rates<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp; Sweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>There are drags at every college gate to take college teams
+down to Cowley.&nbsp; There is the beautiful scenery of the
+&lsquo;stripling Thames&rsquo; to explore; the haunts of the
+immortal &lsquo;Scholar Gipsy,&rsquo; and of Shelley, and of
+Clough&rsquo;s Piper, who&mdash;</p>
+<blockquote><p>&lsquo;Went in his youth and the sunshine
+rejoicing, to Nuneham and Godstowe.&rsquo;</p>
+</blockquote>
+<p>Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to
+delight and amuse in Oxford. <a name="citation221"></a><a
+href="#footnote221" class="citation">[221]</a>&nbsp; What day can
+be happier than that of which the morning is given (after a
+lively college breakfast, or a &lsquo;commonising&rsquo; with a
+friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till
+music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above Iffley, and the
+college eights flash past among cheering and splashing?&nbsp;
+Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and half-lit
+up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms,
+and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue of
+dawn.&nbsp; How long the days were then! almost like the days of
+childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used to
+make!&nbsp; In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college
+staircase, and the &lsquo;oak&rsquo; which Shelley blessed cannot
+keep out this visitor.&nbsp; She comes in many a shape&mdash;as
+debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and often she comes as
+bereavement.&nbsp; Life and her claims wax importunate; to many
+men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all
+proportion to the real importance of academic success.&nbsp; We
+cannot see things as they are, and estimate their value, in
+youth; and if pleasures are more keen then, grief is more
+hopeless, doubt more desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in
+later years, when we have known and survived a good deal of the
+worst of mortal experience.&nbsp; Often on men still in their
+pupilage the weight of the first misfortunes falls heavily; the
+first touch of Dame Fortune&rsquo;s whip is the most
+poignant.&nbsp; We cannot recover the first summer term; but it
+has passed into ourselves and our memories, into which Oxford,
+with her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass.&nbsp; He
+is not to be envied who has known and does not love her.&nbsp;
+Where her children have quarrelled with her the fault is theirs,
+not hers.&nbsp; They have chosen the accidental evils to brood
+on, in place of acquiescing in her grace and charm.&nbsp; These
+are crowded and hustled out of modern life; the fever and the
+noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving still, at the
+Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.</p>
+<p>If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has
+only been spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford
+cease to be herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her
+repose.</p>
+<h2>FOOTNOTES</h2>
+<p><a name="footnote120"></a><a href="#citation120"
+class="footnote">[120]</a>&nbsp; Poems by Ernest Myers.&nbsp;
+London, 1877.</p>
+<p><a name="footnote221"></a><a href="#citation221"
+class="footnote">[221]</a>&nbsp; A very pleasing account of the
+scenery near Oxford appeared in the <i>Cornhill</i> for September
+1879.</p>
+<p>***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD***</p>
+<pre>
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oxford[City/Univ], by Andrew Lang
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+This etext was prepared by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
+from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd. edition.
+
+
+
+
+
+OXFORD
+
+by Andrew Lang
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+
+These papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history
+of Oxford.  They are merely records of the impressions made by this
+or that aspect of the life of the University as it has been in
+different ages.  Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and
+white, with the pen or the etcher's needle.  On a wild winter or late
+autumn day (such as Father Faber has made permanent in a beautiful
+poem) the sunshine fleets along the plain, revealing towers, and
+floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery light, and leaving them once
+more in shadow.  The melancholy mist creeps over the city, the damp
+soaks into the heart of everything, and such suicidal weather ensues
+as has been described, once for all, by the author of John-a-Dreams.
+How different Oxford looks when the road to Cowley Marsh is dumb with
+dust, when the heat seems almost tropical, and by the drowsy banks of
+the Cherwell you might almost expect some shy southern water-beast to
+come crashing through the reeds!  And such a day, again, is unlike
+the bright weather of late September, when all the gold and scarlet
+of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that cover the walls of
+Magdalen with an imperial vesture.
+
+Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of
+Indolence, vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her scenery.
+Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with
+days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation.  Our
+mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as the
+landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the
+colourless drizzling weather.  Oxford, that once seemed a pleasant
+porch and entrance into life, may become a dingy ante-room, where we
+kick our heels with other weary, waiting people.  At last, if men
+linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final
+condition of the loiterer to take "this for a hermitage."  It is well
+to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry away few but kind
+recollections.  If there be any who think and speak ungently of their
+Alma Mater, it is because they have outstayed their natural "welcome
+while," or because they have resisted her genial influence in youth.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I--THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY
+
+
+
+Most old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been
+scrawled over again and again by their successive owners.  Oxford,
+though not one of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more
+legibly than the rest, the handwriting, as it were, of many
+generations.  The convenient site among the interlacing waters of the
+Isis and the Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after
+another.  Each generation has used it for its own purpose:  for war,
+for trade, for learning, for religion; and war, trade, religion, and
+learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks.  No set of its
+occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very eager to
+deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors.  Old things were
+turned to new uses, or altered to suit new tastes; they were not
+overthrown and carted away.  Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see
+everywhere, in colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows
+which have been builded up; or again, openings which have been cut
+where none originally existed.  The upper part of the round Norman
+arches in the Cathedral has been preserved, and converted into the
+circular bull's-eye lights which the last century liked.  It is the
+same everywhere, except where modern restorers have had their way.
+Thus the life of England, for some eight centuries, may be traced in
+the buildings of Oxford.  Nay, if we are convinced by some
+antiquaries, the eastern end of the High Street contains even earlier
+scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages who
+scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in the
+gravel, on the spot where the new schools are to stand.  Here half-
+naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and hither
+they may have brought home the boars which they slew in the trackless
+woods of Headington and Bagley.  It is with the life of historical
+Oxford, however, and not with these fancies, that we are concerned,
+though these papers have no pretension to be a history of Oxford.  A
+series of pictures of men's life here is all they try to sketch.
+
+It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of
+Oxford as she was when she is first spoken of by history.  What she
+may have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a
+home for religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid
+among the swine, and after a whole fairy tale of adventures died in
+great sanctity, we cannot even guess.  This legend of St. Frideswyde,
+and of her foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ
+Church, is not, indeed, without its value and significance for those
+who care for Oxford.  This home of religion and of learning was a
+home of religion from the beginning, and her later life is but a
+return, after centuries of war and trade, to her earliest purpose.
+What manner of village of wooden houses may have surrounded the
+earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we cannot readily guess,
+but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was when the English
+Chronicle first mentions her.  Even then it is not unnatural to think
+Oxford might well have been a city of peace.  She lies in the very
+centre of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland, burning
+church and cloister, must have wandered long before they came to
+Oxford.  On the other hand, the military importance of the site must
+have made it a town that would be eagerly contended for.  Any places
+of strength in Oxford would command the roads leading to the north
+and west, and the secure, raised paths that ran through the flooded
+fens to the ford or bridge, if bridge there then was, between
+Godstowe and the later Norman grand pont, where Folly Bridge now
+spans the Isis.  Somewhere near Oxford, the roads that ran towards
+Banbury and the north, or towards Bristol and the west, would be
+obliged to cross the river.  The water-way, too, and the paths by the
+Thames' side, were commanded by Oxford.  The Danes, as they followed
+up the course of the Thames from London, would be drawn thither,
+sooner or later, and would covet a place which is surrounded by half
+a dozen deep natural moats.  Lastly, Oxford lay in the centre of
+England indeed, but on the very marches of Mercia and Wessex.  A
+border town of natural strength and of commanding situation, she can
+have been no mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she
+is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder "incorporated with his own
+kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street"
+(Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57), and took possession of
+London and of Oxford as the two most important parts of a scientific
+frontier.  If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill
+that was not yet "Shotover," and had looked along the plain to the
+place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as it were
+in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but "the
+smoke floating up through the oakwood and the coppice,"
+
+
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+
+
+The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds
+trimmed and enclosed.  Centuries later, when the early students came,
+they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor, to
+the East Gate of the city" (Munimenta Academica, Oxon., vol. i. p.
+60).  In the midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no
+mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to
+settle their differences, to feast together and forget their wrongs
+over the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the
+banquet with fire and sword.
+
+Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went
+about burning and wasting England.  The wooden towns were flaming
+through the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from
+Thamesmouth to Cambridge.  "And next was there no headman that force
+would gather, and each fled as swift as he might, and soon was there
+no shire that would help another."  When the first fury of the
+plundering invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to
+settle and till the land and have some measure of peace, the early
+meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border-
+town, in Oxford.  Thus Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came
+to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were slain at a banquet, while
+their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them.  "Into the
+tower of St. Frideswyde they were driven, and as men could not drive
+them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning."
+So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the
+story, as he says, in the records of the Church of St. Frideswyde.
+There is another version of the story in the Codex Diplomaticus
+(DCCIX.).  Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to
+St. Frideswyde's Church ("mine own minster"), that the Danes were
+slain in the massacre of St. Brice.  On that day Aethelred, "by the
+advice of his satraps, determined to destroy the tares among the
+wheat, the Danes in England."  Certain of these fled into the
+minster, as into a fortress, and therefore it was burned and the
+books and monuments destroyed.  For this cause Aethelred gives lands
+to the minster, "fro Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro
+Merewell to Rugslawe, fro the lawe to the foule putte," and so forth.
+It is pleasant to see how old are the familiar names "Cherwell,"
+"Hedington," "Couelee" or Cowley, where the college cricket-grounds
+are.  Three years passed, and the headmen of the English and of the
+Danes met at Oxford again, and more peacefully, and agreed to live
+together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar; to the law, that is, as it
+was administered in older days, that seem happier and better ruled to
+men looking back on them from an age of confusion and bloodshed.  At
+Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and
+English claims were in some sort reconciled, and at Oxford Harold
+Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040.  The place indeed was
+fatal to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar,
+left her curse on it.  Just as the old Irish kings were forbidden by
+their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May
+morning, or to listen to the winnowing of the night-fowl's wings in
+the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to
+enter Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden.
+Harold died there, as we have seen, but there he was not buried.  His
+body was laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his
+enemies dug it up, and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into
+the river.  Many years later, when Henry III. entered Oxford, not
+without fear, the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon him.  He came
+in 1263, with Edward the prince, and misfortune fell upon him, so
+that his barons defeated and took him prisoner at the battle of
+Lewes.  The chronicler of Oseney Abbey mentions his contempt of
+superstitions, and how he alone of English kings entered the city:
+"Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari," an error, for
+Harold attemptavit, and died.  When Edward I. was king, he was less
+audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode up to the East Gate
+and turned his horse's head about, and sought a lodging outside the
+town, reflexis habenis equitans extra moenia aulam regiain in
+suburbio positam introivit.  In 1280, however, he seems to have
+plucked up courage and attended a Chapter of Dominicans in Oxford.
+
+The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford
+in October 1065.  "In urle quae famoso nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur,"
+to quote a document of Cnut's.  (Cod. Dipl. DCCXLVI. in 1042.)  There
+the Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the
+Confessor.  With this meeting we leave that Oxford before the
+Conquest, of which possibly not one stone, or one rafter, remains.
+We look back through eight hundred years on a city, rich enough, it
+seems, and powerful, and we see the narrow streets full of armed
+bands of men--men that wear the cognisance of the horse or of the
+raven, that carry short swords, and are quick to draw them; men that
+dress in short kirtles of a bright colour, scarlet or blue; that wear
+axes slung on their backs, and adorn their bare necks and arms with
+collars and bracelets of gold.  We see them meeting to discuss laws
+and frontiers, and feasting late when business is done, and
+chaffering for knives with ivory handles, for arrows, and saddles,
+and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens.  Through the mist of time
+this picture of ancient Oxford may be distinguished.  We are tempted
+to think of a low, grey twilight above that wet land suddenly lit up
+with fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde's Minster flaring
+like a torch athwart the night; of poplars waving in the same wind
+that drives the vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the Danes
+who have taken refuge there, and there stand at bay against the
+English and the people of the town.  The material Oxford of our times
+is not more unlike the Oxford of low wooden booths and houses, and of
+wooden spires and towers, than the life led in its streets was unlike
+the academic life of to-day.  The Conquest brought no more quiet
+times, but the whole city was wrecked, stormed, and devastated,
+before the second period of its history began, before it was the seat
+of a Norman stronghold, and one of the links of the chain by which
+England was bound.  "Four hundred and seventy-eight houses were so
+ruined as to be unable to pay taxes," while, "within the town or
+without the wall, there were but two hundred and forty-three houses
+which did yield tribute."
+
+With the buildings of Robert D'Oily, a follower of the Conqueror's,
+and the husband of an English wife, the heiress of Wigod of
+Wallingford, the new Oxford begins.  Robert's work may be divided
+roughly into two classes.  First, there are the strong places he
+erected to secure his possessions, and, second, the sacred places he
+erected to secure the pardon of Heaven for his robberies.  Of the
+castle, and its "shining coronal of towers," only one tower remains.
+From the vast strength of this picturesque edifice, with the natural
+moat flowing at its feet, we may guess what the castle must have been
+in the early days of the Conquest, and during the wars of Stephen and
+Matilda.  We may guess, too, that the burghers of Oxford, and the
+rustics of the neighbourhood, had no easy life in those days, when,
+as we have seen, the town was ruined, and when, as the extraordinary
+thickness of the walls of its remaining tower demonstrates, the
+castle was built by new lords who did not spare the forced labour of
+the vanquished.  The strength of the position of the castle is best
+estimated after viewing the surrounding country from the top of the
+tower.  Through the more modern embrasures, or over the low wall
+round the summit, you look up and down the valley of the Thames, and
+gaze deep into the folds of the hills.  The prospect is pleasant
+enough, on an autumn morning, with the domes and spires of modern
+Oxford breaking, like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps
+above the roofs of the good town.  In the old times, no movement of
+the people who had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of an
+army from any direction could have evaded the watchman.  The towers
+guarded the fords and the bridge and were themselves almost
+impregnable, except when a hard winter made the Thames, the Cherwell,
+and the many deep and treacherous streams passable, as happened when
+Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford.  This natural strength of the site
+is demonstrated by the vast mound within the castle walls, which
+tradition calls the Jews' Mound, but which is probably earlier than
+the Norman buildings.  Some other race had chosen the castle site for
+its fortress in times of which we know nothing.  Meanwhile, some of
+the practical citizens of Oxford wish to level the Jews' Mound, and
+to "utilise" the gravel of which it is largely composed.  There is
+nothing to be said against this economic project which could interest
+or affect the persons who entertain it.  M. Brunet-Debaines'
+illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as old as the
+tower.  Did the citizens bring their corn to be tolled and ground at
+the lord's mill?
+
+Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature inclined to
+piety, and, his piety beginning at home, he founded the church of St.
+George within the castle.  The crypt of the church still remains, and
+is not without interest for persons who like to trace the changing
+fortunes of old buildings.  The site of Robert's Castle is at present
+occupied by the County Gaol.  When you have inspected the tower
+(which does not do service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the
+courtesy of the Governor, to the crypt, and satisfy your
+archaeological curiosity.  The place is much lower, and worse
+lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St. Peter's-in-the-East, but
+not, perhaps, less interesting.  The square-headed capitals have not
+been touched, like some of those in St. Peter's, by a later chisel.
+The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise much as Robert D'Oily
+left it.  There is an odd-looking arrangement of planks on the floor.
+It is THE NEW DROP, which is found to work very well, and gives
+satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it.  Sinister the
+Norman castle was in its beginning, "it was from the castle that men
+did wrong to the poor around them; it was from the castle that they
+bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and tyrant as he might be,
+was still a protector against smaller tyrants."  Sinister the castle
+remains; you enter it through ironed and bolted doors, you note the
+prisoners at their dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the
+engines of the law lying in the old crypt you pass out into the place
+of execution.  Here, in a corner made by Robert's tower and by the
+wall of the prison, is a dank little quadrangle.  The ground is of
+the yellow clay and gravel which floors most Oxford quadrangles.  A
+few letters are scratched on the soft stone of the wall--the letters
+"H. R." are the freshest.  These are the initials of the last man who
+suffered death in this corner--a young rustic who had murdered his
+sweetheart.  "H. R." on the prison wall is all his record, and his
+body lies under your feet, and the feet of the men who are to die
+here in after days pass over his tomb.  It is thus that malefactors
+are buried, "within the walls of the gaol."
+
+One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert's place of arms--as
+glad as Matilda may have been when "they let her down at night from
+the tower with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to
+Wallingford."  Robert seems at first to have made the natural use of
+his strength.  "Rich he was, and spared not rich or poor, to take
+their livelihood away, and to lay up treasures for himself."  He
+stole the lands of the monks of Abingdon, but of what service were
+moats, and walls, and dungeons, and instruments of torture, against
+the powers that side with monks?
+
+The Chronicle of Abingdon has a very diverting account of Robert's
+punishment and conversion.  "He filched a certain field without the
+walls of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it
+over to the soldiers in the castle.  For which loss the brethren were
+greatly grieved--the brethren of Abingdon.  Therefore, they gathered
+in a body before the altar of St. Michael--the very altar that St.
+Dunstan the archbishop dedicated--and cast themselves weeping on the
+ground, accusing Robert D'Oily, and praying that his robbery of the
+monastery might be avenged, or that he might be led to make
+atonement."  So, in a dream, Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady
+by two brethren of Abingdon, and thence carried into the very meadow
+he had coveted, where "most nasty little boys," turpissimi pueri,
+worked their will on him.  Thereon Robert was terrified and cried
+out, and wakened his wife, who took advantage of his fears, and
+compelled him to make restitution to the brethren.
+
+After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery
+and performing other good works.  He it was who built a bridge over
+the Isis, and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford--
+churches which, perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin.  The
+tower of St. Michael's, in "the Corn," is said to be of his building;
+perhaps he only "restored" it, for it is in the true primitive style-
+-gaunt, unadorned, with round-headed windows, good for shooting from
+with the bow.  St. Michael's was not only a church, but a watchtower
+of the city wall; and here the old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned
+the street.  The rooms above the gate were used till within quite
+recent times, and the poor inmates used to let down a greasy old hat
+from the window in front of the passers-by, and cry, "Pity the
+Bocardo birds":
+
+
+"Pigons qui sont en 1'essoine,
+Enserrez soubz trappe voliere,"
+
+
+as a famous Paris student, Francois Villon, would have called them.
+Of Bocardo no trace remains, but St. Michael's is likely to last as
+long as any edifice in Oxford.  Our illustrations represent it as it
+was in the last century.  The houses huddle up to the church, and
+hide the lines of the tower.  Now it stands out clear, less
+picturesque than it was in the time of Bocardo prison.  Within the
+last two years the windows have been cleared, and the curious and
+most archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may be examined.  It
+is worth while to climb the tower and remember the times when arrows
+were sent like hail from the narrow windows on the foes who
+approached Oxford from the north, while prayers for their confusion
+were read in the church below.
+
+That old Oxford of war was also a trading town.  Nothing more than
+the fact that it was a favourite seat of the Jews is needed to prove
+its commercial prosperity.  The Jews, however, demand a longer notice
+in connection with the still unborn University.  Meanwhile, it may be
+remarked that Oxford trade made good use of the river.  The Abingdon
+Chronicle (ii. 129) tells us that "from each barque of Oxford city,
+which makes the passage by the river Thames past Abingdon, a hundred
+herrings must yearly be paid to the cellarer.  The citizens had much
+litigation about land and houses with the abbey, and one Roger
+Maledoctus (perhaps a very early sample of the pass-man) gave
+Abingdon tenements within the city."  Thus we leave the pre-Academic
+Oxford a flourishing town, with merchants and moneylenders.  As for
+the religious, the brethren of St. Frideswyde had lived but loosely
+(pro libito viverunt), says William of Malmesbury, and were to be
+superseded by regular canons, under the headship of one Guimond, and
+the patronage of the Bishop of Salisbury.  Whoever goes into Christ
+Church new buildings from the river-side, will see, in the old
+edifice facing him, a certain bulging in the wall.  That is the mark
+of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read aloud to the brethren in
+the refectory of St. Frideswyde.  The new leaven of learning was soon
+to ferment in an easy Oxford, where men lived pro libito, under good
+lords, the D'Oilys, who loved the English, and built, not churches
+and bridges only, but the great and famous Oseney Abbey, beyond the
+church of St. Thomas, and not very far from the modern station of the
+Great Western Railway.  Yet even after public teaching in Oxford
+certainly began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity
+there (1133; cf. Oseney Chronicle), the tower was burned down by
+Stephen's soldiery in 1141 (Oseney Chronicle, p. 24).
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II--THE EARLY STUDENTS--A DAY WITH A MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE
+
+
+
+Oxford, some one says, "is bitterly historical."  It is difficult to
+escape the fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of "our antiquary," Bryan
+Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the University.
+Indeed, it is impossible to understand the strange blending of new
+and old at Oxford--the old names with the new meanings--if we avert
+our eyes from what is "bitterly historical."  For example, there is
+in most, perhaps in all, colleges a custom called "collections."  On
+the last days of term undergraduates are called into the Hall, where
+the Master and the Dean of the Chapel sit in solemn state.
+Examination papers are set, but no one heeds them very much.  The
+real ordeal is the awful interview with the Master and the Dean.  The
+former regards you with the eyes of a judge, while the Dean says,
+"Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown's PAPERS are very fair,
+very fair.  But in the matters of CHAPELS and of CATECHETICS, Mr.
+Brown sets--for a SCHOLAR--a very bad example to the other
+undergraduates.  He has only once attended divine service on Sunday
+morning, and on that occasion, Master, his dress consisted
+exclusively of a long great-coat and a pair of boots."  After this
+accusation the Master will turn to the culprit and observe, with
+emphasis ill represented by italics, "Mr. Brown, the COLLEGE cannot
+hear with pleasure of such behaviour on the part of a SCHOLAR.  You
+are GATED, Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next term."  Now why
+should this tribunal of the Master and the Dean, and this dread
+examination, be called collections?  Because (Munimenta Academica,
+Oxon., i. 129) in 1331 a statute was passed to the effect that "every
+scholar shall pay at least twelve pence a-year for lectures in logic,
+and for physics eighteenpence a-year," and that "all Masters of Arts
+except persons of royal or noble family, shall be obliged to COLLECT
+their salary from the scholars."  This collection would be made at
+the end of term; and the name survives, attached to the solemn day of
+doom we have described, though the college dues are now collected by
+the bursar at the beginning of each term.
+
+By this trivial example the perversions of old customs at Oxford are
+illustrated.  To appreciate the life of the place, then, we must
+glance for a moment at the growth of the University.  As to its
+origin, we know absolutely nothing.  That Master Puleyn began to
+lecture there in 1133 we have seen, and it is not likely that he
+would have chosen Oxford if Oxford had possessed no schools.  About
+these schools, however, we have no information.  They may have grown
+up out of the seminary which, perhaps, was connected with St.
+Frideswyde's, just as Paris University may have had some connection
+with "the School of the Palace."  Certainly to Paris University the
+academic corporation of Oxford, the Universitas, owed many of her
+regulations; while, again, the founder of the college system, Walter
+de Merton (who visited Paris in company with Henry III.), may have
+compared ideas with Robert de Sorbonne, the founder of the college of
+that name.  In the early Oxford, however, of the twelfth and most of
+the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their statutes were unknown.
+The University was the only corporation of the learned, and she
+struggled into existence after hard fights with the town, the Jews,
+the Friars, the Papal courts.  The history of the University begins
+with the thirteenth century.  She may be said to have come into being
+as soon as she possessed common funds and rents, as soon as fines
+were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of
+scholars.  Now the first recorded fine is the payment of fifty-two
+shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the compensation for
+the hanging of certain clerks.  In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in
+a letter to his "beloved sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford,"
+bade them excuse the "scholars studying in Oxford" half the rent of
+their halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years.  The burghers
+were also to do penance, and to feast the poorer students once a
+year; but the important point is, that they had to pay that large
+yearly fine "propter suspendium clericorum"--all for the hanging of
+the clerks.  Twenty-six years after this decision of the Legate,
+Robert Grossteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment
+and distribution of the fine, and founded the first of the CHESTS,
+the chest of St. Frideswyde.  These chests were a kind of Mont de
+Piete, and to found them was at first the favourite form of
+benefaction.  Money was left in this or that chest, from which
+students and masters would borrow, on the security of pledges, which
+were generally books, cups, daggers, and so forth.
+
+Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history,
+which happily illustrates the growth of the University.  The
+beginning of the whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which,
+in 1209, had hanged two clerks, "in contempt of clerical liberty."
+The matter was taken up by the Legate--in those bad years of King
+John the Pope's viceroy in England--and out of the humiliation of the
+town the University gained money, privileges, and halls at low
+rental.  These were precisely the things that the University wanted.
+About these matters there was a constant strife, in which the Kings,
+as a rule, took part with the University.  The University possessed
+the legal knowledge, which the monarchs liked to have on their side,
+and was therefore favoured by them.  Thus, in 1231 (Wood, Annals, i.
+205), "the King sent out his Breve to the Mayor and Burghers
+commanding them not to overrate their houses"; and thus gradually the
+University got the command of the police, obtained privileges which
+enslaved the city, and became masters where they had once been
+despised, starveling scholars.  The process was always the same.  On
+the feast of St. Scholastica, for example, in 1354, Walter de
+Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered into
+the Swyndlestock tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of John de
+Croydon's wine, and ended by pitching the tankard at the head of that
+vintner.  In ten minutes the town bell at St. Martin's was rung, and
+the most terrible of all Town-and-Gown rows began.  The Chancellor
+could do no less than bid St. Mary's bell reply to St. Martin's, and
+shooting commenced.  The Gown held their own very well at first, and
+"defended themselves till Vespertide," when the citizens called in
+their neighbours, the rustics of Cowley, Headington, and Hincksey.
+The results have been precisely described in anticipation by Homer:
+
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+
+Which is as much as to say, "The townsfolk call for help to their
+neighbours, the yokels, that were more numerous than they, and better
+men in battle . . . so when the sun turned to the time of the loosing
+of oxen the Town drave in the ranks of the Gown, and won the
+victory."  They were strong, the townsmen, but not merciful.  "The
+crowns of some chaplains, viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure
+went, these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy," and
+"some poor innocents these confounded sons of Satan knocked down,
+beat, and most cruelly wounded."  The result, in the long run, was
+that the University received from Edward III. "a most large charter,
+containing many liberties, some that they had before, and OTHERS THAT
+HE HAD TAKEN AWAY FROM THE TOWN."  Thus Edward granted to the
+University "the custody of the assize of bread, wine, and ale," the
+supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing the
+streets of the town and suburbs.  Moreover, the Mayor and the chief
+Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of public penance and
+humiliation on St. Scholastica's Day.  Thus, by the middle of the
+fourteenth century, the strife of Town and Gown had ended in the
+complete victory of the latter.
+
+Though the University owed its success to its clerkly character, and
+though the Legate backed it with all the power of Rome, yet the
+scholars were Englishmen and Liberals first, Catholics next.  Thus
+they had all English sympathy with them when they quarrelled with the
+Legate in 1238, and shot his cook (who, indeed, had thrown hot broth
+at them); and thus, in later days, the undergraduates were with Simon
+de Montfort against King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful
+body of archers.  The University, too, constantly withstood the
+Friars, who had settled in Oxford on pretence of wishing to convert
+the Jews, and had attempted to get education into their hands.  "The
+Preaching Friars, who had lately obtained from the Pope divers
+privileges, particularly an exemption, as they pretended, from being
+subject to the jurisdiction of the University, began to behave
+themselves very insolent against the Chancellors and Masters."
+(Wood, Annals, i. 399.)  The conduct of the Friars caused endless
+appeals to Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly
+national, and resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the
+King.  The King's Jews, too, the University kept in pretty good
+order, and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched the crucifix from
+the hand of the Chancellor and trod it under foot, his tribesmen were
+compelled to raise "a fair and stately cross of marble, very
+curiously wrought," on the scene of the sacrilege.
+
+The growth in power and importance of academic corporations having
+now been sketched, let us try to see what the outer aspect of the
+town was like in these rude times, and what manner of life the
+undergraduates led.  For this purpose we may be allowed to draw a
+rude, but not unfaithful, picture of a day in a student's life.  No
+incident will be introduced for which there is not authority, in
+Wood, or in Mr. Anstey's invaluable documents, the Munimenta
+Academica, published in the collection of the Master of the Rolls.
+Some latitude as to dates must be allowed, it is true, and we are not
+of course to suppose that any one day of life was ever so gloriously
+crowded as that of our undergraduate.
+
+The time is the end of the fourteenth century.  The forest and the
+moor stretch to the east gate of the city.  Magdalen bridge is not
+yet built, nor of course the tower of Magdalen, which M. Brunet-
+Debaines has sketched from Christ Church walks.  Not till about 1473
+was the tower built, and years would pass after that before
+choristers saluted with their fresh voices from its battlements the
+dawn of the first of May, or sermons were preached from the beautiful
+stone pulpit in the open air.  When our undergraduate, Walter de
+Stoke, or, more briefly, Stoke, was at Oxford, the spires of the city
+were few.  Where Magdalen stands now, the old Hospital of St. John
+then stood--a foundation of Henry III.--but the Jews were no longer
+allowed to bury their dead in the close, which is now the "Physic
+Garden."  "In 1289," as Wood says, "the Jews were banished from
+England for various enormities and crimes committed by them."  The
+Great and Little Jewries--those dim, populous streets behind the
+modern Post Office--had been sacked and gutted.  No clerk would ever
+again risk his soul for a fair Jewess's sake, nor lose his life for
+his love at the hands of that eminent theologian, Fulke de Breaute.
+The beautiful tower of Merton was still almost fresh, and the spires
+of St. Mary's, of old All Saints, of St. Frideswyde, and the strong
+tower of New College on the city wall, were the most prominent
+features in a bird's-eye view of the town.  But though part of
+Merton, certainly the chapel tower as we have seen, the odd muniment-
+room with the steep stone roof, and, perhaps, the Library, existed;
+though New was built; and though Balliol and University owned some
+halls, on, or near, the site of the present colleges, Oxford was
+still an university of poor scholars, who lived in town's-people's
+dwellings.
+
+Thus, in the great quarrel with the Legate in 1238, John Currey, of
+Scotland, boarded with Will Maynard, while Hugh le Verner abode in
+the house of Osmund the Miller, with Raynold the Irishman and seven
+of his fellows.  John Mortimer and Rob Norensis lodged with Augustine
+Gosse, and Adam de Wolton lodged in Cat Street, where you can still
+see the curious arched doorway of Catte's, or St. Catherine's Hall.
+By the time of my hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed
+that all scholars of years of discretion should live in the house of
+some sufficient principal (1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall, at
+the corner of the street that leads to New College out of the modern
+Broad Street, which was then the City Ditch.  It is six o'clock on a
+summer morning, and the bells waken Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock
+bed, in his little camera.  His room, though he is not one of the
+luxurious clerks whom the University scolds in various statutes, is
+pretty well furnished.  His bed alone is worth not less than
+fifteenpence; he has a "cofer" valued at twopence (we have plenty of
+those old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat, which no
+one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic, cheap at tenpence, "a
+roll of the seven Psalms," and twelve books only "at his beddes
+heed."  Stoke has not
+
+
+"Twenty bookes, clothed in blak and reed,
+Of Aristotil and of his philosophie,"
+
+
+like Chaucer's Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile.
+There are not many records of "as many as twenty bookes" in the old
+valuations.  The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of
+buckler, bow, arrows, and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on
+the wall.  Stoke opens his eyes, yawns, looks round for his clothes,
+and sees, with no surprise, that his laundress has not sent home his
+clean linen.  No; Christina, of the parish of St. Martin, who used to
+be Stoke's lotrix, has been detected at last.  "Under pretence of
+washing for scholars, multa mala perpetrata fuerunt," she has
+committed all manner of crimes, and is now in the Spinning House,
+carcerata fuit.  Stoke wastes a malediction on the laundress, and,
+dressing as well as he may, runs down to Parson's Pleasure, I hope,
+and has a swim, for I find no tub in his room, or, indeed, in the
+camera of any other scholar.  It is now time to go, not to chapel--
+for Catte's has no chapel--but to parish Church, and Stoke goes very
+devoutly to St. Peter's, where we shall find him again, later in the
+day, in another mood.  About eight o'clock he "commonises" with a
+Paris man, Henricus de Bourges, who has an admirable mode of cooking
+omelettes, which makes his company much sought after at breakfast-
+time.  The University, in old times, was full of French students, as
+Paris was thronged by Englishmen.  Lectures begin at nine, and first
+there is lecture in the hall by the principal of Catte's.  That
+scholar receives his pupils in a bare room, where it is very doubtful
+whether the students are allowed to sit down.  From the curious old
+seal of the University of St. Andrews, however, it appears that the
+luxury of forms was permitted, in Scotland, to all but the servitors,
+who held the lecturer's candles.  The principal of Catte's is in
+academic dress, and wears a black cape, boots, and a hood.  The
+undergraduates have no distinguishing costume.  After an hour or two
+of viva voce exercises in the grammar of Priscian, preparatory
+lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the "schools," a
+set of low-roofed buildings between St. Mary's and Brasenose.  There
+he will find the Divinity "school" or lecture-room in the place of
+honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the lecture-
+rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and
+astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and "the tongues," stretching
+down School Street on either side.  Here the Praelectors are holding
+forth, and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their
+subject regere scholas, whether they like it or not.  Our friend,
+Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine
+of two-pence for omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his
+nation (he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch, Welsh, and
+Irish) in the parish Church.  He stops in the Flower Market and at a
+barber's shop on his way to St. Peter's, and comes forth a wonderful
+pagan figure with a Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance,
+with horns protruding through a wig of tow, with vine-leaves twisted
+in and out of the horns, and roses stuck wherever there is room for
+roses.  Henricus de Bourges, and half a dozen Picardy men, with some
+merry souls from the Southern side of the Thames, are jigging down
+the High, playing bag-pipes and guitars.  To these Stoke joins
+himself, and they waltz joyously into the church, and in and out of
+the gateways of the different halls, singing, -
+
+
+"Mihi est propositum in taberna mori,
+Vinum sit appositum morientis ori,
+Ut dicant, quum venerint, angelorum chori
+Deus sit propitius huic potatori."
+
+
+The students of the Northern nations mock, of course, at these
+revellers, thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged, and we shall see
+what comes of the quarrel.  But the hall bells chime half-past noon;
+it is dinner-time in Oxford, and Stoke, as he throws off his mask
+(larva) and vine-leaves, mutters to himself the equivalent for "there
+WILL be a row about this."  There will, indeed, for the penalty is
+not "crossing at the buttery," nor "gating," but--excommunication!
+(Munim. Academ., i. 18.)  Dinner is not a very quiet affair, for the
+Catte's men have had to fight for their beer in the public streets
+with some Canterbury College fellows who were set on by their Warden,
+of all people, to commit this violence (ut vi et violentia raperent
+cerevisiam aliorum scholarum in vico):  however, Catte's has had the
+best of it, and there is beer in plenty.  It is possible, however,
+that fish is scarce, for certain "forestallers" (regratarii) have
+been buying up salmon and soles, and refusing to sell them at less
+than double the proper price.  On the whole, however, there a rude
+abundance of meat and bread; indeed, Stoke may have fared better in
+Catte's than the modern undergraduate does in the hall of the college
+protected by St. Catherine.  After dinner there would be lecture in
+Lent, but we are not in Lent.  A young man's fancy lightly turns to
+the Beaumont, north of the modern Beaumont Street, where there are
+wide playing-fields, and space for archery, foot-ball, stool-ball,
+and other sports.  Stoke rushes out of hall, and runs upstairs into
+the camera of Roger de Freshfield, a reading man, but a good fellow.
+He knocks and enters, and finds Freshfield over his favourite work,
+the Posterior Analytics, and a pottle of strawberries.  "Come down to
+the Beaumont, old man," he says, "and play pyked staffe."  Roger is
+disinclined to move, he MUST finish the Posterior Analytics.  Stoke
+lounges about, in the eternal fashion of undergraduates after
+luncheon, and picking up the Philobiblon of Richard de Bury (then
+quite a new book), clinches his argument in favour of pyke and staffe
+with a quotation:  "You will perhaps see a stiff-necked youth
+lounging sluggishly in his study . . . He is not ashamed to eat fruit
+and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his cup from side to
+side upon it."  Thus addressed, Roger lays aside his Analytics, and
+the pair walk down by Balliol, to the Beaumont, where pyked staffe,
+or sword and buckler, is played.  At the Beaumont they find two men
+who say that "sword and buckler can be played sofft and ffayre," that
+is, without hard hitting, and with one of these Stoke begins to
+fence.  Alas! a dispute arose about a stroke, the by-standers
+interfered, and Stoke's opponent drew his hanger (extraxit cultellum
+vocatum hangere), and hit one John Felerd over the sconce.  On this
+the Proctors come up, and the assailant is put in Bocardo, while
+Stoke goes off to a "pass-supper" given by an inceptor, who has just
+taken his degree.  These suppers were not voluntary entertainments,
+but enforced by law.  At supper the talk ranges over University
+gossip, they tell of the scholar who lately tried to raise the devil
+in Grope Lane, and was pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul
+fiend.  They speak of the Queen's man, who has just been plucked for
+maintaining that Ego currit, or ego est currens, is as good Latin as
+ego curro.  Then the party breaks up, and Stoke goes towards Merton,
+with some undergraduates of that college, Bridlington, Alderberk, and
+Lymby.  At the corner of Grope Lane, out come many men of the
+Northern nations, armed with shields, and bows and arrows.  Stoke and
+his friends run into Merton for weapons, and "standing in a window of
+that hall, shot divers arrows, and one that Bridlington shot hit
+Henry de l'Isle, and David Kirkby unmercifully perished, for after
+John de Benton had given him a dangerous wound in the head with his
+faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and wounded him in the knee with his
+sword."
+
+These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke had a
+brush with the Town before he got safely back to Catte's Hall.  The
+old rudeness gave way gradually, as the colleges swallowed up the
+irregular halls, and as the scholars unattached, infando nomine
+Chamber-Dekyns, ceased to exist.  Learning, however, dwindled, as
+colleges increased, under the clerical and reactionary rule of the
+House of Lancaster.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III--THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION
+
+
+
+We have now arrived at a period in the history of Oxford which is
+confused and unhappy, but for us full of interest, and perhaps of
+instruction.  The hundred years that passed by between the age of
+Chaucer and the age of Erasmus were, in Southern Europe, years of the
+most eager life.  We hear very often--too often, perhaps--of what is
+called the Renaissance.  The energy of delight with which Italy
+welcomed the new birth of art, of literature, of human freedom, has
+been made familiar to every reader.  It is not with Italy, but with
+England and with Oxford, that we are concerned.  How did the
+University and the colleges prosper in that strenuous time when the
+world ran after loveliness of form and colour, as, in other ages, it
+has run after warlike renown, or the far-off rewards of the saintly
+life?  What was Oxford doing when Florence, Venice, and Rome were
+striving towards no meaner goal than perfection?
+
+It must be said that "the spring came slowly up this way."  The
+University merely reflected the very practical character of the
+people.  In contemplating the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+centuries, in their influence on English civilisation, we are
+reminded once more of the futility of certain modern aspirations.  No
+amount of University Commissions, nor of well-meant reforms, will
+change the nature of Englishmen.  It is impossible, by distributions
+of University prizes and professorships, to attract into the career
+of letters that proportion of industry and ingenuity which, in
+Germany for example, is devoted to the scholastic life.  Politics,
+trade, law, sport, religion, will claim their own in England, just as
+they did at the Revival of Letters.  The illustrious century which
+Italy employed in unburying, appropriating, and enjoying the
+treasures of Greek literature and art, our fathers gave, in England,
+to dynastic and constitutional squabbles, and to religious broils.
+The Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a bitter
+and changeful spring.  There was an hour of genial warmth, there
+breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer; then came
+frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court favour shone on
+literature for a while, when Henry VIII. encouraged study, and Wolsey
+and Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more
+the bad days of religious strife returned, and the promise of
+learning was destroyed.  Thus the chief result of the awakening
+thought of the fourteenth century in England was not a lively delight
+in literature, but the appearance of the Lollards.  The intensely
+practical genius of our race turned not to letters, but to questions
+about the soul and its future, about property and its distribution.
+The Lollards were put down in Oxford; "the tares were weeded out" by
+the House of Lancaster, and in the process the germs of free thought,
+of originality, and of a rational education, were destroyed.
+"Wyclevism did domineer among us," says Wood; and, in fact, the
+intellect of the University was absorbed, like the intellect of
+France during the heat of the Jansenist controversy, in defending or
+assailing "267 damned conclusions," drawn from the books of Wyclif.
+The University "lost many of her children through the profession of
+Wyclevism."  Those who remained were often "beneficed clerks."  The
+Friars lifted up their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large
+ecclesiastical school.  As the University declared to Archbishop
+Chichele (1438), "Our noble mother, that was blessed in so goodly an
+offspring, is all but utterly destroyed and desolate."  Presently the
+foreign wars and the wars of the Roses drained the University of the
+youth of England.  The country was overrun with hostile forces, or
+infested by disbanded soldiers.  Plague and war, war and plague, and
+confusion, alternate in the annals.  Sickly as Oxford is to-day by
+climate and situation, she is a city of health compared to what she
+was in the middle ages.  In 1448 "a pestilence broke out, occasioned
+by the overflowing of waters, . . . also by the lying of many
+scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which
+occasioned nasty air and smells, and consequently diseases."  In the
+general dulness and squalor two things were remarkable:  one, the
+last splendour of the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the
+new learning from Italy.  In 1452, George Neville of Balliol, brother
+of the King-maker, gave the most prodigious pass-supper that was ever
+served in Oxford.  On the first day there were 600 messes of meat,
+divided into three courses.  The second course is worthy of the
+attention of the epicure:
+
+
+SECOND COURSE
+
+Vian in brase.   Carcell.
+Crane in sawce.  Partrych.
+Young Pocock.    Venson baked.
+Coney.           Fryed meat in paste.
+Pigeons.         Lesh Lumbert.
+Byttor.          A Frutor.
+Curlew.          A Sutteltee.
+
+
+Against this prodigious gormandising we must set that noble gift, the
+Library presented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester.  In the
+Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark many books of the utmost value
+to the impoverished students.  Here are the works of Plato, and the
+Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, translated by Leonard the Aretine.
+Here, among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and
+Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum,
+Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch.  Here, with
+Ovid's verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his Divine Comedy.
+Here, rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the silent father of
+Liddel's and Scott's to be.
+
+The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of
+those manuscripts (to which the very beauty of their illuminations
+proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a
+printing-press at Oxford, and the arrival of certain Italians, "to
+propagate and settle the studies of true and genuine humanity among
+us."  The exact date of the introduction of printing let us leave to
+be determined by the learned writer who is now at work on the history
+of Oxford.  The advent of the Italians is dated by Wood in 1488.
+Polydore Virgil had lectured in New College.  "He first of all taught
+literature in Oxford.  Cyprianus and Nicholaus, Italici, also arrived
+and dined with the Vice-President of Magdalen on Christmas Day.  Lily
+and Colet, too, one of them the founder, the other the first Head
+Master, of St. Paul's School, were about this time studying in Italy,
+under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus.  Oxford, which had
+so long been in hostile communication with Italy as represented by
+the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the electric
+current of Italian civilisation.  At this conjuncture of affairs, who
+but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua?  Till
+the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that "huge
+barbarian pupil," and had revelled in vast Rabelaisian suppers:  "of
+fat beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and
+fourteen, that in the entering in of spring he might have plenty of
+powdered beef."  The bill of fare of George Neville's feast is like
+one of the catalogues dear to the Cure of Meudon.  For Oxford, as for
+Gargantua, "they appointed a great sophister-doctor, that read him
+Donatus, Theodoletus, and Alanus, in parabolis."  Oxford spent far
+more than Gargantua's eighteen years and eleven months over "the book
+de Modis significandis, with the commentaries of Berlinguandus and a
+rabble of others."  Now, under Colet, and Erasmus (1497), Oxford was
+put, like Gargantua, under new masters, and learned that the old
+scholarship "had been but brutishness, and the old wisdom but blunt,
+foppish toys serving only to bastardise noble spirits, and to corrupt
+all the flower of youth."
+
+The prospects of classical learning at Oxford (and, whatever may be
+the case to-day, on classical learning depended, in the fifteenth
+century, the fortunes of European literature) now seemed fair enough.
+People from the very source of knowledge were lecturing in Oxford.
+Wolsey was Bursar of Magdalen.  The colleges, to which B. N. C. was
+added in 1509, and C. C. C. in 1516, were competing with each other
+for success in the New Learning.  Fox, the founder of C. C. C.,
+established in his college two chairs of Greek and Latin, "to
+extirpate barbarism."  Meanwhile, Cambridge had to hire an Italian to
+write public speeches at twenty pence each!  Henry VIII. in his youth
+was, like Francis I., the patron of literature, as literature was
+understood in Italy.  He saw in learning a new splendour to adorn his
+court, a new source of intellectual luxury, though even Henry had an
+eye on the theological aspect of letters.  Between 1500 and 1530
+Oxford was noisy with the clink of masons' hammers and chisels.
+Brasenose, Corpus, and the magnificent kitchen of Christ Church, were
+being erected.  (The beautiful staircase, which M. Brunet-Debaines
+has sketched, was not finished till 1640.  The world owes it to Dr.
+Fell.  The Oriel niches, designed in the illustration, are of rather
+later date.)  The streets were crowded with carts, dragging in from
+all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future homes of the fair
+humanities.  Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the
+Platonic Society of Florence.  "He would hardly care much about going
+to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there.  When I
+listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and
+he praises the judgment and learning of those Englishmen, Grocyn and
+Linacre, who had been taught in Italy.
+
+In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten
+at the root.  Theology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it a
+deadly blight.  Our academic forefathers "drove at practice," and saw
+everything with the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no
+interest save that of religion.  It is Mr. Seebohm (Oxford Reformers,
+1867), I think, who detects, in Colet's concern with the religious
+side of literature, the influence of Savonarola.  When in Italy "he
+gave himself entirely to the study of the Holy Scriptures."  He
+brought to England from Italy, not the early spirit of Pico of
+Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his youth, but his later
+austerity, his later concern with the harmony of scripture and
+philosophy.  The book which the dying Petrarch held wistfully in his
+hands, revering its very material shape, though he could not spell
+its contents, was the Iliad of Homer.  The book which the young
+Renaissance held in its hands in England, with reverence and
+eagerness as strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul.
+It was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in 1496-97, when doctors
+and abbots flocked to hear him, with their note-books in their hands.
+Thus Oxford differed from Florence, England from Italy:  the former
+all intent on what it believed to be the very Truth, the latter all
+absorbed on what it knew to be no other than Beauty herself.
+
+We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford made.
+The search for Truth was as certain to bring "not peace but a sword"
+as the search for Beauty was to bring the decadence of Italy, the
+corruption of manners, the slavery of two hundred years.  Still, our
+practical earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of the
+Renaissance.  It is not possible here to tell the story of religious
+and social changes, which followed so hard upon each other, in the
+reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth.  A few
+moments in these stormy years are still memorable for some terrible
+or ludicrous event.
+
+That Oxford was rather "Trojan" than "Greek," that men were more
+concerned about their dinners and their souls than their prosody and
+philosophy, in 1531, is proved by the success of Grynaeus.  He
+visited the University and carried off quantities of MSS., chiefly
+Neoplatonic, on which no man set any value.  Yet, in 1535, Layton, a
+Commissioner, wrote to Cromwell that he and his companions had
+established the New Learning in the University.  A Lecture in Greek
+was founded in Magdalen, two chairs of Greek and Latin in New, two in
+All Souls, and two already existed, as we have seen, in C. C. C.
+This Layton is he that took a Rabelaisian and unquotable revenge on
+that old tyrant of the Schools, Duns Scotus.  "We have set Dunce in
+Bocardo, and utterly banished him from Oxford for ever, with all his
+blind glosses . . . And the second time we came to New College we
+found all the great quadrant full of the leaves of Dunce, the wind
+blowing them into every corner.  And there we found a certain Mr.
+Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering up part of the
+same books' leaves, as he said, therewith to make him sewers or
+blanshers, to keep the deer within his wood, thereby to have the
+better cry with his hounds."  Ah! if the University Commissioners
+would only set Aristotle, and Messrs. Ritter and Preller, "in
+Bocardo," many a young gentleman out of Buckinghamshire and other
+counties would joyously help in the good work, and use the pages, if
+not for blanshers, for other sportive purposes!
+
+"Habent sua fata libelli," as Terentianus Maurus says, in a
+frequently quoted verse.  If Cromwell's Commissioners were hard on
+Duns, the Visitors of Edward VI. were ruthless in their condemnation
+of everything that smacked of Popery or of magic.  Evangelical
+religion in England has never been very favourable to learning.
+Thus, in 1550 "the ancient libraries were by their appointment
+rifled.  Many manuscripts, guilty of no other superstition than red
+letters in the front or titles, were condemned to the fire . . . Such
+books wherein appeared angles were thought sufficient to be
+destroyed, because accounted Papish or diabolical, or both."  A cart-
+load of MSS., lucubrations of the Fellows of Merton, chiefly in
+controversial divinity, was taken away; but, by the good services of
+one Herks, a Dutchman, many books were preserved, and, later, entered
+the Bodleian Library.  The world can spare the controversial
+manuscripts of the Fellows of Merton, but who knows what invaluable
+scrolls may have perished in the Puritan bonfire!  Persons, the
+librarian of Balliol, sold old books to buy Protestant ones.  Two
+noble libraries were sold for forty shillings, for waste paper.  Thus
+the reign of Edward VI. gave free play to that ascetic and
+intolerable hatred of letters which had now and again made its voice
+heard under Henry VIII.  Oxford was almost empty.  The schools were
+used by laundresses, as a place wherein clothes might conveniently be
+dried.  The citizens encroached on academic property.  Some schools
+were quite destroyed, and the sites converted into gardens.  Few men
+took degrees.  The college plate and the jewels left by pious
+benefactors were stolen, and went to the melting-pot.  Thus
+flourished Oxford under Edward VI.
+
+The reign of Mary was scarcely more favourable to letters.  No one
+knew what to be at in religion.  In Magdalen no one could be found to
+say Mass, the fellows were turned out, the undergraduates were
+whipped--boyish martyrs--and crossed at the buttery.  What most
+pleases, in this tragic reign, is the anecdote of Edward Anne of
+Corpus.  Anne, with the conceit of youth, had written a Latin satire
+on the Mass.  He was therefore sentenced to be publicly flogged in
+the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each line in his
+satire.  Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of
+brevity.  How Edward Anne must have regretted that he had not knocked
+off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting
+of the wit in the tail!
+
+Oxford still retains a memory of the hideous crime of this reign.  In
+Broad Street, under the windows of Balliol, there is a small stone
+cross in the pavement.  This marks the place where, some years ago, a
+great heap of wooden ashes was found.  These ashes were the remains
+of the fire of October 16th, 1555--the day when Ridley and Latimer
+were burned.  "They were brought," says Wood, "to a place over
+against Balliol College, where now stands a row of poor cottages, a
+little before which, under the town wall, ran so clear a stream that
+it gave the name of Canditch, candida fossa, to the way leading by
+it."  To recover the memory of that event, let the reader fancy
+himself on the top of the tower of St. Michael's, that is,
+immediately above the city wall.  No houses interfere between him and
+the open country, in which Balliol stands; not with its present
+frontage, but much farther back.  A clear stream runs through the
+place where is now Broad Street, and the road above is dark with a
+swaying crowd, out of which rises the vapour of smoke from the
+martyrs' pile.  At your feet, on the top of Bocardo prison (which
+spanned the street at the North Gate), Cranmer stands manacled,
+watching the fiery death which is soon to purge away the memory of
+his own faults and crimes.  He, too, joined that "noble army of
+martyrs" who fought all, though they knew it not, for one cause--the
+freedom of the human spirit.
+
+It was in a night-battle that they fell, and "confused was the cry of
+the paean," but they won the victory, and we have entered into the
+land for which they contended.  When we think of these martyrdoms,
+can we wonder that the Fellows of Lincoln did not spare to ring a
+merry peal on their gaudy-day, the day of St. Hugh, even though Mary
+the Queen had just left her bitter and weary life?
+
+It would be pleasant to have to say that learning returned to Oxford
+on the rising of "that bright Occidental star, Queen Elizabeth."  On
+the other hand, the University recovered slowly, after being "much
+troubled," as Wood says, "AND HURRIED UP AND DOWN by the changes of
+religion."  We get a glimpse, from Wood, of the Fellows of Merton
+singing the psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins round a fire in the
+College Hall.  We see the sub-warden snatching the book out of the
+hands of a junior fellow, and declaring "that he would never dance
+after that pipe."  We find Oxford so illiterate, that she could not
+even provide an University preacher!  A country gentleman, Richard
+Taverner of Woodeaton, would stroll into St. Mary's, with his sword
+and damask gown, and give the Academicians, destitute of academical
+advice, a sermon beginning with these words:
+
+
+"Arriving at the mount of St. Mary's, I have brought you some fine
+bisketts baked in the Oven of Charitie, carefully conserved for the
+chickens of the Church, the sparrows of the spirit, and the sweet
+swallows of salvation.
+
+
+In spite of these evil symptoms, a Greek oration and plenty of Latin
+plays were ready for Queen Elizabeth when she visited Oxford in 1566.
+The religious refugees, who had "eaten mice at Zurich" in Mary's
+time, had returned, and their influence was hostile to learning.  A
+man who had lived on mice for his faith was above Greek.  The court
+which contained Sydney, and which welcomed Bruno, was strong enough
+to make the classics popular.  That famed Polish Count, Alasco, was
+"received with Latin orations and disputes (1583) in the best
+manner," and only a scoffing Italian, like Bruno, ventured to call
+the Heads of Houses THE DROWSY HEADS--dormitantes.  Bruno was a man
+whom nothing could teach to speak well of people in authority.
+Oxford enjoyed the religious peace (not extended to "Seminarists") of
+Elizabeth's and James's reigns, and did not foresee that she was
+about to become the home of the Court and a place of arms.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV--JACOBEAN OXFORD
+
+
+
+The gardens of Wadham College on a bright morning in early spring are
+a scene in which the memory of old Oxford pleasantly lingers, and is
+easily revived.  The great cedars throw their secular shadow on the
+ancient turf, the chapel forms a beautiful background; the whole
+place is exactly what it was two hundred and sixty years ago.  The
+stones of Oxford walls, when they do not turn black and drop off in
+flakes, assume tender tints of the palest gold, red, and orange.
+Along a wall, which looks so old that it may well have formed a
+defence of the ancient Augustinian priory, the stars of the yellow
+jasmine flower abundantly.  The industrious hosts of the bees have
+left their cells, to labour in this first morning of spring; the
+doves coo, the thrushes are noisy in the trees.  All breathes of the
+year renewal, and of the coming April; and all that gladdens us may
+have gladdened some indolent scholar in the time of King James.
+
+In the reign of the first Stuart king of England, Oxford became the
+town that we know.  Even in Elizabeth's days, could we ascend the
+stream of centuries, we should find ourselves much at home in Oxford.
+The earliest trustworthy map, that of Agas (1578), is worth studying,
+if we wish to understand the Oxford that Elizabeth left, and that the
+architects of James embellished, giving us the most interesting
+examples of collegiate buildings, which are both stately and
+comfortable.  Let us enter Oxford by the Iffley Road, in the year
+1578.  We behold, as Agas enthusiastically writes:
+
+
+"A citie seated, rich in everything,
+Girt with wood and water, meadow, corn, and hill."
+
+
+The way is not bordered, of course, by the long, straggling streets
+of rickety cottages, which now stretch from the bridge half-way to
+Cowley and Iffley.  The church, called by ribalds "the boiled
+rabbit," from its peculiar shape, lies on the right; there is a gate
+in the city wall, on the place where the road now turns to Holywell.
+At this time the walls still existed, and ran from Magdalen past "St.
+Mary's College, called Newe," through Exeter, through the site of Mr.
+Parker's shop, and all along the south side of Broad Street to St.
+Michael's, and Bocardo Gate.  There the wall cut across to the
+castle.  On the southern side of the city, it skirted Corpus and
+Merton Gardens, and was interrupted by Christ Church.  Probably if it
+were possible for us to visit Elizabethan Oxford, the walls and the
+five castle towers would seem the most curious features in the place.
+Entering the East Gate, Magdalen and Magdalen Grammar School would be
+familiar objects.  St. Edmund's Hall would be in its present place,
+and Queen's would present its ancient Gothic front.  It is easy to
+imagine the change in the High Street which would be produced by a
+Queen's not unlike Oriel, in the room of the highly classical edifice
+of Wren.  All Souls would be less remarkable; at St. Mary's we should
+note the absence of the "scandalous image" of Our Lady over the door.
+At Merton the fellows' quadrangle did not yet exist, and a great
+wood-yard bordered on Corpus.  In front of Oriel was an open space
+with trees, and there were a few scattered buildings, such as
+Peckwater's Inn (on the site of "Peck"), and Canterbury College.  Tom
+Quad was stately but incomplete.  Turning from St. Mary's past B. N.
+C., we miss the attics in Brasenose front, we miss the imposing
+Radcliffe, we miss all the quadrangle of the Schools, except the
+Divinity school, and we miss the Theatre.  If we go down South
+Street, past Ch. Ch. we find an open space where Pembroke stands.
+Where Wadham is now, the most uniform, complete, and unchanged of all
+the colleges, there are only the open pleasances, and perhaps a few
+ruins of the Augustinian priory.  St. John's lacks its inner
+quadrangle, and Balliol, in place of its new buildings, has its old
+delightful grove.  As to the houses of the town, they are not unlike
+the tottering and picturesque old roofs and gables of King Street.
+
+To the Oxford of Elizabeth's reign, then, the founders and architects
+of her successor added, chiefly, the Schools' quadrangle, with the
+great gate of the five orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in
+its own despite.  They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort, at
+Merton; they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful achievement.
+Their taste was a medley of new and old:  they made a not
+uninteresting effort to combine the exquisiteness of Gothic
+decoration with the proportions of Greek architecture.  The tower of
+the five orders reminds the spectator, in a manner, of the style of
+Milton.  It is rich and overloaded, yet its natural beauty is not
+abated by the relics out of the great treasures of Greece and Rome,
+which are built into the mass.  The Ionic and Corinthian pillars are
+like the Latinisms of Milton, the double-gilding which once covered
+the figures and emblems of the upper part of the tower gave them the
+splendour of Miltonic ornament.  "When King James came from Woodstock
+to see this quadrangular pile, he commanded the gilt figures to be
+whitened over," because they were so dazzling, or, as Wood expresses
+it, "so glorious and splendid that none, especially when the sun
+shone, could behold them."  How characteristic of James is this
+anecdote!  He was by no means le roi soleil, as courtiers called
+Louis XIV., as divines called the pedantic Stuart.  It is easy to
+fancy the King issuing from the Library of Bodley, where he has been
+turning over books of theology, prosing, and displaying his learning
+for hours.  The rheumy, blinking eyes are dazzled in the sunlight,
+and he peevishly commands the gold work to be "whitened over."
+Certainly the translators of the Bible were but ill-advised when they
+compared his Majesty to the rising sun in all his glory.
+
+James was rather fond of visiting Oxford and the royal residence at
+Woodstock.  We shall see that his Court, the most dissolute, perhaps,
+that England ever tolerated, corrupted the manners of the students.
+On one of his Majesty's earliest visits he had a chance of displaying
+the penetration of which he was so proud.  James was always finding
+out something or somebody, till it almost seemed as if people had
+discovered that the best way to flatter him was to try to deceive
+him.  In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a
+Bachelor of Physic.  This Haydock practised his profession during the
+day like other mortals, but varied from the kindly race of men by a
+pestilent habit of preaching all night.  It was Haydock's contention
+that he preached unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a
+text with the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as
+were revealed to him in slumber, "his preaching coming by
+revelation."  Though people went to hear Haydock, they were chiefly
+influenced by curiosity.  "His auditory were willing to silence him
+by pulling, haling, and pinching him, yet would he pertinaciously
+persist to the end, and sleep still."  The King was introduced into
+Haydock's bedroom, heard him declaim, and next day cross-examined him
+in private.  Awed by the royal acuteness, Haydock confessed that he
+was a humbug, and that he had taken to preaching all night by way of
+getting a little notoriety, and because he felt himself to be "a
+buried man in the University."
+
+That a man should hope to get reputation by preaching all night is
+itself a proof that the University, under James, was too
+theologically minded.  When has it been otherwise?  The religious
+strife of the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., and Mary, was not
+asleep; the troubles of Charles's time were beginning to stir.
+Oxford was as usual an epitome of English opinion.  We see the
+struggle of the wildest Puritanism, of Arminianism, of Pelagianism,
+of a dozen "isms," which are dead enough, but have left their
+pestilent progeny to disturb a place of religion, learning, and
+amusement.  By whatever names the different sects were called, men's
+ideas and tendencies were divided into two easily recognisable
+classes.  Calvinism and Puritanism on one side, with the Puritanic
+haters of letters and art, were opposed to Catholicism in germ, to
+literature, and mundane studies.  How difficult it is to take a side
+in this battle, where both parties had one foot on firm ground, the
+other in chaos, where freedom, or what was to become freedom of
+thought, was allied with narrow bigotry, where learning was chained
+to superstition!
+
+As early as 1606, Mr. William Laud, B.D., of St. John's College,
+began to disturb the University.  The young man preached a sermon
+which was thought to look Romewards.  Laud became SUSPECT, it was
+thought a "scandalous" thing to give him the usual courteous
+greetings in the street or in the college quadrangle.  From this time
+the history of Oxford, for forty years, is mixed up with the history
+of Laud.  The divisions of Roundhead and of Cavalier have begun.  The
+majority of the undergraduates are on the side of Laud; and the
+Court, the citizens, and many of the elder members of the University,
+are with the Puritans.
+
+The Court and the King, we have said, were fond of being entertained
+in the college halls.  James went from libraries to academic
+disputations, thence to dinner, and from dinner to look on at
+comedies played by the students.  The Cambridge men did not care to
+see so much royal favour bestowed on Oxford.  When James visited the
+University in 1641, a Cambridge wit produced a remarkable epigram.
+For some mysterious reason the playful fancies of the sister
+University have never been greatly admired at Oxford, where the brisk
+air, men flatter themselves, breeds nimbler humours.  Here is part of
+the Cantab's epigram:
+
+
+"To Oxenford the King has gone,
+With all his mighty peers,
+That hath in peace maintained us,
+These five or six long years."
+
+
+The poem maunders on for half a dozen lines, and "loses itself in the
+sands," like the River Rhine, without coming to any particular point
+or conclusion.  How much more lively is the Oxford couplet on the
+King, who, being bored by some amateur theatricals, twice or thrice
+made as if he would leave the hall, where men failed dismally to
+entertain him.
+
+
+"The King himself did offer,"--"What, I pray?"
+"He offered twice or thrice--to go away!"
+
+
+As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to wear
+love-locks.  In Elizabeth's time, when men wore their hair "no longer
+than their ears," long locks had been a mark, says Wood, of
+"swaggerers."  Drinking and gambling were now very fashionable,
+undergraduates were whipped for wearing boots, while "Puritans were
+many and troublesome," and Laud publicly declared (1614) that
+"Presbyterians were as bad as Papists."  Did Laud, after all, think
+Papists so very bad?  In 1617 he was President of his college, St.
+John's, on which he set his mark.  It is to Laud and to Inigo Jones
+that Oxford owes the beautiful garden-front, perhaps the most lovely
+thing in Oxford.  From the gardens--where for so many summers the
+beauty of England has rested in the shadow of the chestnut-trees,
+amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy with the scent of the
+acacia flowers--from the gardens, Laud's building looks rather like a
+country-house than a college.
+
+If St. John's men have lived in the University too much as if it were
+a large country-house, if they have imitated rather the Toryism than
+the learning of their great Archbishop, the blame is partly Laud's.
+How much harm to study he and Waynflete have unwittingly done, and
+how much they have added to the romance of Oxford!  It is easy to
+understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the
+beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John's.  When Kubla Khan
+"a stately pleasure-dome decreed," he did not mean to settle students
+there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and
+Latin prose compositions.  Kubla Khan would have found a palace to
+his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, "meandering
+with a mazy motion," stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the
+mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and purple
+with fritillaries.
+
+
+"And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills,
+Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree";
+
+
+but here is scarcely the proper training-ground of first-class men!
+
+Oxford returned to her ancient uses in 1625.  Soon after the
+accession of Charles I. the plague broke out in London, and Oxford
+entertained the Parliament, as six hundred years before she had
+received the Witan.  There seemed something ominous in all that
+Charles did in his earlier years--the air, or men's minds, was full
+of the presage of fate.  It was observed that the House of Commons
+met in the Divinity School, and that the place seemed to have
+infected them with theological passion.  After 1625 there was never a
+Parliament but had its committee to discuss religion, and to stray
+into the devious places of divinity.  The plague pursued Charles to
+Oxford.  In those days, and long afterwards, it was a common
+complaint that the citizens built rows of poor cottages within the
+walls, and that these cottages were crowded by dirty and indigent
+people.  Plague was bred almost yearly at Oxford, and Charles really
+seems to have improved the sanitary arrangements of the city.
+
+Laud, the President of St. John's, became, by some intrigue,
+Chancellor of the University.  He made Oxford many presents of Greek,
+Chinese, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic MSS.  There may have been--let us
+hope there were--quiet bookworms who enjoyed these gifts, while the
+town and University were bubbling over with religious feuds.  People
+grumbled that "Popish darts were whet afresh on a Dutch grindstone."
+A series of anti-Romish and anti-Royal sermons and pamphlets,
+followed as a rule by a series of recantations, kept men's minds in a
+ferment.  The good that Laud did by his gifts--and he was a
+munificent patron of learning--he destroyed by his dogmatism.
+Scholars could not decipher Greek texts while they were torturing
+biblical ones into arguments for and against the opinions of the
+Chancellor.  What is the true story about the gorgeous vestments
+which were found in a box in the house of the President of St.
+John's, and which are now preserved in the library of that college?
+Did they belong to the last of the old Catholic presidents of what
+was Chichele's College of St. Bernard before the Reformation?  Were
+they, on the other hand, the property of Laud himself?  It has been
+said that Laud would not have known how to wear them.  Fancy sees him
+treasuring that bright ecclesiastical raiment, [Greek text which
+cannot be reproduced], in some place of security.  At night, perhaps,
+when candles were lit and curtains drawn, and he was alone, he may
+have arrayed himself in the gorgeous chasuble before the mirror, as
+Hetty wore her surreptitious finery.  "There is a great deal of human
+nature in man."  If Laud really strutted in solitude, draped rather
+at random in these vestments, the ecclesiastical gear is even more
+interesting than the thin ivory-headed staff which supported him on
+his way to the scaffold; more curious than the diary in which he
+recorded the events of night and day, of dreaming hours and waking.
+In the library at St. John's they show his bust--a tarnished, gilded
+work of art.  He has a neat little cocked-up moustache, not like a
+prelate's; the face is that of a Bismarck without strength of
+character.
+
+In speaking of Oxford before the civil war, let us not forget that
+true students and peaceable men found a welcome retreat beyond the
+din of theological fictions.  Lord Falkland's house was within ten
+miles of the town.  "In this time," says Clarendon, in his immortal
+panegyric, "in this time he contracted familiarity and friendship
+with the most polished men of the University, who found such an
+immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so
+infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a
+vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an
+excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently
+resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air;
+so that his house was a university in a less volume, whither they
+came not so much for repose as study; and to examine and refine those
+grosser propositions, which laziness and consent made current in
+vulgar conversation."
+
+The signs of the times grew darker.  In 1636 the King and Queen
+visited Oxford, "with no applause."  In 1640 Laud sent the University
+his last present of manuscripts.  He was charged with many offences.
+He had repaired crucifixes; he had allowed the "scandalous image" to
+be set up in the porch of St. Mary's; and Alderman Nixon, the Puritan
+grocer, had seen a man bowing to the scandalous image--so he
+declared.  In 1642 Charles asked for money from the colleges, for the
+prosecution of the war with the Parliament.  The beautiful old
+college plate began its journey to the melting-pot.  On August 9th
+the scholars armed themselves.  There were two bands of musqueteers,
+one of pikemen, one of halberdiers.  In the reign of Henry III. the
+men had been on the other side.  Magdalen bridge was blocked up with
+heaps of wood.  Stones, for the primitive warfare of the time, were
+transported to the top of Magdalen tower.  The stones were never
+thrown at any foemen.  Royalists and Roundheads in turn occupied the
+place; and while grocer Nixon fled before the Cavaliers, he came back
+and interceded for All Souls College (which dealt with him for figs
+and sugar) when the Puritans wished to batter the graven images on
+the gate.  On October 29th the King came, after Edgehill fight, the
+Court assembled, and Oxford was fortified.  The place was made
+impregnable in those days of feeble artillery.  The author of the
+Gesta Stephani had pointed out, many centuries before, that Oxford,
+if properly defended, could never be taken, thanks to the network of
+streams that surrounds her.  Though the citizens worked grudgingly
+and slowly, the trenches were at last completed.  The earthworks--a
+double line--ran in and out of the interlacing streams.  A
+Parliamentary force on Headington Hill seems to have been unable to
+play on the city with artillery.  Barbed arrows were served out to
+the scholars, who formed a regiment of more than six hundred men.
+The Queen held her little court in Merton, in the Warden's lodgings.
+Clarendon gives rather a humorous account of the discontent of the
+fine ladies "The town was full of lords (besides those of the
+Council), and of persons of the best quality, with very many ladies,
+who, when not pleased themselves, kept others from being so."  Oxford
+never was so busy and so crowded; letters, society, war, were all
+confused; there were excursions against Brown at Abingdon, and alarms
+from Fairfax on Headington Hill.  The siege, from May 22nd to June
+5th, was almost a farce.  The Parliamentary generals "fought with
+perspective glasses."  Neither Cromwell at Wytham, nor Brown at
+Wolvercot, pushed matters too hard.  When two Puritan regiments
+advanced on Hinksey, Mr. Smyth blazed away at them from his house.
+As in Zululand, any building made a respectable fort, when cannon-
+balls had so little penetrative power, or when artillery was not at
+the front.  Oxford was surrendered, with other places of arms, after
+Naseby, and--Presbyterians became heads of colleges!
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V--SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION
+
+
+
+In Merton Chapel a little mural tablet bears the crest, the name, and
+the dates of the birth and death, of Antony Wood.  He has been our
+guide in these sketches of Oxford life, as he must be the guide of
+the gravest and most exact historians.  No one who cares for the past
+of the University should think without pity and friendliness of this
+lonely scholar, who in his lifetime was unpitied and unbefriended.
+We have reached the period in which he lived and died, in the midst
+of changes of Church and State, and surrounded by more worldly
+scholars, whose letters remain to testify that, in the reign of the
+Second Charles, Oxford was modern Oxford.  In the epistles of
+Humphrey Prideaux, student of Christ Church, we recognise the foibles
+of the modern University, the love of gossip, the internecine
+criticism, the greatness of little men whom rien ne peut plaire.
+
+Antony Wood was a scholar of a different sort, of a sort that has
+never been very common in Oxford.  He was a perfect dungeon of books;
+but he wrote as well as read, which has never been a usual practice
+in his University.  Wood was born in 1632, in one of the old houses
+opposite Merton, perhaps in the curious ancient hall which has been
+called Beham, Bream, and Bohemiae Aula, by various corruptions of the
+original spelling.  As a boy, Wood must have seen the siege of
+Oxford, which he describes not without humour.  As a young man, he
+watched the religious revolution which introduced Presbyterian Heads
+of Houses, and sent Puritanical captains of horse, like Captain James
+Wadsworth, to hunt for "Papistical reliques" and "massing stuffs"
+among the property of the President of C. C. C. and the Dean of Ch.
+Ch. (1646-1648).  In 1650 he saw the Chancellorship of Oliver
+Cromwell; in 1659 he welcomed the Restoration, and rejoiced that "the
+King had come to his own again."  The tastes of an antiquary
+combined, with the natural reaction against Puritanism, to make
+Antony Wood a High Churchman, and not averse to Rome, while he had
+sufficient breadth of mind to admire Thomas Hobbes, the patriarch of
+English learning.  But Wood had little room in his heart or mind for
+any learning save that connected with the University.  Oxford, the
+city, and the colleges, the remains of the old religious art, the
+customs, the dresses--these things he adored with a loverlike
+devotion, which was utterly unrewarded.  He owed no office to the
+University, and he was even expelled (1693) for having written
+sharply against Clarendon.  This did not abate his zeal, nor prevent
+him from passing all his days, and much of his nights, in the study
+and compilation of University history.
+
+The author of Wood's biography has left a picture of his sombre and
+laborious old age.  He rose at four o'clock every morning.  He
+scarcely tasted food till supper-time.  At the hour of the college
+dinner he visited the booksellers' shops, where he was sure not to be
+disturbed by the gossip of dons, young and old.  After supper he
+would smoke his pipe and drink his pot of ale in a tavern.  It was
+while he took this modest refreshment, before old age came upon him,
+that Antony once fell in, and fell out, with Dick Peers.  This Dick
+was one of the men employed by Dr. Fell, the Dean of Ch. Ch., to
+translate Wood's History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford
+into Latin.  The translation gave rise to a number of literary
+quarrels.  As Dean of Ch. Ch., Dr. Fell yielded to the besetting sin
+of deans, and fancied himself the absolute master of the University,
+if not something superior to mortal kind.  An autocrat of this sort
+had no scruples about changing Wood's copy whenever he differed from
+Wood in political or religious opinion.  Now Antony, as we said, had
+eyes to discern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the Dean considered no
+better than a Deist or an Atheist.  The Dean therefore calmly altered
+all that Wood had written of the Philosopher of Malmesbury, and so
+maligned Hobbes that the old man, meeting the King in Pall Mall,
+begged leave to reply in his own defence.  Charles allowed the
+dispute to go on, and Hobbes hit Fell rather hard.  The Dean retorted
+with the famous expression about irritabile illud et vanissimum
+Malmesburiense animal.  This controversy amused Oxford, but bred bad
+feeling between Antony Wood and Dick Peers, the translator of his
+work, and the tool of the Dean of Ch. Ch.  Prideaux (Letters to John
+Ellis; Camden Society, 1875) describes the battles in city taverns
+between author and translator:
+
+
+"I suppose that you have heard of the continuall feuds, and often
+battles, between the author and the translator; they had a skirmish
+at Sol Hardeing [keeper of a tavern in All Saints' parish], another
+at the printeing house [the Sheldonian theatre], and several other
+places."
+
+
+From the record of these combats, we learn that the recluse Antony
+was a man of his hands:
+
+
+"As Peers always cometh off with a bloody nose or a black eye, he was
+a long time afraid to goe annywhere where he might chance to meet his
+too powerful adversary, for fear of another drubbing, till he was
+pro-proctor, and now Woods (sic) is as much afraid to meet him, least
+he should exercise his authority upon him.  And although he be a good
+bowzeing blad, yet it hath been observed that never since his
+adversary hath been in office hath he dared to be out after nine,
+least he should meet him and exact the rigor of the statute upon
+him."
+
+
+The statute required all scholars to be in their rooms before Tom had
+ceased ringing.  It was, perhaps, too rash to say that the Oxford of
+the Restoration was already modern Oxford.  The manners of the
+students were, so to speak, more accentuated.  However much the
+lecturer in Idolology may dislike the method and person of the Reader
+in the Mandingo language, these two learned men do not box in
+taverns, nor take off their coats if they meet each other at the
+Clarendon Press.  People are careful not to pitch into each other in
+that way, though the temper which confounds opponents for their
+theory of irregular verbs is not at all abated.  As Wood grew in
+years he did not increase in honours.  "He was a mere scholar," and
+consequently might expect from the greater number of men disrespect.
+When he was but sixty-four, he looked eighty at least.  His dress was
+not elegant, "cleanliness being his chief object."  He rarely left
+his rooms, that were papered with MSS., and where every table and
+chair had its load of books and yellow parchments from the College
+muniment rooms.  When strangers came to Oxford with letters of
+recommendation, the recluse would leave his study, and gladly lead
+them about the town, through Logic Lane to Queen's, which had not
+then the sublimely classical front, built by Hawksmoor, "but
+suggested by Sir Christopher Wren."  It is worthy of his genius.
+Wood died in 1695, "forgiving every one."  He could well afford to do
+so.  In his Athenae Oxonienses he had written the lives of all his
+enemies.
+
+Wood, "being a mere scholar," could, of course, expect nothing but
+disrespect in a place like Oxford.  His younger contemporary,
+Humphrey Prideaux, was, in the Oxford manner, a man of the world.  He
+was the son of a Cornish squire, was educated at Westminster under
+Busby (that awful pedagogue, whose birch seems so near a memory), got
+a studentship at Christ Church in 1668, and took his B.A. degree in
+1672.  Here it may be observed that men went up quite as late in life
+then as they do now, for Prideaux was twenty-four years old when he
+took his degree.  Fell was Dean of Christ Church, and was showing
+laudable zeal in working the University Press.  What a pity it is
+that the University Press of to-day has become a trading concern, a
+shop for twopenny manuals and penny primers!  It is scarcely proper
+that the University should at once organise examinations and sell the
+manuals which contain the answers to the questions most likely to be
+set.  To return to Fell; he made Prideaux edit Lucius Florus, and
+publish the Marmora Oxoniensia, which came out 1676.  We must not
+suppose, however, that Prideaux was an enthusiastic archaeologist.
+He did the Marmora because the Dean commanded it, and because
+educated people were at that period not uninterested in Greek art.
+At the present hour one may live a lifetime in Oxford and only learn,
+by the accident of examining passmen in the Arundel Room, that the
+University possesses any marbles.  In the walls of the Arundel Room
+(on the ground-floor in the Schools' quadrangle) these touching
+remains of Hellas are interred.  There are the funereal stelae, with
+their quiet expression of sorrow, of hope, of resignation.  The young
+man, on his tombstone, is represented in the act of rising and taking
+the hand of a friend.  He is bound on his latest journey.
+
+
+"He goeth forth unto the unknown land,
+Where wife nor child may follow; thus far tell
+The lingering clasp of hand in faithful hand,
+And that brief carven legend, Friend, farewell.
+
+O pregnant sign, profound simplicity!
+All passionate pain and fierce remonstrating
+Being wholly purged, leave this mere memory,
+Deep but not harsh, a sad and sacred thing." {1}
+
+
+The lady chooses from a coffer a trinket, or a ribbon.  It is her
+last toilette she is making, with no fear and no regret.  Again, the
+long-severed souls are meeting with delight in the home of the just
+made perfect.
+
+Even in the Schools these scraps of Greek lapidary's work seem
+beautiful to us, in their sober and cheerful acceptance of life and
+death.  We hope, in Oxford, that the study of ancient art, as well as
+of ancient literature, may soon be made possible.  These tangible
+relics of the past bring us very near to the heart and the life of
+Greece, and waken a kindly enthusiasm in every one who approaches
+them.  In Humphrey Prideaux's letters there is not a trace of any
+such feeling.  He does his business, but it is hack-work.  In this he
+differs from the modern student, but in his caustic description of
+the rude and witless society of the place he is modern enough.  In
+his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it
+is plain that Prideaux wants to get preferment.  His taste and his
+ambition alike made him detest the heavy, beer-drinking doctors, the
+fast "All Souls gentlemen," and the fossils of stupidity who are
+always plentifully imbedded in the soil of University life.
+Fellowships were then sold, at Magdalen and New, when they were not
+given by favour.  Prideaux grumbles (July 28th, 1674) at the laxness
+of the Commissioners, who should have exposed this abuse:  "In town,
+one of their inquirys is whether any of the scholars weare pantaloons
+or periwigues, or keep dogs."  The great dispute about dogs, which
+raged at a later date in University College, had already begun to
+disturb dons and undergraduates.  The choice language of Oxford
+contempt was even then extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison in Daniel
+Deronda, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not like as "brutes."
+"Pembroke--the fittest colledge in the town for brutes."  The
+University did not encourage certain "players" who had paid the place
+a visit, and the players, in revenge, had gone about the town at
+night and broken the windows.
+
+When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is
+amusing to read of Prideaux's miserable adventures, in the diligence,
+between a lady of easy manners, a "pitiful rogue," and two
+undergraduates who "sordidly affected debauchery."
+
+
+"This ill company made me very miserable all the way.  Only once I
+could not but heartily laugh to see Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by
+five or six carmen with whips and prong staves for provoking them
+with some of his extravagant frolics."
+
+
+The "violent affection to vice" in the University, or in the country,
+was, of course, the reaction against the godliness of Puritan
+captains of horse.  Another form of the reaction is discernible in
+the revived High Church sentiments of Prideaux, Wood, and most of the
+students of the time.
+
+The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than those of
+the pot-house-haunting seniors.  Dr. Good, the Master of Balliol, "a
+good old toast," had much trouble with his students.
+
+
+"There is, over against Balliol College, a dingy, horrid, scandalous
+ale-house, fit for none but draymen and tinkers, and such as, by
+going there, have made themselves equally scandalous.  Here the
+Balliol men continually, and by perpetuall bubbing, add art to their
+natural stupidity, to make themselves perfect sots."
+
+
+The envy and jealousy of the inferior colleges, alas! have put about
+many things, in these latter days, to the discredit of the Balliol
+men, but not even Humphrey Prideaux would, out of all his stock of
+epithets, choose "sottish" and "stupid."  In these old times,
+however, Dr. Good had to call the men together, and -
+
+
+"Inform them of the mischiefs of that hellish liquor called ale; but
+one of them, not so tamely to be preached out of his beloved liquor,
+made answer that the Vice-Chancelour's men drank ale at the "Split
+Crow," and why should not they too?"
+
+
+On this, old Dr. Good posted off to the Vice-Chancellor, who, "being
+a lover of old ale" himself, returned a short answer to the head of
+Balliol.  The old man went back to his college, and informed his
+fellows, "that he was assured there were no hurt in ale, so that now
+they may be sots by authority."  Christ Church men were not more
+sober.  David Whitford, who had been the tutor of Shirley the poet,
+was found lying dead in his bed:  "he had been going to take a dram
+for refreshment, but death came between the cup and the lips, and
+this is the end of Davy."  Prideaux records, in the same feeling
+style, that smallpox carried off many of the undergraduates, "besides
+my brother," a student at Corpus.
+
+The University Press supplied Prideaux with gossip.  They printed "a
+book against Hobs," written by Clarendon.  Hobbes was the heresiarch
+of the time, and when an unhappy fellow of Merton hanged himself, the
+doctrines of Hobbes were said to have prompted him to the deed.  To
+return to the Press.  "Our Christmas book will be Cornelius Nepos . .
+. Our marbles are now printing."  Prideaux, as has been said, took no
+interest in his own work.
+
+
+"I coat (quote) a multitude of authors; if people think the better of
+me for that, I will think the worse of them for their judgement.  It
+beeing soe easyly a thinge to make this specious show, he must be a
+fool that cannot gain whatsoever repute is to be gotten by it.  If
+people will admire him for this, they may; I shall admire such for
+nothing else but their good indexs.  As long as books have these, on
+what subject may we not coat as many others as we please, and never
+have read one of them?"
+
+
+It is not easy to gather from this confession whether Prideaux had or
+had not read the books he "coated."  It is certain that Dean Aldrich
+(and here again we recognise the eternal criticism of modern Oxford)
+held a poor opinion of Humphrey Prideaux.  Aldrich said Prideaux was
+"incorrect," "muddy-headed," "he would do little or nothing besides
+heaping up notes"; "as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about
+any, but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former
+editors."  This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes,
+this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this
+horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those
+temptations which seem to be in the air.  Oxford is a discouraging
+place.  College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion
+to their conscientiousness.  They have only the waste odds-and-ends
+of time for their own labours.  They live in an atmosphere of
+criticism.  They collect notes, they wait, they dream; their youth
+goes by, and the night comes when no man can work.  The more praise
+to the tutors and lecturers who decipher the records of Assyria, or
+patiently collate the manuscripts of the Iliad, who not only teach
+what is already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and advance
+the boundaries of scholarship and science.
+
+One lesson may be learned from Prideaux's cynical letters, which is
+still worth the attention of every young Oxford student who is
+conscious of ambition, of power, and of real interest in letters.  He
+can best serve his University by coming out of her, by declining
+college work, and by devoting himself to original study in some less
+exhausted air, in some less critical society.
+
+Among the aversions of Humphrey Prideaux were the "gentlemen of All
+Souls."  They certainly showed extraordinary impudence when they
+secretly employed the University Press to print off copies of Marc
+Antonio's engravings after Giulio Romano's drawings.  It chanced that
+Fell visited the press rather late one evening, and found "his press
+working at such an imployment.  The prints and plates he hath seased,
+and threatened the owners of them with expulsion."  "All Souls," adds
+Prideaux, "is a scandalous place."  Yet All Souls was the college of
+young Mr. Guise, an Arabic scholar, "the greatest miracle in the
+knowledge of that I ever heard of."  Guise died of smallpox while
+still very young.
+
+Thus Prideaux prattles on, about Admiral Van Tromp, "a drunken greazy
+Dutchman," whom Speed, of St. John's, conquered in boozing; of the
+disputes about races in Port Meadow; of the breaking into the Mermaid
+Tavern.  "We Christ Church men bear the blame of it, our ticks, as
+the noise of the town will have it, amounting to 1,500 pounds."  Thus
+Christ Church had little cause to throw the first stone at Balliol.
+Prideaux shows little interest in letters, little in the press,
+though he lived in palmy days of printing, in the time of the
+Elzevirs; none at all in the educational work of the place.  He
+sneers at the Puritans, and at the controversy on "The Foundations of
+Hell Torments shaken and removed."  He admits that Locke "is a man of
+very good converse, but is chiefly concerned to spy out the movements
+of the philosopher, suspected of sedition, and to report them to
+Ellis in town.  About the new buildings, as of the beautiful western
+gateway, where Great Tom is hung, the work of Wren, Prideaux says
+little; St. Mary's was suffering restoration, and "the old men,"
+including Wood, we may believe, "exceedingly exclaim against it."
+That is the way of Oxford, a college is constantly rebuilding amid
+the protests of the rest of the University.  There is no question
+more common, or less agreeable than this, "What are you doing to your
+tower?" or "What are you doing to your hall, library, or chapel?"  No
+one ever knows; but we are always doing something, and working men
+for ever sit, and drink beer, on the venerable roofs.
+
+Long intercourse with Prideaux's letters, and mournful memories of
+Oxford new buildings, tempt a writer to imitate Prideaux's spirit.
+Let us shut up his book, where he leaves Oxford, in 1686, to become
+rector of Saham-Toney, in Norfolk, and marry a wife, though, says he,
+"I little thought I should ever come to this."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI--HIGH TORY OXFORD
+
+
+
+The name of her late Majesty Queen Anne has for some little time been
+a kind of party watch-word.  Many harmless people have an innocent
+loyalty to this lady, make themselves her knights (as Mary Antoinette
+has still her sworn champions in France and Mary Stuart in Scotland),
+buy the plate of her serene period, and imitate the dress.  To many
+moral critics in the press, however, Queen Anne is a kind of
+abomination.  I know not how it is, but the terms "Queen Anne
+furniture and blue china" have become words of almost slanderous
+railing.  Any didactic journalist who uses them is certain at once to
+fall heavily on the artistic reputation of Mr. Burne Jones, to rebuke
+the philosophy of Mr. Pater, and to hint that the entrance-hall of
+the Grosvenor Gallery is that "by-way" with which Bunyan has made us
+familiar.  In the changes of things our admiration of the Augustan
+age of our literature, the age of Addison and Steele, of Marlborough
+and Aldrich, has become a sort of reproach.  It may be that our
+modern preachers know but little of that which they traduce.  At all
+events, the Oxford of Queen Anne's time was not what they call "un-
+English," but highly conservative, and as dull and beer-bemused as
+the most manly taste could wish it to be.
+
+The Spectator of the ingenious Sir Richard Steele gives us many a
+glimpse of non-juring Oxford.  The old fashion of Sanctity (Mr.
+Addison says, in the Spectator, No. 494) had passed away; nor were
+appearances of Mirth and Pleasure looked upon as the Marks of a
+Carnal Mind.  Yet the Puritan Rule was not so far forgotten, but that
+Mr. Anthony Henley (a Gentleman of Property) could remember how he
+had stood for a Fellowship in a certain College whereof a great
+Independent Minister was Governor.  As Oxford at this Moment is much
+vexed in her Mind about Examinations, wherein, indeed, her whole
+Force is presently expended, I make no scruple to repeat the account
+of Mr. Henley's Adventure:
+
+
+"The Youth, according to Custom, waited on the Governor of his
+College, to be examined.  He was received at the Door by a Servant,
+who was one of that gloomy Generation that were then in Fashion.  He
+conducted him with great Silence and Seriousness to a long Gallery
+which was darkened at Noon-day, and had only a single Candle burning
+in it.  After a short stay in this melancholy Apartment, he was led
+into a Chamber hung with black, where he entertained himself for some
+time by the glimmering of a Taper, till at length the Head of the
+College came out to him from an inner Room, with half a dozen Night
+Caps upon his Head, and a religious Horror in his Countenance.  The
+Young Man trembled; but his Fears increased when, instead of being
+asked what progress he had made in Learning, he was ask'd "how he
+abounded in Grace?"  His Latin and Greek stood him in little stead.
+He was to give an account only of the state of his Soul--whether he
+was of the Number of the Elect; what was the Occasion of his
+Conversion; upon what Day of the Month and Hour of the Day it
+happened; how it was carried on, and when completed.  The whole
+Examination was summed up in one short Question, namely, WHETHER HE
+WAS PREPARED FOR DEATH?  The Boy, who had been bred up by honest
+Parents, was frighted out of his wits by the solemnity of the
+Proceeding, and by the last dreadful Interrogatory, so that, upon
+making his Escape out of this House of Mourning, he could never be
+brought a second Time to the Examination, as not being able to go
+through the Terrors of it."
+
+
+By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund's Hall, began to
+keep his diary, the "honest folk"--that is, the High Churchmen--had
+the better of the Independent Ministers.  The Dissenters had some
+favour at Court, but in the University they were looked upon as
+utterly reprobate.  From the Reliquiae of Hearne (an antiquarian
+successor of Antony Wood, a bibliophile, an archaeologist, and as
+honest a man as Jacobitism could make him) let us quote an example of
+Heaven's wrath against Dissenters
+
+
+"Aug. 6, 1706.  We have an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire,
+that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks
+to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and
+spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to
+their great mortification.
+
+
+Hearne's common-place books are an amusing source of information
+about Oxford society in the years of Queen Anne, and of the
+Hanoverian usurper.  Tom Hearne was a Master of Arts of St. Edmund's
+Hall, and at one time Deputy-Librarian of the Bodleian.  He lost this
+post because he would not take "the wicked oaths" required of him,
+but he did not therefore leave Oxford.  His working hours were passed
+in preparing editions of antiquarian books, to be printed in very
+limited number, on ordinary and LARGE PAPER.  It was the joy of Tom's
+existence to see his editions become first scarce, then VERY SCARCE,
+while the price augmented in proportion to the rarity.  When he was
+not reading in his rooms he was taking long walks in the country,
+tracing Roman walls and roads, and exploring Woodstock Park for the
+remains of "the labyrinth," as he calls the Maze of Fair Rosamund.
+In these strolls he was sometimes accompanied by undergraduates, even
+gentlemen of noble family, "which gave cause to some to envy our
+happiness."  Hearne was a social creature, and had a heart, as he
+shows by the entry about the death of his "very dear friend, Mr.
+Thomas Cherry, A.M., to the great grief of all that knew him, being a
+gentleman of great beauty, singular modesty, of wonderful good
+nature, and most excellent principles."
+
+The friends of Hearne were chiefly, perhaps solely, what he calls
+"honest men," supporters of the Stuart family, and always ready to
+drink his Majesty's (King James') health.  They would meet in
+"Antiquity Hall," an old house near Wadham, and smoke their honest
+pipes.  They held certain of the opinions of "the Hebdomadal
+Meeting," satirised by Steele in the Spectator (No. 43).  "We are
+much offended at the Act for importing French wines.  A bottle or two
+of good solid Edifying Port, at honest George's, made a Night
+cheerful, and threw off Reserve.  But this plaguy French Claret will
+not only cost us more Money but do us less good."  Hearne had a poor
+opinion of "Captain Steele," and of "one Tickle:  this Tickle is a
+pretender to poetry."  He admits that, though "Queen's people are
+angry at the Spectator, and the common-room say 'tis silly dull
+stuff, men that are indifferent commend it highly, as it deserves."
+Some other satirist had a plate etched, representing Antiquity Hall--
+a caricature of Tom's antiquarian engravings.  It may be seen in
+Skelton's book.
+
+Thanks to Hearne, it is easy to reproduce the common-room gossip, and
+the more treasonable talk of honest men at Antiquity Hall.  The
+learned were much interested, as they usually are at Oxford, in
+theological discussion.  Some one proved, by an ingenious syllogism,
+that all men are to be saved; but Hearne had the better of this
+Latitudinarian, easily demonstrating that the comfortable argument
+does not meet the case of madmen, and of deaf-mutes, whom Tom did not
+expect to meet in a future state.  The ingenious, though depressing
+speculations of Mr. Dodwell were also discussed:  "He makes the air
+the receptacle of all souls, good and bad, and that they are under
+the power of the D--l, he being prince of the air."  "The less
+perfectly good" hang out, if we may say so, "in the space between
+earth and the clouds," all which is subtle, and creditable to Mr.
+Dodwell's invention, but not susceptible of exact demonstration.  The
+whole controversy is an interesting specimen of Queen Anne
+philosophy, which, with all respect for the taste of the period, we
+need not wish to see revived.  The Bishop of Worcester, for example,
+"expects the end of the world about nine years hence."  While the
+theology of Oxford is being mentioned, the zeal of Dr. Miller, Regius
+Professor of Greek, must not be forgotten.  The learned Professor
+endeavoured to convert, and even "writ a Letter to Mrs. Bracegirdle,
+giving her great encomiums (as having himself been often to see plays
+acted whilst they continued here) upon account of her excellent
+qualifications, and persuading her to give over this loose way of
+living, and betake herself to such a kind of life as was more
+innocent, and would gain her more credit."  The Professor's advice
+was wasted on "Bracegirdle the brown."
+
+Politics were naturally much discussed in these doubtful years, when
+the Stuarts, it was thought, had still a chance to win their own
+again.  In 1706, Tom says, "The great health now is "The Cube of
+Three," which is the number 27, i.e. the number of the protesting
+Lords."  The University was most devoted, as far as drinking toasts
+constitutes loyalty.  In Hearne's common-place book is carefully
+copied out this "Scotch Health to K. J.":
+
+
+"He's o'er the seas and far awa',
+He's o'er the seas and far awa';
+Altho' his back be at the wa'
+We'll drink his health that's far awa'."
+
+
+The words live, and ring strangely out of that dusty past.  The song
+survives the throne, and sounds pathetically, somehow, as one has
+heard it chanted, in days as dead as the year 1711, at suppers that
+seem as ancient almost as the festivities of Thomas Hearne.  It is
+not unpleasant to remember that the people who sang could also fight,
+and spilt their blood as well as their "edifying port."  If the
+Southern "honest men" had possessed hearts for anything but tippling,
+the history of England would have been different.
+
+When "the allyes and the French fought a bloudy battle near Mons"
+(1709, "Malplaquet"), the Oxford honest men, like Colonel Henry
+Esmond, thought "there was not any the least reason of bragging."
+The young King of England, under the character of the Chevalier St.
+George, "shewed abundance of undaunted courage and resolution, led up
+his troups with unspeakable bravery, appeared in the utmost dangers,
+and at last was wounded."  Marlborough's victories were sneered at,
+his new palace of Blenheim was said to be not only ill-built, but
+haunted by signs of evil omen.
+
+It was not always safe to say what one thought about politics at
+Oxford.  One Mr. A. going to one Mr. Tonson, a barber, put the barber
+and his wife in a ferment (they being rascally Whigs) by maintaining
+that the hereditary right was in the P. of W.  Tonson laid
+information against the gentleman; "which may be a warning to honest
+men not to enter into topicks of this nature with barbers."  One
+would not willingly, even now, discuss the foreign policy of her
+Majesty's Ministers with the person who shaves one.  There are
+opportunities and temptations to which no decent person should be
+wantonly exposed.  The bad effect of Whiggery on the temper was
+evident in this, that "the Mohocks are all of the Whiggish gang, and
+indeed all Whigs are looked upon as such Mohocks, their principles
+and doctrines leading thus to all manner of barbarity and
+inhumanity."  So true is it that Conservatives are all lovers of
+peace and quiet, that (May 29th, 1715) "last night a good part of the
+Presbyterian meeting-house in Oxford was pulled down.  The people ran
+up and down the streets, crying, King James the Third!  The true
+king!  No Usurper.  In the evening they pulled a good part of the
+Quakers' and Anabaptists' meeting-houses down.  The heads of houses
+have represented that it was begun by the Whiggs."  Probably the
+heads of houses reasoned on a priori principles when they arrived at
+this remarkable conclusion.
+
+In consequence of the honesty, frankness, and consistency of his
+opinions, Mr. Hearne ran his head in danger when King George came to
+the throne, which has ever since been happily settled in the
+possession of the Hanoverian line.  A Mr. Urry, a Non-juror, had to
+warn him, saying, "Do you not know that they have a mind to hang you
+if they can, and that you have many enemies who are very ready to do
+it?"  In spite of this, Hearne, in his diaries, still calls George I.
+the Duke of Brunswick, and the Whigs, "that fanatical crew."  John,
+Duke of Marlborough, he styles "that villain the Duke."  We have had
+enough, perhaps, of Oxford politics, which were not much more
+prejudiced in the days of the Duke than in those of Mr. Gladstone.
+Hearne's allusions to the contemporary state of buildings and of
+college manners are often rather instructive.  In All Souls the Whigs
+had a feast on the day of King Charles's martyrdom.  They had a
+dinner dressed of woodcock, "whose heads they cut off, in contempt of
+the memory of the blessed martyr."  These men were "low Churchmen,
+more shame to them."  The All Souls men had already given up the
+custom of wandering about the College on the night of January 14th,
+with sticks and poles, in quest of the mallard.  That "swopping"
+bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger
+in the college of which he is the protector.  But now all hope of
+recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of
+the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the "swopping, swopping
+mallard."
+
+As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne's reign--quite a
+different thing from the "Neo-paganism" which now causes so much
+anxiety to the moral press-man--let us note the affecting instance of
+Geffery Ammon.  "He was a merry companion, and his conversation was
+much courted."  Geffery had but little sense of religion.  He is now
+buried on the west side of Binsey churchyard, near St. Margaret's
+well.  Geffery selected Binsey for the place of his sepulchre,
+because he was partial to the spot, having often shot snipe there.
+In order to moisten his clay, he desired his friend Will Gardner, a
+boatman of Oxford, who was accustomed to row him down the river, to
+put now and then a bottle of ale by his grave when he came that way;
+an injunction which was punctually complied with.
+
+Oxford lost in Hearne's time many of her old buildings.  It is said,
+with a dreadful appearance of truth, that Oxford is now to lose some
+of the few that are left.  Corpus and Merton, if they are not belied,
+mean to pull down the old houses opposite Merton, halls and houses
+consecrated to the memory of Antony Wood, and to build lecture-rooms
+AND HOUSES FOR MARRIED DONS on the site.  The topic, for one who is
+especially bound to pray for Merton (and who now does so with unusual
+fervour), is most painful.  A view of the "proposed new buildings,"
+in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy (1879), depresses the soul.
+In the same spirit Hearne says (March 28th, 1671), "It always grieves
+me when I go through Queen's College, to see the ruins of the old
+chapell next to High Street, the area of which now lies open (the
+building being most of it pulled down) and trampled upon by dogs,
+etc., as if the ground had never been consecrated.  Nor do the
+Queen's Coll. people take any care, but rather laught at it when 'tis
+mentioned."  In 1722 "the famous postern-gate called the Turl Gate"
+(a corruption for Thorold Gate) was "pulled down by one Dr. Walker,
+who lived by it, and pretended that it was a detriment to his house.
+As long ago as 1705, they had pulled down the building of Peckwater
+quadrangle, in Ch. Ch."  Queen's also "pulled down the old refectory,
+which was on the west side of the old quadrangle, and was a fine old
+structure that I used to admire much."  It appears that the College
+was also anxious to pull down the chamber of King Henry V.  This is a
+strange craze for destruction, that some time ago endangered the
+beautiful library of Merton, a place where one can fancy that Chaucer
+or Wyclif may have studied.  Oxford will soon have little left of the
+beauty and antiquity of Patey's Quad in Merton, as represented in our
+illustration.  What the next generation will think of the
+multitudinous new buildings, it is not hard to conjecture.  Imitative
+experiments, without style or fancy in structure or decoration, and
+often more than medievally uncomfortable, they will seem but
+evidences of Oxford's love of destruction.  People of Hearne's way of
+thinking, people who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and, like
+Hearne, must be content sadly to enjoy what is left of grace and
+dignity.  He died before Oxford had quite become the Oxford of
+Gibbon's autobiography.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII--GEORGIAN OXFORD
+
+
+
+Oxford has usually been described either by her lovers or her
+malcontents.  She has suffered the extremes of filial ingratitude and
+affection.  There is something in the place that makes all her
+children either adore or detest her; and it is difficult, indeed, to
+pick out the truth concerning her past social condition from the
+satires and the encomiums.  Nor is it easy to say what qualities in
+Oxford, and what answering characteristics in any of her sons, will
+beget the favourable or the unfavourable verdict.  Gibbon, one might
+have thought, saw the sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of the
+University.  With youth, and wealth, and liberty, with a set of three
+beautiful rooms in that "stately pile, the new building of Magdalen
+College," Gibbon found nothing in Oxford to please him--nothing to
+admire, nothing to love.  From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke
+Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson--rugged, anxious, and conscious
+of his great unemployed power--looked down on a much more pleasant
+Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased to regard with
+affection.  This contrast is found in the opinions of our
+contemporaries.  One man will pass his time in sneering at his tutors
+and his companions, in turning listlessly from study to study, in
+following false tendencies, and picking up scraps of knowledge which
+he despises, and in later life he will detest his University.  There
+are wiser and more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge
+against the stately mother of us all, that so easily can disregard
+our petty spleens and ungrateful rancour.  Mr. Lowe's most bitter
+congratulatory addresses to the "happy Civil Engineers," and his
+unkindest cuts at ancient history, and at the old philosophies which
+"on Argive heights divinely sung," move her not at all.  Meanwhile,
+the majority of men are more kindly compact, and have more natural
+affections, and on them the memory of their earliest friendships, and
+of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave to their years of
+youth, is not wholly wasted.
+
+There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons.
+There is little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson's life
+at Pembroke.  He went up in the October term of 1728, being then
+nineteen years of age, and already full of that wide and
+miscellaneous classical reading which the Oxford course, then as now,
+somewhat discouraged.  "His figure and manner appeared strange" to
+the company in which he found himself; and when he broke silence it
+was with a quotation from Macrobius.  To his tutor's lectures, as a
+later poet says, "with freshman zeal he went"; but his zeal did not
+last out the discovery that the tutor was "a heavy man," and the fact
+that there was "sliding on Christ Church Meadow."  Have any of the
+artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in the
+Doctor's life--drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in
+these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even
+the exercise of skating could not have made "swan-like," to quote the
+young lady in "Pickwick"?  Johnson was "sconced" in the sum of
+twopence for cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the
+amount of the fine was the same four hundred years earlier, when
+Master Stoke, of Catte Hall (whose career we touched on in the second
+of these sketches), deserted his lessons.  It was when he was thus
+sconced that Johnson made that reply which Boswell preserves "as a
+specimen of the antithetical character of his wit"--"Sir, you have
+sconced me twopence for non-attendance on a lecture not worth a
+penny."
+
+Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in
+degree.  "A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some
+discontent, cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his
+College sent his servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five
+shillings; and," says the Doctor, "tell him that the next time he
+cuts his throat I'll sconce him ten!"  This prosaic punishment might
+perhaps deter some Werthers from playing with edged tools.
+
+From Boswell's meagre account of Johnson's Oxford career we gather
+some facts which supplement the description of Gibbon.  The future
+historian went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson
+departed without taking his degree.  Gibbon was a gentleman commoner,
+and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just
+as he pleased.  He "eloped," as he says, from Oxford, as often as he
+chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of
+"the Manly Oxonian in London."  The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a
+revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to 30,000
+pounds, took no interest in their pupils.  Gibbon's tutor read a few
+Latin plays with his pupil, in a style of dry and literal
+translation.  The other fellows, less conscientious, passed their
+lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the "Oxford Toasts," and
+drinking other toasts to the king over the water.  "Some duties,"
+says Gibbon, "may possibly have been imposed on the poor scholars,"
+but "the velvet cap was the cap of liberty," and the gentleman
+commoner consulted only his own pleasure.  Johnson was a poor
+scholar, and on him duties were imposed.  He was requested to write
+an ode on the Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks "his vivacity and
+imagination must have produced something fine."  He neglected,
+however, with his usual indolence, this opportunity of producing
+something fine.  Another exercise imposed on the poor was the
+translation of Mr. Pope's "Messiah," in which the young Pembroke man
+succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope's own generous confession, future
+ages would doubt whether the English or the Latin piece was the
+original.  Johnson complained that no man could be properly inspired
+by the Pembroke "coll," or college beer, which was then commonly
+drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of
+collecting Chinese monsters.
+
+
+Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetae
+Ingenium jubeas purior baustus alat.
+
+
+In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the "bitterness mistaken
+for frolic," with which Johnson entertained the other undergraduates
+round Pembroke gate, he never ceased to respect his college.  "His
+love and regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last," while of
+his old tutor he said, "a man who becomes Jorden's pupil becomes his
+son."  Gibbon's sneer is a foil to Johnson's kindliness.  "I applaud
+the filial piety which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To
+the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she will
+as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her
+for a mother."
+
+Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to
+judge by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the
+eighteenth century was excessively rough.  Manners were rather
+primitive:  a big fire burned in the centre of Balliol Hall, and
+round this fire, one night in every year, it is said that all the
+world was welcome to a feast of ale and bread and cheese.  Every
+guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling a story; and one can
+fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality.  "What learning
+can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil
+behaviour?" says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746)
+Southey has made some extracts.  The diarist was a Puritan of the old
+leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson's period, and who
+speaks of "a power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly
+prevailing in that place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God .
+. . In this wicked place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and
+unruly rabble, and most mischievous."  But this strange and
+unfriendly critic was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen
+showed their piety by wrecking chapels and "rabbling" ministers.  In
+our days only the Davenport Brothers and similar professors of
+strange creeds suffer from the manly piety of the undergraduates.
+
+Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish
+assailants of Alma Mater, the author of Terrae Filius was the most
+persistent.  The first little volume which contains the numbers of
+this bi-weekly periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom's
+Coffee-house, in Russell Street, Covent Garden, MDCCXXVI.) is not at
+all rare, and is well worth a desultory reading.  What strikes one
+most in Terrae Filius is the religious discontent of the bilious
+author.  One thinks, foolishly of course, of even Georgian Whigs as
+orthodox men, at least in their undergraduate days.  The mere aspect
+of Mr. Leslie Stephen's work on the philosophers of the eighteenth
+century is enough to banish this pleasing delusion.  The Deists and
+Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson's day among the
+undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery, was unpopular, and
+might be punished.  Johnson says, that when he was a boy he was a lax
+TALKER, rather than a lax THINKER, against religion; "but lax talking
+against religion at Oxford would not be suffered."  The author of
+Terrae Filius, however, never omits a chance of sneering at our
+faith, and at the Church of England as by law established.  In his
+description of the exercises of the Club of Wits, only one
+respectably clever epigram is quoted, beginning, -
+
+
+"Since in religion all men disagree,
+And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three."
+
+
+This production "was voted heretical," and burned by the hands of the
+small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled.  In the author's
+advice to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these
+rudimentary creatures.  The chrysalis, as described by the preacher
+of a University sermon, "never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of
+being a butterfly"; but the public schoolboy of the last century
+sometimes came up in what he conceived to be gorgeous attire.  "I
+observe, in the first place, that you no sooner shake off the
+authority of the birch but you affect to distinguish yourselves from
+your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a
+new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword."  As soon as they arrived in
+Oxford, these youths were hospitably received "amongst a parcel of
+honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in honour and
+common civility, to make you DAMNABLE DRUNK, and carry you, as they
+call it, a CORPSE to bed."  When this period of jollity is ended, the
+freshman must declare his views.  He must see that he is in the
+fashion; "and let your declarations be, that you are CHURCHMEN, and
+that you believe as the CHURCH believes.  For instance, you have
+subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the
+sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses;
+so many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and
+no TRUE CHURCHMAN in that which the words bear, and in that which
+they were written."
+
+This is pretty plain speaking, and Terrae Filius enforces, by an
+historical example, the dangers of even political freethought.  In
+1714 the Constitution Club kept King George's birthday.  The
+Constitutional Party was then the name which the Whigs took to
+themselves, though, thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories
+have fallen back upon the same.  The Conservative undergraduates
+attacked the club, sallying forth from their Jacobite stronghold in
+Brasenose (as seen in our illustration), where the "silly statue," as
+Hearne calls it, was about that time erected.  The Whigs took refuge
+in Oriel, the Tories assaulted the gates, and an Oriel man, firing
+out of his window, wounded a gownsman of Brasenose.  The Tories,
+"under terror of this dangerous and unexpected resistance, retreated
+from Oriel."  Yet such was the academic strength of the Jacobites and
+the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a "Constitutioner," could
+scarcely take his degree.
+
+Terrae Filius, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed,
+dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the
+Puritan's report about the bad manners of the undergraduates.  Yet
+Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of
+the fair.  Terrae Filius thus describes a "smart," as these dandies
+were called--Mr. Frippery:
+
+
+"He is one of those who come in their academical undress, every
+morning between ten and eleven, to Lyne's Coffee-house; after which
+he takes a turn or two upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst
+the dull REGULARS are at dinner in their hall, according to statute;
+about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled chicken or some
+pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour at least to dress
+in, to make his afternoon's appearance at Lyne's; from whence he
+adjourns to Hamilton's about five; from whence (after strutting about
+the room for a while, and drinking a dram of citron), he goes to
+chapel, to show how genteelly he dresses, and how well he can chaunt.
+After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast, and then
+waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and back again.
+He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but novels and
+romances."
+
+
+The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets
+more gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating
+men.
+
+
+"He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in
+the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long
+natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his
+waist]; a broad bully-cock'd hat, or a square cap of about twice the
+usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes.  His clothes
+lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well
+as at the wrists."
+
+
+These "smarts" cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in
+Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-
+woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn
+stockings, flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-
+cloths run with red at the bottom.
+
+After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the
+contemporary account-book of a Proctor.  In 1752 Gilbert White of
+Selborne was Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen,
+who little thought that Oxford boasted an official who was to become
+an English classic.  White paid some attention to dress, and got a
+feather-topp'd, grizzled wig from London; cost him 2 pounds, 5s.  He
+bought "mountain wine, very old and good," and had his crest engraved
+on his teaspoons, that everything might be handsome about him.  When
+he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall they ate a hundred
+pounds weight of biscuits--not, we trust, without marmalade.  "A bowl
+of rum-punch from Horsman's" cost half a crown.  Fancy a jolly
+Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in April!  Eggs
+cost a penny each, and "three oranges and a mouse-trap" ninepence.
+
+White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor "seven pounds of
+double-refined white sugar."  I like to fancy my learned friend, the
+Proctor, going to the present Vice-Chancellor's with a donation of
+white sugar!  Manners have certainly changed in the direction of
+severity.  "Share of the expense for Mr. Butcher's release" came to
+ten and sixpence.  What had Mr. Butcher been doing?  The Proctor went
+"to Blenheim with Nan," and it cost him fifteen and sixpence.
+Perhaps she was one of the "Oxford Toasts" of a contemporary satire.
+Strawberries were fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on
+November 6, White lost one shilling "at cards, in common room."  He
+went from Selborne to Oxford, "in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke";
+and he gave Jenny a "round Chinaturene."  Tea cost eight shillings a
+pound in 1752, while rum-punch was but half a crown a bowl.  White's
+highest terminal battels were but 12 pounds, though he was a
+hospitable man, and would readily treat the other Proctor to a bowl
+of punch.  It is well to remember White and Johnson when the Gibbon
+of that or any other day bewails the intellectual poverty of Oxford.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII--POETS AT OXFORD:  SHELLEY AND LANDOR
+
+
+
+At any given time a large number of poets may be found among the
+undergraduates at Oxford, and the younger dons.  It is not easy to
+say what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and
+peculiar people while they remain in residence.  The undergraduate
+poet is a not uninteresting study.  He wears his hair long, and
+divides it down the middle.  His eye is wild and wandering, and his
+manner absent, especially when he is called on to translate a piece
+of an ancient author in lecture.  He does not "read" much, in the
+technical sense of the term, but consumes all the novels that come in
+his way, and all the minor poetry.  His own verses the poet may be
+heard declaiming aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his
+neighbours have been known to break his windows with bottles, and
+then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper
+party, without interfering with the divine afflatus.  When the
+college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it to
+the Editor of the Nineteenth Century, and it returns to him after
+many days.  At last it appears in print, in College Rhymes, a
+collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or
+irregular intervals, and was never seen except in the rooms of
+contributors.  The poet also speaks at the Union, where his
+sentiments are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that
+he looks on Magna Charta as the first step on the path that leads to
+England's ruin.  As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no
+mean between Mr. Peter Taylor and King John.  He has been known to
+found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards to swallow the formulae of
+Mr. Bradlaugh.
+
+The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare with his
+dons.  He cannot conform himself to pedantic rules, which demand his
+return to college before midnight.  Though often the possessor of a
+sweet vein of clerical and Kebleian verse, the poet does not
+willingly attend chapel; for indeed, as he sits up all night, it is
+cruel to expect him to arise before noon.  About the poet's late
+habits a story is told, which seems authentic.  A remarkable and
+famous contemporary singer was known to his fellow-undergraduates
+only by this circumstance, that his melodious voice was heard
+declaiming anapaests all through the ambrosial night.  When the voice
+of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the silence.
+This noise was produced by the bard's Scotch friend and critic in
+knocking the ashes out of his pipe.  These feasts of reason are
+almost incompatible with the early devotion which, strangely enough,
+Shelley found time and inclination to attend.
+
+Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might break
+the decalogue and the laws of man in every direction with safety and
+the approval of the dons, if you only went regularly to chapel.  As
+the poet cannot do this (unless he is a "sleepless man"), his
+existence is a long struggle with the fellows and tutors of his
+college.  The manners of poets vary, of course, with the tastes of
+succeeding generations.  I have heard of two (Thyrsis and Corydon)
+"who lived in Oxford as if it were a large country-house."
+
+Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is invidiously
+said that they build shrines to Blue China and other ceramic
+abominations of the Philistine, and worship the same in their rooms.
+Of this sort it is not the moment to speak.  Time has not proved
+them.  But the old poets of ten years ago lived a militant life; they
+rarely took good classes (though they competed industriously for the
+Newdigate, writing in the metre of Dolores), and it not uncommonly
+happened that they left Oxford without degrees.  They were often very
+agreeable fellows, as long as one was in no way responsible for them;
+but it was almost impossible--human nature being what it is--that
+they should be much appreciated by tutors, proctors, and heads of
+houses.  How could these worthy, learned, and often kind and
+courteous persons know when they were dealing with a lad of genius,
+and when they had to do with an affected and pretentious donkey?
+
+These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a consideration of
+the existence of Shelley and Landor at Oxford--the Oxford of 1793-
+1810.  Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must
+be said that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing
+more or less than the ordinary Oxford poet, of the quieter type.  In
+Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier
+specimen of the same class.  People who have to do with hundreds of
+young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to generalise.  No don,
+that was a don, could have seen Shelley or Landor as they are
+described to us without hastily classing them in the category of
+poets who would come to no good and do little credit to the college.
+Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793.  It was the dreadful year
+of the Terror, when good Englishmen hated the cruel murderers of
+kings and queens.  Landor was a good Englishman, of course, and he
+never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie
+Antoinette.  But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his own
+unpowdered hair--the Poet thus declaring himself at once in the
+regular recognised fashion.  "For a portion of the time he certainly
+read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby,
+he declined everything in the shape of competition."  (Now
+competition is the essence of modern University study.)  "Though I
+wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the
+University," says Landor, "I could never be persuaded by my tutor or
+friends to contend for any prize whatever."  The pleasantest and most
+profitable hours that Landor could remember at Oxford "were passed
+with Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the half-hidden Cherwell."
+Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and most profitable that
+any of us pass at Oxford.  The one duty which that University, by
+virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is the assembling of
+young men together from all over England, and giving them three years
+of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes which
+are classical and peaceful.  For these hours, the most fruitful of
+our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives;
+that is, as long as life and memory remain with us.  And, "if
+anything endure, if hope there be," our conscious existence in the
+after-world would ask for no better companions than those who walked
+with us by the Isis and the Cherwell.
+
+Landor called himself "a Jacobin," though his own letters show that
+he was as far as the most insolent young "tuft" from relishing
+doctrines of human equality.  He had the reputation, however, of
+being not only a Jacobin, but "a mad Jacobin"; too mad for Southey,
+who was then young, and a Liberal.  "Landor was obliged to leave the
+University for shooting at one of the Fellows through a window," is
+the account which Southey gave of Landor's rustication.  Now fellows
+often put up with a great deal of horse-play.  There is scarcely a
+more touching story than that of the don who for the first time found
+himself "screwed up," and fastened within his own oak.  "What am I to
+do?" the victim asked his sympathising scout, who was on the other,
+the free side of the oak.  "Well, sir, Mr. Muff, sir, when 'e's
+screwed up 'e sends for the blacksmith," replied the servant.  What a
+position for a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of
+sending for the blacksmith!  Fellows have not very unfrequently been
+fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with soda-water bottles
+full of gunpowder.  One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol
+windows on the Martyrs' Memorial of our illustration.  In this case,
+too, the sportsman was a poet.  But deliberately to pot at a fellow,
+"to go for him with a shot gun," as the repentant American said he
+would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a
+strong measure.  No college which pretended to maintain discipline
+could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly.  In truth, Landor's
+offence has been exaggerated by Southey.  It was nothing out of the
+common.  The poet was giving "an after-dinner party" in his rooms.
+The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he
+says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity.  On
+the opposite side of the quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds,
+was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls "servitors and
+other raff of every description."  The guests at the rival wine-
+parties began to "row" each other, Landor says, adding, "All the time
+I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any
+conversation with them, particularly out of a window.  But my gun was
+lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back closet some little
+shot.  I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the
+shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley.  It was thought a
+good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired."  Mr.
+Leeds very superfluously complained to the President.  Landor adopted
+the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this
+poet parted company.
+
+It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a
+boyish escapade.  A copious literature is engaged with the subject of
+Shelley's expulsion.  As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his
+delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford
+was a typical one.  There are in every generation youths like him, in
+unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of
+course, in genius.  The divine spark has not touched them, but they,
+like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed.  As
+Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while,
+did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and
+truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810.  The University has
+changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better.  Perhaps that
+old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of
+such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley.  When his Eton friends
+asked him whether he still meant to be "the Atheist," that is, the
+rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities
+were civil, and left him alone."  Let us remember this when the
+learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley "an
+Atheist."  Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left
+too much alone.  But who could have safely advised or securely guided
+Shelley?
+
+Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading
+goes, than perhaps they like--certainly much more than Shelley would
+have liked.  But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is
+it not plain that no OFFICIAL interference can be of real value?
+Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors
+and pupils.  There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and
+with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that they become
+the friends of generation after generation of freshmen.  This is
+fortunate; but who can wonder that middle-aged men, seeing the
+generations succeed and resemble each other, lose their powers of
+understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast
+at once on their own resources?  One has occasionally heard clever
+men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that their
+hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped
+them to unpack.  And it is true that modern education, when it meets
+the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the
+minds of men.  To put it shortly, clever students have to go through
+their age of Sturm und Drang, and they are sometimes disappointed
+when older people, their tutors, for example, do not help them to
+weather the storm.  It is a tempest in which every one must steer for
+himself, after all; and Shelley "was borne darkly, fearfully afar,"
+into unplumbed seas of thought and experience.  When Mr. Hogg
+complains that his friend was too much left to himself to study and
+think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have helped
+Shelley.  He was better at Oxford without his old Dr. Lind, "with
+whom he used to curse George III. after tea."
+
+There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than
+those which tell the story of Shelley at Oxford.  We see him entering
+the hall of University College--a tall, shy stripling, bronzed with
+the September sun, with long elf-locks.  He takes his seat by a
+stranger, and in a moment holds him spell-bound, while he talks of
+Plato, and Goethe, and Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek
+philosophy.  Mr. Hogg draws a curious sketch of Shelley at work in
+his rooms, where seven-shilling pieces were being dissolved in acid
+in the teacups, where there was a great hole in the floor that the
+poet had burned with his chemicals.  The one-eyed scout, "the
+Arimaspian," must have had a time of tribulation (being a
+conscientious and fatherly man) with this odd master.  How
+characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to
+science, to declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not
+literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and then to leave
+a lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that "stones are
+dull things after all!"  Not less Shelleyan was the adventure on
+Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which
+Oxford, with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the
+Arabian Nights--a town of palaces and princesses, rather than of
+proctors.
+
+
+"One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that
+the usual hour of exercise passed away unperceived:  we sallied forth
+hastily to take the air for half-an-hour before dinner.  In the
+middle of Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms.
+Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our conduct in a life
+that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the
+present, according to the established usages of society, in that
+fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century.
+With abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child.  The mother, who
+might well fear that it was about to be thrown over the parapet of
+the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long
+train.
+
+""Will your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, Madam?" he
+asked, in a piercing voice, and with a wistful look."
+
+
+Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life of the
+Scholar Gipsy.  In Mr. Arnold's poem, which has made permanent for
+all time the charm, the sentiment of Oxfordshire scenery, the poet
+seems to be following the track of Shelley.  In Mr. Hogg's memoirs we
+hear little of summer; it seems always to have been in winter that
+the friends took their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in
+talk, his inspiration.  One thinks of him
+
+
+"in winter, on the causeway chill,
+Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,"
+
+
+returning to the supper in Hogg's rooms, to the curious desultory
+meals, the talk, and the deep slumber by the roaring fire, the small
+head lying perilously near the flames.  One would not linger here
+over the absurd injustice of his expulsion from the University.  It
+is pleasant to know, on Mr. Hogg's testimony, that "residence at
+Oxford was exceedingly delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts
+most beneficial."  At Oxford, at least, he seems to have been happy,
+he who so rarely knew happiness, and who, if he made another suffer,
+himself suffered so much for others.  The memory of Shelley has
+deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford.  Thinking of him in his
+glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we not say, with the
+shepherd in Theocritus, of the divine singer:
+
+[Greek verse which cannot be reproduced]
+
+"Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living,
+how gladly on the hills would I have herded thy pretty she-goats, and
+listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pine-trees lying,
+didst sweetly sing, divine Comatas!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX--A GENERAL VIEW
+
+
+
+We have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now,
+perhaps, we may regard it, like our artist, as a whole, and take a
+bird's-eye view of its present condition.  We may ask St. Bernard's
+question, WHITHER HAST THOU COME? a question to which there are so
+many answers readily given, from within and without the University.
+It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character,
+from that which has all along been its own.  We shall have considered
+Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the University
+has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of
+English intellectual life.  At Oxford the men have been thinking what
+England was to think a few months later, and they have been thinking
+with the passion and the energy of youth.  The impulse to thought has
+not, perhaps, very often been given by any mind or minds within the
+college walls; it has come from without--from Italy, from France,
+from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a
+wandering preacher.  Whencesoever the leaven came, Oxford (being so
+small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and
+promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual,
+throughout England.
+
+It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the
+questions that move the people most, have always been religious, or
+deeply tinctured with religion.  Conservative as Oxford is, the home
+of "impossible causes," she has always given asylum to new doctrines,
+to all the thoughts which comfortable people call "dangerous."  We
+have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died,
+perhaps, till its eager protest against the sacerdotal ideal was
+fused into the fire of the Reformation.  Oxford was literally
+devastated by that movement, and by the Catholic reaction, and then
+was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and
+of Tory Anglicanism.  The latter had scarcely had time to win the
+victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of port, when
+Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and
+fond of repose.  The revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley's time was
+comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with religion; or,
+at least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen
+were accustomed.  Between the era of the Revolution and our own day,
+two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept
+over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so,
+like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking much more tranquil than
+it really is.
+
+The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious
+disturbances to which we refer, and much the most powerful.
+
+It is curious to read about that movement in the Apologia, for
+example, of Cardinal Newman.  On what singular topics men's minds
+were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools
+agitated them as they walked round Christ Church meadows!  They
+enlightened each other on things transcendental, yet material, on
+matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, unspeakable.  It is as
+if they "spoke with tongues," which had a meaning then, and for them,
+but which to us, some forty years later, seem as meaningless as the
+inscriptions of Easter Island.
+
+This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in which
+the great Romantic reaction laid hold on England and Oxford.  The
+father of all the revival of old doctrines and old rituals in our
+Church, the originator of that wistful return to things beautiful and
+long dead, was--Walter Scott.  Without him, and his wonderful wand
+which made the dry bones of history live, England and France would
+not have known this picturesque reaction.  The stir in these two
+countries was curiously characteristic of their genius.  In France it
+put on, in the first place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting,
+sculpture.  Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and bore fruit for ten
+years.  The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe,
+who was the Newman of France, was himself unable to remain within the
+fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins.  In England,
+and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was
+promptly transmuted into religion.  Doctrines which men thought dead
+were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, but
+the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the whole religious force which
+has transformed and revivified the Church of England.  That force is
+still working, it need hardly be said, in the University of to-day,
+under conditions much changed, but not without thrills of the old
+volcanic energy.
+
+Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully
+agitating of intellectual forces in Oxford about 1845.  A new current
+came in from Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural
+tide of reaction began to run very strong.  If we had the apologiae
+of the men who thought most, about the time when Clough was an
+undergraduate, we should see that the influence of the Anglican
+divines had become a thing of sentiment and curiosity.  The life had
+not died out of it, but the people whom it could permanently affect
+were now limited in number and easily recognisable.  This form of
+religion might tempt and attract the strongest men for a while, but
+it certainly would not retain them.  It is by this time a matter of
+history, though we are speaking of our contemporaries, that the abyss
+between the Lives of the English Saints, and the Nemesis of Faith,
+was narrow, and easily crossed.  There was in Oxford that enthusiasm
+for certain German ideas which had previously been felt for medieval
+ideas.  Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion was the
+ruling power; and people believed in Liberalism.  What is, or used to
+be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of some ten or fifteen
+years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford.  The Essays and Reviews
+were what the Tracts had been; and Homeric battles were fought over
+the income of the Regius Professor of Greek.  When that affair was
+settled Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single
+dominant intellectual force; but the old storms, slowly subsiding,
+left the ship of the University lurching and rolling in a heavy
+swell.
+
+People believed in Liberalism!  Their faith worked miracles; and the
+great University Commission performed many wonderful works, bidding
+close fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of
+Examiners.  Their dispensation still survives; the large examining-
+machine works night and day, in term time and vacation, and yet we
+are not happy.  The age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the
+age of collapsed opinions.  Never men believed more fervidly in any
+revelation than the men of twenty years ago believed in political
+economy, free trade, open competition, and the reign of Common-sense
+and of Mr. Cobden.  Where is that faith now?  Many of the middle-aged
+disciples of the Church of Common-sense are still in our midst.  They
+say the old sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it
+seems that scepticism is abroad; it seems that the world is wider
+than their system.  Not even open examinations for fellowships and
+scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the
+Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art, have made Oxford that
+ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like the
+New Jerusalem.
+
+We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have
+not learned that it is an eminently discontented place.  There is
+room in colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontent--the
+ignoble, which is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble,
+which is the unassuaged thirst for perfection.  The present result of
+the last forty years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly
+trying to improve the working, and to widen the intellectual
+influence, of the University.  There are more ways than one in which
+this feeling gets vent.  The simplest, and perhaps the most honest
+and worthy impulse, is that which makes the best of the present
+arrangements.  Great religious excitement and religious discussion
+being in abeyance, for once, the energy of the place goes out in
+teaching.  The last reforms have made Oxford a huge collection of
+schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy, philology,
+scholarship, theology, and almost everything in the world but
+archaeology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour.
+The hardest worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and
+almost all tutors are conscientious.  The professors being an
+ornamental, but (with few exceptions) MERELY ornamental, order of
+beings, the tutors have to do the work of a University, which, for
+the moment, is a teaching-machine.  They deliver I know not how many
+sets of lectures a year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full
+acquaintance with the latest ideas of French, German, and Italian
+scholars.  No one can afford, or is willing, to lag behind; every one
+is "gladly learning," like Chaucer's clerk, as well as earnestly
+teaching.  The knowledge and the industry of these gentlemen is a
+perpetual marvel to the "bellelettristic trifler."  New studies, like
+that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental tongues, have sprung up
+during recent years, have grown into strength and completeness.  It
+is unnecessary to say, perhaps, that these facts dispose of the
+popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation.  During the more
+part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must be toiling
+after the great mundane movement in learning.  He must be acquiring
+the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham
+characters and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek inscriptions
+and the origins of Roman history, in addition to reading the familiar
+classics by the light of the latest commentaries.
+
+What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours?
+The answer is the secret of University discontent.  All this
+accumulated knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in
+lectures, is caught up in note-books, and is poured out, with a
+difference, in examinations.  There is not an amount of original
+literary work produced by the University which bears any due
+proportion to the solid materials accumulated.  It is just the
+reverse of Falstaff's case--but one halfpenny-worth of sack to an
+intolerable deal of bread; but a drop of the spirit of learning to
+cart-loads of painfully acquired knowledge.  The time and energy of
+men is occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing, and then in eternal
+examinations.  Even if the results are satisfactory on the whole,
+even if a hundred well-equipped young men are turned out of the
+examining-machine every year, these arrangements certainly curb
+individual ambition.  If a resident in Oxford is to make an income
+that seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and
+primers, till he is grey, and till the energy that might have added
+something new and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has
+departed.
+
+This state of things has produced the demand for the "Endowment of
+Research."  It is not necessary to go into that controversy.
+Englishmen, as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice.  They
+would rather endow a theatre than a Gelehrter, if endow something
+they must.  They have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if
+useless beings, the heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to
+abolish if Researchers were to get the few tens of thousands they
+require.  Finally, it is asked whether the learned might not find
+great endowment in economy; for it is a fact that a Frenchman, a
+German, or an Italian will "research" for life on no larger income
+than a simple fellowship bestows.
+
+The great obstacle to this "plain living" is perhaps to be found in
+the traditional hospitality of Oxford.  All her doors are open, and
+every stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the
+"discreet housewife" in Homer -
+
+
+[Greek text which cannot be reproduced]
+
+
+In some languages the same word serves for "stranger" and "enemy,"
+but in the Oxford dialect "stranger" and "guest" are synonymous.
+Such is the custom of the place, and it does not make plain living
+very easy.  Some critics will be anxious here to attack the
+"aesthetic" movement.  One will be expected to say that, after the
+ideas of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those
+of the wicked, the extravagant, the effeminate, the immoral "Blue
+China School."  Perhaps there is something in this, but sermons on
+the subject are rather luxuries than necessaries in the present
+didactic mood of the Press.  "They were friends of ours, moreover,"
+as Aristotle says, "who brought these ideas in"; so the subject may
+be left with this brief notice.  As a piece of practical advice, one
+may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of Research
+that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than to
+get a subsidy from the Commission.
+
+The last important result of the "modern spirit" at Oxford, the last
+stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was the removal of the
+celibate condition from certain fellowships.  One can hardly take a
+bird's-eye view of Oxford without criticising the consequences of
+this innovation.  The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons, very
+difficult to handle.  One reason is, that the experiment has not been
+completely tried.  It is easy enough to marry on a fellowship, a
+tutorship, and a few small miscellaneous offices.  But how will it be
+when you come to forty years, or even fifty?  No materials exist
+which can be used by the social philosopher who wants an answer to
+this question.  In the meantime, the common rooms are perhaps more
+dreary than of old, in many a college, for lack of the presence of
+men now translated to another place.  As to the "society" of Oxford,
+that is, no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used
+to be in the days when Tony Wood was the surly champion of celibacy.
+
+Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that
+would once have seemed almost feverish, a highly conscientious
+industry, doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely
+certain that it is not neglecting nobler tasks.  Perhaps Oxford has
+never been more busy with its own work, never less distracted by
+religious politics.  If we are to look for a less happy sign, we
+shall find it in the tendency to run up "new buildings."  The
+colleges are landowners:  they must suffer with other owners of real
+property in the present depression; they will soon need all their
+savings.  That is one reason why they should be chary of building;
+another is, that the fellows of a college at any given moment are not
+necessarily endowed with architectural knowledge and taste.  They
+should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford for many
+centuries the uncomely mark of an unfortunate judgment.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X--UNDERGRADUATE LIFE--CONCLUSION
+
+
+
+A hundred pictures have been drawn of undergraduate life at Oxford,
+and a hundred caricatures.  Novels innumerable introduce some Oxford
+scenes.  An author generally writes his first romance soon after
+taking his degree; he writes about his own experience and his own
+memories; he mixes his ingredients at will and tints according to
+fancy.  This is one of the two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from
+the undergraduate side, are generally false.  They are either drawn
+by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises himself and his
+friends, or they are designed by ladies who have read Verdant Green,
+and who, at some period, have paid a flying visit to Cambridge.  An
+exhaustive knowledge of Verdant Green, and a hasty view of the
+Fitzwilliam Museum and "the backs of the Colleges" (which are to
+Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford sufficient
+materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford.  The picture daubed by
+the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as
+unrecognisable.  He makes himself and his friends too large, too
+noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious.
+They seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate
+figures, like the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the
+crowd of dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side
+cads.  Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances
+of years ago, in University novels.  The mildest of men suddenly pose
+as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid
+dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels
+bound round their fevered brows.  These sketches are all nonsense.
+Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write
+about them never did them.
+
+There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of
+describing undergraduate life with truth.  There are very many
+varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying
+and amusing themselves.  A steady man that reads his five or six
+hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that
+his path scarcely ever crosses that of him who belongs to the
+Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely dines in hall.  Then
+the "pale student," who is hard at work in his rooms or in the
+Bodleian all day, and who has only two friends, out-college men, with
+whom he takes walks and tea,--he sees existence in a very different
+aspect.  The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his
+club, dividing the house on questions of blotting-paper and quill
+pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place
+of Librarian, writing rubbish in the suggestion-book, to him Oxford
+is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine flower,
+the Union.  He never encounters the undergraduate who haunts
+billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry for barmaids, and
+who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled a fox-terrier
+into college in a brown-paper parcel.  There are many other species
+of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in
+manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student
+resembles the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the
+hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was
+vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who
+disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior Proctor.
+When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the land of Sitting
+Bull, he doubtless described Oxford life in his own way to the other
+Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words and the papooses played
+around.  His account would vary, in many ways, from that of
+
+
+"Whiskered Tomkins from the hail
+Of seedy Magdalene."
+
+
+And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole,
+as a more cultivated and polished undergraduate might.  Thus there
+are countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the
+University.  The scene is ever the same--boat-races and foot-ball
+matches, scouts, schools, and proctors, are common to all,--but in
+other respects the sketches must always vary, must generally be one-
+sided, and must often seem inaccurate.
+
+It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that
+are passed between the estate of the freshman and that of the
+Bachelor of Arts.  These years are spent in a kind of fairyland,
+neither quite within nor quite outside of the world.  College life is
+somewhat, as has so often been said, like the old Greek city life.
+For three years men are in the possession of what the world does not
+enjoy--leisure; and they are supposed to be using that leisure for
+the purposes of perfection.  They are making themselves and their
+characters.  We are all doing that, all the days of our lives; but at
+the Universities there is, or is expected to be, more deliberate and
+conscious effort.  Men are in a position to "try all things" before
+committing themselves to any.  Their new-found freedom does not
+merely consist in the right to poke their own fires, order their own
+breakfasts, and use their own cheque-books.  These things, which make
+so much impression on the mind at first, are only the outward signs
+of freedom.  The boy who has just left school, and the thoughtless
+life of routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst of
+books, of thought, and discussion.  He has time to look at all the
+common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind
+hurriedly, nor pledge himself to anything.  He can flirt with young
+opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen
+Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human
+thought.  Here first he meets Metaphysics, and perhaps falls in love
+with that enchantress, "who sifts time with a fine large blue silk
+sieve."  There is hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a
+metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute.  Most fall away very
+early from this, their first love; and they follow Science down one
+of her many paths, or concern themselves with politics, and take a
+side which, as a rule, is the opposite of that to which they
+afterwards adhere.  Thus your Christian Socialist becomes a Court
+preacher, and puts his trust in princes; the young Tory of the old
+type will lapse into membership of a School Board.  It is the time of
+liberty, and of intellectual attachments too fierce to last long.
+
+Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more
+attractive, than politics, and science, art, and pure metaphysics.
+The years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the
+enigmas of religion present themselves.  They bring their boyish
+faith into a place (if one may quote Pantagruel's voyage once more)
+like the Isle of the Macraeones.  On that mournful island were
+confusedly heaped the ruins of altars, fanes, temples, shrines,
+sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs.  Through
+the ruins wandered, now and again, the half-articulate words of the
+Oracle, telling how Pan was dead.  Oxford, like the Isle of the
+Macraeones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philosophies, decrepit
+religions, forlorn beliefs.  The modern system of study takes the
+pupil through all the philosophic and many of the religious systems
+of belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been
+fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a day.  You are taught
+to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of
+thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by
+assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time.  This
+is not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern
+University education.  But no man can think of his own University
+days, or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls
+and rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how
+religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the colleges.  And
+it is fair to say that, for this, no set of teachers or tutors is
+responsible.  It is the modern historical spirit that must be blamed,
+that too clear-sighted vision which we are all condemned to share of
+the past of the race.  We are compelled to look back on old
+philosophies, on India, Athens, Alexandria, and on the schools of men
+who thought so hard within our own ancient walls.  We are compelled
+to see that their systems were only plausible, that their truths were
+but half-truths.  It is the long vista of failure thus revealed which
+suggests these doubts that weary, and torture, and embitter the
+naturally happy life of discussion, amusement, friendship, sport, and
+study.  These doubts, after all, dwell on the threshold of modern
+existence, and on the threshold--namely, at the Universities--men
+subdue them, or evade them.
+
+The amusements of the University have been so often described that
+little need be said of them here.  Unhealthy as the site of Oxford
+is, the place is rather fortunately disposed for athletic purposes.
+The river is the chief feature in the scenery, and in the life of
+amusement.  From the first day of term, in October, it is crowded
+with every sort of craft.  The freshman admires the golden colouring
+of the woods and Magdalen tower rising, silvery, through the blue
+autumnal haze.  As soon as he appears on the river, his weight,
+strength, and "form" are estimated.  He soon finds himself pulling in
+a college "challenge four," under the severe eye of a senior cox, and
+by the middle of December he has rowed his first race, and is
+regularly entered for a serious vocation.  The thorough-going
+boating-man is the creature of habit.  Every day, at the same hour,
+after a judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels, making for the
+barge.  He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair, or a four-oar, or to a
+steeplechase through the hedges when Oxford, as in our illustration,
+is under water.  The illustration represents Merton, and the writer
+recognises his old rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr. Ruskin
+denounced.  Chief of all the boating-man goes out in an eight, and
+rows down to Iffley, with the beautiful old mill and Norman church,
+or accomplishes "the long course."  He rows up again, lounges in the
+barge, rows down again (if he has only pulled over the short course),
+and goes back to dinner in hall.  The table where men sit who are in
+training is a noisy table, and the athletes verge on "bear-fighting"
+even in hall.  A statistician might compute how many steaks, chops,
+pots of beer, and of marmalade, an orthodox man will consume in the
+course of three years.  He will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the
+monotony of boating shop, boating society, and broad-blown boating
+jokes.  But this appears to be a harmless affectation.  The old
+breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the honest boating slang, will always
+have an attraction for him.  The summer term will lose its delight
+when the May races are over.  Boating-men are the salt of the
+University, so steady, so well disciplined, so good-tempered are
+they.  The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for
+their college, or their University; not like running--men, who run,
+as it were, each for his own hand.  Whatever may be his work in life,
+a boating-man will stick to it.  His favourite sport is not
+expensive, and nothing can possibly be less luxurious.  He is often a
+reading man, though it may be doubted whether "he who runs may read"
+as a rule.  Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and Strangers'
+cups are, or lately were, given with injudicious generosity.  To the
+artist's eye, however, few sights in modern life are more graceful
+than the University quarter-of-a-mile race.  Nowhere else, perhaps,
+do you see figures so full of a Hellenic grace and swiftness.
+
+The cream of University life is the first summer term.  Debts, as
+yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast their shadow over
+the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one
+o'clock.  There are so many things to do, -
+
+
+"When wickets are bowled and defended,
+When Isis is glad with the eights,
+When music and sunset are blended,
+When Youth and the Summer are mates,
+When freshmen are heedless of "Greats,"
+When note-books are scribbled with rhyme,
+Ah! these are the hours that one rates
+Sweet hours, and the fleetest of Time!"
+
+
+There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to
+Cowley.  There is the beautiful scenery of the "stripling Thames" to
+explore; the haunts of the immortal "Scholar Gipsy," and of Shelley,
+and of Clough's Piper, who -
+
+
+"Went in his youth and the sunshine rejoicing, to Nuneham and
+Godstowe."
+
+
+Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight
+and amuse in Oxford. {2}  What day can be happier than that of which
+the morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a
+"commonising" with a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the
+afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above
+Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and
+splashing?  Then there is supper in the cool halls, darkling, and
+half-lit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the
+elms, and the roofs and the chapel spire look unfamiliar in the blue
+of dawn.  How long the days were then! almost like the days of
+childhood; how distinct is the impression all experience used to
+make!  In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college staircase,
+and the "oak" which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor.
+She comes in many a shape--as debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and
+often she comes as bereavement.  Life and her claims wax importunate;
+to many men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all
+proportion to the real importance of academic success.  We cannot see
+things as they are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if
+pleasures are more keen then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more
+desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in later years, when we have
+known and survived a good deal of the worst of mortal experience.
+Often on men still in their pupilage the weight of the first
+misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of Dame Fortune's whip is
+the most poignant.  We cannot recover the first summer term; but it
+has passed into ourselves and our memories, into which Oxford, with
+her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass.  He is not to be
+envied who has known and does not love her.  Where her children have
+quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers.  They have chosen
+the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in her
+grace and charm.  These are crowded and hustled out of modern life;
+the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving
+still, at the Universities, peace, beauty, and leisure.
+
+If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been
+spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who would make Oxford cease to be
+herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+{1}  Poems by Ernest Myers.  London, 1877.
+
+{2}  A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in
+the Cornhill for September 1879.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Oxford[City/Univ], by Andrew Lang
+
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