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diff --git a/2444-0.txt b/2444-0.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..763b7a3 --- /dev/null +++ b/2444-0.txt @@ -0,0 +1,3390 @@ +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. + + + + +***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD*** + + +******* This file should be named 2444-0.txt or 2444-0.zip ******* + + +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: +http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/2/4/4/2444 + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will +be renamed. + +Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright +law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, +so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United +States without permission and without paying copyright +royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part +of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm +concept and trademark. 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