OXFORD 
 
MAGDALEN 
 TOWER. 
 
OXFORD 
 
 3Brief Ibistorical an& descriptive Wotes 
 
 BY 
 
 ANDREW LANG, M.A. 
 
 SOMETIME FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 NEW EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED 
 
 38 GREAT RUSSELL STREET 
 1909 
 
V-3 
 
 
 -^ :..-.-. 
 
 ,* 
 
 ^ 
 
 V 
 
TO 
 
 A. M. LEE 
 
 330179 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 HPHESE 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 
 
x Preface. 
 
 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 Jo/in-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 
 
Preface. xi 
 
 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. 
 
 i. 
 
 THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY , . i 
 
 II. 
 
 THE EARLY STUDENTS. A DAY WITH A MEDI- 
 EVAL UNDERGRADUATE . 39 
 
 III. 
 THE RENAISSANCE AND THE REFORMATION . 73 
 
 IV. 
 JACOBEAN OXFORD ...... 103 
 
 v, 
 SOME SCHOLARS OF THE RESTORATION . 139 
 
 VI. 
 
 HIGH TORY OXFORD. . * . , , .163 
 
xiv Contents. 
 
 VII. 
 GEORGIAN OXFORD 189 
 
 VIII. 
 POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR . 213 
 
 IX. 
 A GENERAL VIEW ...... 235 
 
 X. 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. CONCLUSION , . 25 ^ 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 MAGDALEN TOWER AND BRIDGE . . Frontispiece. 
 
 GODSTOWE Page 7 
 
 GENERAL VIEW OF OXFORD . . . . . u 
 FOLLY BRIDGE . 17 
 
 OXFORD CASTLE , . .21 
 
 BOCARDO, DESTROYED IN 1771 . <, . 27 
 
 BOCARDO, NORTH SIDE 31 
 
 Isis AND OXFORD CANAL . . . . . .35 
 
 MUNIMENT ROOM, MERTON COLLEGE ... 47 
 MAGDALEN TOWER FROM CHRIST CHURCH MEADOWS 5 1 
 STONE PULPIT AT MAGDALEN COLLEGE . . 55 
 
 CLOISTERS AT MAGDALEN COLLEGE 59 
 
 HIGH STREET 65 
 
 OLD HOUSES IN CASTLE STREET .... 77 
 STAIRCASE TO THE HALL AT CHRIST CHURCH . 85 
 
 NICHES AT ORIEL 89 
 
 ORIEL STREET . . .- . . . .97 
 
 IFFLEY 107 
 
 OXFORD SPIRES FROM IFFLEY 111 
 
 GATEWAY OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE . . . .115 
 
xvi List of Illustrations. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 THE GARDEN FRONT OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE . 121 
 A SUMMER AFTERNOON ON THE CHERWELL . .125 
 
 ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE 129 
 
 PORCH OF ST. MARY'S 135 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH MEADOWS FROM THE RIVER . 143 
 
 NEW COLLEGE 171 
 
 THE RIVER AT BINSEY 181 
 
 MERTON COLLEGE 185 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH j95 
 
 BRAZENOSE COLLEGE. ...... 205 
 
 THE CANAL FERRY 209 
 
 MARTYRS' MEMORIAL 225 
 
 IN THE GARDEN OF WORCESTER COLLEGE . . 228 
 
 OLD EPISCOPAL PALACE 241 
 
 ON THE UPPER RIVER 257 
 
 THE START FROM IFFLEY 261 
 
 THE EIGHTS FROM FOLLY BRIDGE .... 265 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY BOATHOUSE 269 
 
 FLOODS AT OXFORD 275 
 
 IFFLEY MILL 279 
 
I 
 
 THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY. 
 
OXFORD. 
 
 M 
 
 I 
 
 The Town before the University. 
 
 OST 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 genera- 
 tion 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 
 
 B 2 
 
4 Oxford. 
 
 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 con- 
 vinced 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 
 
The Town before the University. 5 
 
 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 
 
6 Oxford. 
 
 Oxford. This home of religion and of learn- 
 ing was a home of religion from the begin- 
 ning, 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 North- 
 men, 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 con- 
 tended for. Any places of strength in Ox- 
 ford 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 pout* 
 
Q 
 O 
 
 o 
 
The Town before the University. 9 
 
 where Folly Bridge now spans the I sis. 
 Somewhere near Oxford, the roads that ran 
 towards B anbury 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 
 E ad ward 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 
 
IO Oxford. 
 
 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/' 
 
 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 to- 
 gether 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 
 

 
 I 9 
 
 - O 
 
 > to 
 
 fa X 
 
 < O O 
 
The Town before the University. 13 
 
 and wasting England. The wooden towns 
 were flaming through the night, and sending 
 up a thick smoke through the day, from 
 Thames-mouth 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 plun- 
 dering invaders was over, when the North- 
 men 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 Ox- 
 ford. 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. Prides wyde 
 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. 
 
1 4 Oxford. 
 
 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 Aethel- 
 red, "by the advice of his satraps, deter- 
 mined 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 
 Mere well to Rugslawe, fro the lawe to the 
 foule putte," and so forth. It is pleasant to 
 see how old are the familiar names " Cher- 
 well," " 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 
 
The Town before the University. 15 
 
 older days, that seem happier and better 
 ruled to men looking back on them from an 
 age of confusion and bloodshed. At Ox- 
 ford, 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 
 
1 6 Oxford. 
 
 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 supersti- 
 tions, and how he alone of English kings 
 entered the city : " Qiiod nullus rex attemp- 
 tavit a tempore Regis Algari" an error, for 
 Harold attempt avit y 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 regiam in suburbia 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 urbe quce famoso nomine Oxna- 
 
 ford nuncupatur" to quote a document of 
 
 Cnut's. (Cod. Dipl. DCCXLVI. in 1042.) 
 
The Town before the University. IQ 
 
 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 Ox- 
 ford may be distinguished. We are tempted 
 to think of a low, grey twilight above that 
 wet land suddenly lit up with fire ; of the 
 
 C 2 
 
20 Oxford. 
 
 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 w r ooden 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 with- 
 out 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 
 
OXFORD 
 CASTLE. 
 
The Town before the University. 23 
 
 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 rob- 
 beries. 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 thick- 
 ness 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 posi- 
 tion of the castle is best estimated after 
 
24 Oxford. 
 
 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 Ox- 
 ford breaking, like islands, through the sea 
 of mist that sweeps above the roofs of the 
 good town. In the old times, no move- 
 ment of the people who had their fastnesses 
 in the fens, no approach of an army from 
 any direction could have evaded the watch- 
 man. The towers guarded the fords and 
 the bridge and were themselves almost im- 
 pregnable, 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 
 
The Town before the University. 25 
 
 than the Norman buildings. Some other 
 race had chosen the castle site for its fortress 
 in times of which we know nothing. Mean- 
 while, some of the practical citizens of Ox- 
 ford 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 w r hich 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 build- 
 ings. 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 
 
26 Oxford. 
 
 are taken, by the courtesy of *the Governor, 
 to the crypt, and satisfy your archaeological 
 curiosity. The place is much lower, and 
 worse lighted, than the contemporary crypt 
 of St. Peter's-in-the-East, but not, perhaps, 
 less interesting. The square-headed capitals 
 have not been touched like some of those 
 in St. Peter's, by a later chisel. The 
 place is dank and earthy, but otherwise 
 much as Robert D'Oily left it. There is 
 an odd-looking arrangement of planks on 
 the floor. It is the new drop, which is found 
 to work very well, and gives satisfaction 
 to the persons who have to employ it. 
 Sinister the Norman castle was in its be- 
 ginning, " it w r as 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 re- 
 mains ; you enter it through ironed and 
 bolted doors, you note the prisoners at 
 their dreary exercises, and, when you have 
 
The Town before the University. 29 
 
 seen the engines of the law lying in the old 
 crypt you pass out into the place of exe- 
 cution. 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 youn^ 
 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 Wal- 
 lingford." Robert seems at firsr to have 
 
30 Oxford. 
 
 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 instru- 
 ments 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 be- 
 longed 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 them- 
 selves 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 
 
J 
 
 BOCARDO, 
 NORTH SIDE 
 
The Town before the University. 33 
 
 Lady by two brethren of Abingdon, and 
 thence carried into the very meadow he had 
 coveted, where " most nasty little boys," 
 turpissimi pueriy 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 I sis, 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 watch-tower of the city 
 wall ; and here the old north-gate, called 
 Bocardo, spanned the street. The rooms 
 above the gate were used till within quite 
 
 D 
 
34 Oxford. 
 
 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 Tessoine, 
 Enserrez souLi trappe voliere," 
 
 as a famous Paris student, Francois Villon, 
 would have called them. Of Bocardo no 
 trace remains, but St. Michael's is likely to 
 last as long as any edifice in Oxford. Our 
 illustrations represent it as it was in the last 
 century. The houses huddle up to the 
 church, and hide the lines of the tower. 
 Now it stands out clear, less picturesque 
 than it was in the time of Bocardo prison. 
 Within the last two years the windows have 
 been cleared, and the curious and most 
 archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may 
 be examined. It is worth while to climb the 
 tower and remember the times when arrows 
 were sent like hail from the narrow windows 
 on the foes who approached Oxford from 
 the north, while prayers for their confusion 
 were read in the church below, 
 
The Town before the University. 37 
 
 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 con- 
 nexion 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 (per- 
 haps 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 money- 
 lenders. As for the religious, the Brethren 
 of St. Frideswyde had lived but loosely (pro 
 libito viverunf), says William of Malmesbury, 
 and were to be superseded by regular 
 canons, under the headship of one Guimond 
 
38 Oxford. 
 
 and the patronage of the Bishop of Salis- 
 bury. Whoever goes into Christ Church 
 new buildings from the river-side, will see, 
 in the old edifice facing him, a certain bulg- 
 ing in the wall. That is the mark of the pul- 
 pit, whence a brother used to read aloud to 
 the brethren in the refectory of St. Frides- 
 wyde. 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 1 141 ("Oseney 
 Chronicle/' p. 24). 
 
II 
 
 THE EARLY STUDENTS. A DAY WITH A 
 MEDIEVAL UNDERGRADUATE. 
 
II 
 
 The Early Students. A Day with a 
 Medieval Undergraduate. 
 
 /"^XFORD, 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 his- 
 torical." For example, there is in most, per- 
 haps in all, colleges a custom called " collec- 
 tions." On the last days of term under- 
 graduates are called into the Hall, where the 
 Master and the Dean of the Chapel sit in 
 solemn state. Examination papers are set 
 
42 Oxford. 
 
 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 repre- 
 sented by italics, " Mr. Brown, the College 
 cannot hear with pleasure of such behaviour 
 on the part of a scholar. You 3S,gated y 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 (" Muni- 
 menta Academica Oxon." i. 129) in 1331 a 
 statute was passed to the effect that " every 
 
The Early Stiidents. 43 
 
 scholar shall pay at least twelve pence a-year 
 for lectures in logic, and for physics eighteen- 
 pence 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 abso- 
 lutely 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 con- 
 nected with St. Frideswyde's, just as Paris 
 
44 Oxford. 
 
 University may have had some connexion 
 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 as- 
 signed, or benefactions contributed to the 
 maintenance of scholars. Now the first re- 
 corded fine is the payment of fifty-two shil- 
 lings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of 
 
The Early Students. 45 
 
 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 hang- 
 ing of the clerks. Twenty -six years after 
 this decision of the Legate, Robert Gross- 
 teste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organized 
 the payment and distribution of the fine, and 
 founded the first of the chests, the chest of 
 St. Frideswyde. These chests were a kind 
 of Mont de Piete, and to found them was 
 at first the favourite form of benefaction. 
 Money was left in this or that chest, from 
 which students and masters would borrow, 
 on the security of pledges, which were gener- 
 ally books, cups, daggers, and so forth. 
 Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a 
 
46 Oxford. 
 
 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 Univer- 
 sity. 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 com- 
 manding 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 
 
THE 
 
 MUNIMENT ROOM, 
 
 MERTON COLLEGE 
 
The Early Students. 49 
 
 where they had once been despised, starve- 
 ling 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 Croy- 
 don'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 Hinck- 
 sey. The results have been precisely de- 
 scribed in anticipation by Homer : 
 
 r6(f)pa S'rtp* ol^ofjifvoi KtKoi/cff KtKoi>f<T(7i yry&vevv 
 dav apa TrXeoves KOL dpiovs 
 
 f 8 f)\LOS fJLTvicT(TfTO 
 
 tore 8rj KIKOVCS Mv 
 
 E 
 
50 Oxford. 
 
 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 in- 
 nocents 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 
 
The Early Students. 53 
 
 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 under- 
 graduates were with Simon de Montfort 
 against King Henry, and aided the barons 
 with a useful body of archers. The Uni- 
 versity, too, constantly withstood the Friars, 
 who had settled in Oxford on pretence of 
 wishing to convert the Jews, and had at- 
 tempted to get education into their hands. 
 " The Preaching Friars, who had lately ob- 
 tained from the Pope divers privileges, par- 
 ticularly an exemption, as theypretended, from 
 
54 Oxford. 
 
 being subject to the jurisdiction of the Uni- 
 versity, began to behave themselves very in- 
 solent 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 tribes- 
 men 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 under 
 graduates 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 in- 
 cident will be introduced for which there is 
 
THE STONE PULPIT 
 AT MAGDALEN. 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. 57 
 
 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 cen- 
 tury. 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 Hos- 
 pital of St. John then stood a foundation of 
 
58 Oxford. 
 
 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 enormi- 
 ties and crimes committed by them." The 
 Great and Little Jewries those dim,populous 
 streets behind the modern Post Office had 
 been sacked and gutted. No clerk would 
 ever again risk his soul for a fair Jewess's 
 sake, nor lose his life for his love at the hands 
 of that eminent theologian, Fulke de Breaute. 
 The beautiful tower of Merton was still al- 
 most 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, Ox- 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. 61 
 
 ford 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 discre- 
 tion should live in the house of some suffi- 
 cient 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 morn- 
 ing, 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 
 
62 Oxford. 
 
 in various statutes, is pretty well furnished. 
 His bed alone is worth not less than fifteen- 
 pence ; he has a "cofer" valued at two- 
 pence (we have plenty of those old valua 
 tions), and in his cofer are his black coat, 
 which no one would think clear 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 philosophic," 
 
 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 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. 63 
 
 washing for scholars, multa mala perpetrata 
 fuerunt" she has committed all manner of 
 crimes, and is now in the Spinning House, 
 career ata f int. 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. Lec- 
 tures 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 
 
64 Oxford. 
 
 students are allowed to sit down. From the 
 curious old seal of the University of St. 
 Andrews, however, it appears that the luxury 
 of forms was permitted, in Scotland, to all 
 but the servitors, who held the lecturer's 
 candles. The principal of Catte's is in 
 academic dress, and wears a black cape, 
 boots, and a hood. The undergraduates 
 have no distinguishing costume. After an 
 hour or two of viva voce exercises in the 
 grammar of Priscian, preparatory lecture is 
 over, and a reading man will hurry off to the 
 "schools," a set of low-roofed buildings 
 between St. Mary's and Brazenose. 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,' 1 
 stretching down School Street on either side. 
 Here the Prselectors are holding forth, and 
 all newly-made Masters of Arts are bound to 
 teach their subject regere scholas, whether 
 
o 
 
 s 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. 67 
 
 they like it or not. Our friend, Master 
 Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and 
 means to pay his fine of twopence for omit- 
 ting 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, 
 
 F 2 
 
68 Oxford. 
 
 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 ra- 
 perent cerevisiam aliorum scholarum in vico] ; 
 however, Catte's has had the best of it, and 
 there is beer in plenty. It is possible, how- 
 ever, that fish is scarce, for certain " fore- 
 stallers" (regratarii) have been buying up 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. 69 
 
 salmon and soles, and refusing to sell them 
 at less than double the proper price. On 
 the whole, however, there was 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 up-stairs 
 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 Analy- 
 tics." Stoke lounges about, in the eternal 
 fashion of undergraduates after luncheon, 
 
70 Oxford. 
 
 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 Stake's opponent 
 drew his hanger (extraxit cultellum vocatum 
 hanger e)> 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. 
 
A Medieval Undergraduate. J\ 
 
 These suppers were not voluntary enter- 
 tainments, 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 main- 
 taining 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 1'Isle, and David Kirkby unmerci- 
 fully 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." 
 
72 Oxford. 
 
 These were rough times, and it is not im- 
 probable that Stoke had a brush with the 
 Town before he got safely back to Catte's 
 Hall. The old rudeness gave way gradu- 
 ally, as the Colleges swallowed up the 
 irregular halls, and as the scholars unat- 
 tached, infando nomine Chamber- Dekyns, 
 ceased to exist. Learning, however, 
 dwindled, as Colleges increased, under 
 the clerical and reactionary rule of the 
 House of Lancaster. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE AND THE 
 REFORMATION. 
 
Ill 
 
 The Renaissance and 77ie Reformation. 
 
 \\T E have now arrived at a period in 
 the history of Oxford which is con- 
 fused 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, per- 
 haps of what is called the Renaissance. 
 The energy of delight with which Italy wel- 
 comed 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 con- 
 cerned. How did the University and the 
 Colleges prosper in that strenuous time, 
 
76 Oxford. 
 
 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 per- 
 fection ? 
 
 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 English- 
 men. It is impossible, by distributions of 
 University prizes and professorships, to 
 attract into the career of letters that propor- 
 tion 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, 
 
CASTLE 
 STREET. 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 79 
 
 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 sun- 
 shine 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 re- 
 turned, 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 litera- 
 ture, but the appearance of the Lollards. 
 The intensely practical genius of our race 
 turned, not to letters, but to questions about 
 
So Oxford. 
 
 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 origin- 
 ality, and of a rational education, were 
 destroyed. "Wyclevism did domineei 
 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 Wyclife. The University 
 " lost many of her children through the pro- 
 fession of Wyclevism." Those who re- 
 mained were often " beneficed clerks/' The 
 Friars lifted up their heads again, and Ox- 
 ford was becoming a large ecclesiastical 
 school. As the University declared to 
 Archbishop Chichele (1438), "Our noble 
 mother, that was blessed in so goodly an off- 
 spring, is all but utterly destroyed and deso- 
 late. " Presently the foreign wars and the 
 wars of the Roses drained the University of 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 8 1 
 
 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 re- 
 markable : 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 : 
 
 Q 
 
8j Oxford. 
 
 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 pre- 
 sented to Oxford by Duke Humfrey of Glou- 
 cester. 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 Leo- 
 nard the Aretine. Here, among the numer- 
 ous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and 
 Seneca, Averroes and Avicenna, " Bellum 
 Trojae cum secretis secretorum," Apuleius, 
 Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch. 
 Here, with Ovid's verses, is the Commentary 
 on Dante, and his Divine Comedy. Here, 
 rarest of all, is a Greek Dictionary, the silent 
 father of Liddel's and Scott's to be. 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 83 
 
 The most hopeful fact in the University 
 annals, after the gift of those manuscripts 
 (to which the very beauty of their illumina- 
 tions proved ruinous in Puritan times), was 
 the establishment of a printing-press at Ox- 
 ford, 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 litera- 
 ture 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, 0f St. 
 Paul's School, were about this time studying 
 in Italy, under the great Politian and Her- 
 molaus Barbarus. Oxford, which had so 
 long been in hostile communication with 
 Italy as represented by the Papal Courts, at 
 
 G 2 
 
84 Oxford. 
 
 last touched, and was thrilled by the electric 
 current of Italian civilisation. At this con- 
 juncture of affairs, who but is reminded oi 
 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 deaf to the Cure of Meudon. For 
 Oxford, as for Gargantua, " they appointed 
 a great sophister-doctor, that read him 
 Donatus, Theodoletus, and Alanus, in para- 
 bolis" Oxford spent far more than Gargan- 
 tua'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 
 
STAIRCASE 
 
 TO THE HALL, 
 
 CHRISTCHURCH. 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 87 
 
 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 Ox- 
 ford (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 bar- 
 barism." Meanwhile, .Cambridge had to hire 
 an Italian to write public speeches at twenty 
 pence each! Henry VIII. in his youth was, 
 like Francis L, 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 theo- 
 
88 Oxford. 
 
 logical aspect of letters. Between 1500 and 
 1530 Oxford was noisy with the clink of 
 masons' hammers and chisels. Brazenose, 
 Corpus, and the magnificent kitchen of Christ 
 Church, were being erected. (The beauti- 
 ful 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 Renais- 
 sance in England was rotten at the root. The- 
 ology killed it, or, at the least, breathed on it 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 91 
 
 a deadly blight. Our academic forefathers 
 " drove at practice," and saw everything with 
 the eyes of party men, and of men who recog- 
 nised 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 Miran- 
 dola, 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 
 
92 Oxford. 
 
 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 corrup- 
 tion of manners, the slavery of two hundred 
 years. Still, our practical earnestness did 
 rob Oxford of the better side of the Renais- 
 sance. 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 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 93 
 
 their prosody and philosophy, in 1531, is 
 proved by the success of Grynaeus. He 
 visited the University and carried off quan- 
 tities of MSS., chiefly Neoplatonic, on 
 which no man set any value. Yet, in 1535, 
 Layton, a Commissioner, wrote to Crom- 
 well, that he and his companions had 
 established the New Learning in the Uni- 
 versity. 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 Oxford for ever, with all his blind 
 glosses. . . . And the second time we came 
 to New College w r e 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 lie 
 
94 Oxford. 
 
 said, therewith to make him sewers or blan- 
 shers, to keep the deer within his w r ood, 
 thereby to have the better cry with his 
 hounds." Ah ! if the University Com- 
 missioners would only set Aristotle, and 
 Messrs. Ritter and Preller, "in Bocardo," 
 many a young gentleman out of Bucking- 
 hamshire and other counties would joyously 
 help in the good work, and use the pages, if 
 not for blanshers, for other sportive pur- 
 poses ! 
 
 " Habent siia 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 ruth- 
 less 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 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 95 
 
 were thought sufficient to be destroyed, be- 
 cause accounted Papish or diabolical, or 
 both." A cart-load of MSS., lucubrations of 
 the Fellows of Merton, chiefly in contro- 
 versial divinity, was taken away ; but, by 
 the good services of one Herks, a Dutch- 
 man, 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 laun- 
 dresses, as a place wherein clothes might 
 conveniently be dried. The citizens en- 
 croached on academic property. Some 
 schools were quite destroyed, and the sites 
 
96 Oxford. 
 
 converted into gardens. Few men took 
 degrees. The college plate and the jewels 
 left by pious benefactors were stolen, arfci 
 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 w r as 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 
 
g 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation. 99 
 
 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 i6th, 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 further 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 
 
ioo Oxford. 
 
 smoke from the martyrs' pile. At your feet, 
 on the top of Bocardo prison (which spanned 
 the street at the North Gate), Cranmer 
 stands manacled, watching the fiery death 
 which is soon to purge away the memory 
 of his own faults and crimes. He, too, 
 joined that " noble army of martyrs " who 
 fought all, though they knew it not, for one 
 cause the freedom of the human spirit. 
 
 It was in a night-battle that they fell, and 
 " confused was the cry of the paean," but they 
 won the victory, and we have entered into 
 the land for which they contended. When 
 we think of these martyrdoms, can we 
 w r onder 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 Eliza- 
 beth. " On the other hand, the University re- 
 covered slowly, after being " much troubled," 
 
The Renaissance and The Reformation, toi 
 
 as Wood says, " and hurried up and down by 
 the changes of religion." We get a glimpse, 
 from Wood, of the Fellows of Merton sing- 
 ing 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 ad- 
 vice, 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 salva- 
 tion." 
 
 In spite of these evil symptoms, a Greek 
 oration and plenty of Latin plays w r ere ready 
 for Queen Elizabeth when she visited Oxford 
 in 1566. The religious refugees, who had 
 
io'2 Oxford. 
 
 "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, ven- 
 tured 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 " Semi- 
 narists ") 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. 
 
IV 
 JACOBEAN OXFORD. 
 
IV 
 
 Jacobean Oxford. 
 
 / TpHE gardens of Waclham 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 ofif 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 ol 
 the ancient Augustinian priory, the stars oi 
 the yellow jasmine flower abundantly. The 
 industrious hosts of the bees have left their 
 
1 06 Oxford. 
 
 cells, to labour in this first morning of spring ; 
 the doves coo, the thrushes are noisy in the 
 trees. All breathes of the year's renewal, 
 and of the coming April ; and all that glad- 
 dens 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 com- 
 fortable. 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, 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 109 
 
 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 Holy well. 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 
 
/ 1 o Oxford. 
 
 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 Mertonthe 
 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 impos- 
 ing 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 un- 
 changed of all the colleges, there are only 
 the open pleasances, and perhaps a few ruins 
 of the Augustinian priory. St. John's lacks 
 
!SP- I 
 
 nVNf>t;_Hi', o 
 
 o 
 
 x 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 113 
 
 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 com- 
 bine 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 
 
 I 
 
ii4 Oxford. 
 
 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, espe- 
 cially when the sun shone, could behold 
 them." How characteristic of James is this 
 anecdote ! He was by no means le rot- 
 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 turn- 
 ing 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." Cer- 
 tainly the translators of the Bible were but 
 ill-advised when they compared his Majesty 
 to the rising sun in all his glory. 
 
THE GATEWAY 
 
 OF 
 
 ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 117 
 
 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, cor- 
 rupted 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 prac- 
 tised 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 
 
1 1 8 Oxford. 
 
 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, Hay dock con- 
 fessed that he was a humbug, and that he 
 had taken to preaching all night by way of 
 getting a little notoriety, and because he 
 felt himself to be " a buried man in the 
 University." 
 
 That a man should hope to get reputation 
 by preaching all night is itself a proof that 
 the University, under James, was too theo- 
 logically minded. When has it been other- 
 wise ? The religious strife of the reigns of 
 Henry VI I L, Edvard 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 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 119 
 
 " 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 litera- 
 ture, 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 
 
120 Oxford. 
 
 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 under- 
 graduates 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 be- 
 stowed 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 Can tab's 
 epigram : 
 
k 
 
 H 
 
 1 
 
 s I 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 123 
 
 " 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?' 
 1 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 
 
124 Oxford. 
 
 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 
 
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 ^.",/^i &&"$ ^^^^';'' ;l w^ 
 
 ^jpf^-^i 
 
 A\f--, * 5---T -Af 
 
 '/ .v}^ 'f% ,. fc-e.^ 1 
 
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 t:. >: J '.'',- ,;!' /^ \.%^ 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 127 
 
 weary task to read in sight of the beauty of 
 the groves of Magdalen and of St. John. 
 When Kubla Khan " a stately pleasure- 
 dome decreed," he did not mean to settle 
 students there, and to ask them for meta- 
 physical 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, " mean- 
 dering with a mazy motion/' stirs the green 
 weeds, and flashes from the mill-wheel, and 
 flows to the I sis 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 Ox- 
 ford entertained the Parliament, as six 
 hundred years before she had received the 
 Witan. There seemed something ominous 
 
128 Oxford. 
 
 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 arrange- 
 ments of the city. 
 
 Laud, the president of St. John's, became, 
 by some intrigue, Chancellor of the Uni- 
 versity. 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 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 131 
 
 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 ser- 
 mons 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 pre- 
 sidents 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 
 
 K 2 
 
132 Oxford. 
 
 wear them. Fancy sees him treasuring 
 that bright ecclesiastical raiment, Tre-rrXo* 
 irafjL7rol/a\oi, 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 mous- 
 tache, 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 be- 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 133 
 
 yond the din of theological factions. 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 in- 
 finite 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 uni- 
 versity in a less volume, whither they came 
 not so much for repose as study ; and to 
 examine and refine those grosser proposi- 
 tions, 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 manu- 
 
1 34 Oxford. 
 
 scripts. 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 tc the scandalous image 
 so he declared. In 1642 Charles asked 
 for money from the Colleges, for the pro- 
 secution of the war w r ith the Parliament. 
 The beautiful old College plate began its 
 journey to the melting-pot. On August 
 gth 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 trans- 
 ported to the top of Magdalen tower. 
 The stones were never thrown at any foe- 
 men. 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 
 
PORCH OF 
 
 ST. MARY'S. 
 
Jacobean Oxford. 137 
 
 dealt with him for figs and sugar) when the 
 Puritans wished to batter the graven 
 images on the gate. On October 2Qth 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 Parlia- 
 mentary 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 
 
138 Oxford. 
 
 (besides those of the Council), and of per- 
 sons 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 excur- 
 sions 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/ 1 
 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 build- 
 ing 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! 
 
SOME SCHOLARS OF THE 
 RESTORATION. 
 
Some Scholars oj the Restoration. 
 
 T N 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 Ox- 
 ford. In the epistles of Humphrey Prideaux, 
 
142 Oxford. 
 
 student of Christ Church, we recognise the 
 foibles of the modern University, the love of 
 gossip, the internecine criticism, the great- 
 ness of little men whom rien ne pent plaire. 
 
 Antony Wood was a scholar of a different 
 sort, of a sort that has never been very com- 
 mon 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 Uni- 
 versity. 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 Bohemia Anla, 
 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 in- 
 troduced Presbyterian Heads of Houses, and 
 sent Puritanical captains of horse, like Cap- 
 tain James Wadsworth, to hunt for " Papis- 
 tical reliques " and " massing stuffs " among 
 the property of the President of C C. C. and 
 the Dean of Ch. Ch. (1646-1648). In 1650 
 
CURISTCIIURCH MEADOWS 
 FROM THE RIVER. 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 145 
 
 he saw the Chancellorship of Oliver Crom- 
 well ; 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 con- 
 nected 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) f r 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 
 
 L 
 
1 46 Oxford. 
 
 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 " His- 
 tory and Antiquities of the University of Ox- 
 ford " into Latin. The translation gave rise 
 to a number of literary quarrels. As Dean 
 of Ch. Ch., Dr. Fell yielded to the beset- 
 ting 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 dis- 
 cern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 147 
 
 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, ard 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 printe- 
 ing house [the Sheldonian theatre], and several other 
 places." 
 
 L 2 
 
148 Oxford. 
 
 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 adver- 
 sary, 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 Ox- 
 ford 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 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 149 
 
 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 con- 
 sequently 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 be- 
 ing 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 recommenda- 
 tion, 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 " Athense Oxonienses" 
 he had written the lives of all his enemies. 
 
150 Oxford. 
 
 Wood, " being a mere scholar/' could, of 
 course, expect nothing but disrespect in a 
 place like Oxford. His younger contem- 
 porary, 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 ChristChurch 
 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 two- 
 penny manuals and penny primers! It is 
 scarcely proper that the University should at 
 once organize 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 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 151 
 
 Florus, and publish the " Marmora Oxoni- 
 ensia," which came out 1676. We must not 
 suppose, however, that Prideaux was an en- 
 thusiastic archaeologist. He did the " Mar- 
 mora" because the Dean commanded it, and 
 because educated people were at that period 
 not uninterested in Greek art. At the pre- 
 sent 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 in- 
 terred. There are the funereal stelae, with 
 their quiet expression of sorrow, of hope, of 
 resignation. The young man, on his tomb- 
 stone, 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. 
 
152 Oxford. 
 
 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."* 
 
 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 de- 
 light in the home of the just made perfect. 
 
 Even in the Schools, these scraps of Greek 
 lapidary's work seem beautiful to us, in their 
 sober and cheerful acceptance of life and 
 death. We hope, in Oxford, that the study 
 of ancient art, as well as of ancient litera- 
 ture, 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 Pri- 
 deaux'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 
 
 * Poems by Ernest Myers. London, 1877. 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 153 
 
 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 prefer- 
 ment. His taste and his ambition alike made 
 him detest the heavy beer-drinking doctors, 
 the fast " All Souls gentlemen," and the fos- 
 sils 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 under- 
 graduates. 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 
 
154 Oxford. 
 
 "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 re- 
 venge, 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/' 
 
 11 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 Uni- 
 versity, or in the country, was, of course, the 
 reaction against the godliness of Puritan 
 captains of horse. Another form of the re- 
 action is discernible in the revived High 
 Church sentiments of Prideaux, Wood, and 
 most of the students of the time. 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 155 
 
 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 Pri- 
 deaux 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 ? " 
 
156 Oxford. 
 
 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 feel- 
 ing style, that small-pox 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 un- 
 happy fellow of Merton hanged himself, the 
 doctrines of Hobbes were said to have 
 prompted him to the deed. To return to 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 157 
 
 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 confes- 
 sion, 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 
 
158 Oxford. 
 
 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 manu- 
 scripts, every Oxford man knows them, and 
 feels those temptations which seem to be in 
 the air. Oxford is a discouraging place. Col- 
 lege 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 Pri- 
 deaux's cynical letters, which is still worth 
 the attention of every young Oxford student 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 159 
 
 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 ex- 
 hausted air, in some less critical society. 
 
 Among the aversions of Humphrey 
 Prideaux, were the " gentlemen of All 
 Souls." They certainly showed extraordi- 
 nary impudence when they secretly em- 
 ployed 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 Pri- 
 deaux, "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 small-pox while still very 
 young. 
 
160 Oxford. 
 
 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 ,1500." 
 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 con- 
 troversy on "The Foundations of Hell 
 Torments shaken and removed/' He ad- 
 mits 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, 
 
Some Scholars of the Restoration. 1 6 1 
 
 Prideaux says little ; St, Mary's was suffer, 
 ing restoration, and " the old men," including 
 Wood, we may believe, " exceedingly ex- 
 claim against it." That is the way of 
 Oxford, a college is constantly rebuilding 
 amid the protests of the rest of the Uni- 
 versity. 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 Pri- 
 deaux'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." 
 
VI 
 HIGH TORY OXFORD 
 
VI 
 
 High Tory Oxford. 
 
 HPHE 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 .hem is certain at once to fall 
 heavily on the artistic reputation of Mr. 
 Burne Jones to rebuke the philosophy of 
 
1 66 Oxford. 
 
 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 ad- 
 miration of the Augustan age of our litera- 
 ture, 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, n but highly con- 
 servative, 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 " Specta- 
 tor," 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 
 
High Tory Oxford. 167 
 
 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 Examina- 
 tions, wherein, indeed, her whole Force is 
 presently expended, I make no scruple to 
 repeat the account of Mr. Henley's Ad- 
 venture : 
 
 " The Youth, according to Custom, waited on the 
 Governor of his College, to be examined. He was re- 
 ceived 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 Occa- 
 sion of his Conversion ; upon what Day of the Month 
 
1 68 Oxford. 
 
 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 1/05, 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 Indepen- 
 dent Ministers. The Dissenters had some 
 favour at Court, but in the Univeisity they 
 were looked upon as utterly reprobate. 
 From the " Reliquiae " of Hearne (an anti- 
 quarian successor of Antony Wood, a biblio- 
 phile, an archaeologist, and as honest a man 
 as Jacobitism could make him) let us quote 
 an example of Heavens wrath against Dis- 
 senters. 
 
 "Aug. 6, 1706. We have an account from Whit- 
 church, in Shropshire, that the Dissenters there having 
 prepared a great quantity of bricks to erect a spacious 
 
High Tory Oxford. 169 
 
 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 Ox- 
 ford. His working hours were passed in 
 preparing editions of antiquarian books, to 
 be printed in very limited number, on ordi- 
 nary 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 
 
1 70 Oxford. 
 
 Rosamund. In these strolls he was some- 
 times 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, per- 
 haps 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 cer- 
 tain of the opinions of "the Hebdomadal 
 Meeting," satirised by Steele in the "Spec- 
 tator" (No. 43). "We are much offended 
 at the Act for importing French wines. A 
 bottle or two of good solid Edifying Port, at 
 honest Georges, made a Night cheerful, and 
 
NEW 
 COLLEGE. 
 
High Tory Oxford. 173 
 
 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 com- 
 mon-room say 'tis silly dull stuff, men that 
 are indifferent commend it highly, as it de- 
 serves." 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 ingeni- 
 ous syllogism, that all men are to be saved ; 
 but Hearne had the better of this Latitu- 
 dinarian, easily demonstrating that the com- 
 fortable argument does not meet the case of 
 madmen, and of deaf-mutes, whom Tom did 
 
T 74 Oxford. 
 
 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 1, he being prince of the 
 
 air." "The less perfectly good" hangout, 
 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 men- 
 tioned, the zeal of Dr. Miller, Regius Pro- 
 fessor of Greek, must not be forgotten. 
 The learned Professor endeavoured to con- 
 vert, and even " writ a Letter to Mrs. Brace- 
 girdle, giving her great encomiums (as 
 having himself been often to see plays acted 
 
High Tory Oxford. 175 
 
 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 con- 
 stitutes 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 
 
1 76 Oxford. 
 
 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 " edify- 
 ing port." If the Southern "honest men" 
 had possessed hearts for anything but tip- 
 pling, the history of England would have 
 been different. 
 
 When " the allyes and the French fought 
 a bloudy battle near Mons" (1709, " Mal- 
 plaquet") 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 reso- 
 lution, 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 
 
High Tory Oxford. 177 
 
 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. Ton- 
 son laid information against the gentleman ; 
 " which may be a warning to honest men not 
 to enter into topicks of this nature with bar- 
 bers." 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 lead- 
 ing thus to all manner of barbarity and in 
 humanity." So true is it that Conservatives 
 
 W 
 
1 78 Oxford. 
 
 are all lovers of peace and quiet, that (May 
 2 9> J 7 5) "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 even- 
 ing they pulled a good part of the Quakers' 
 and Anabaptists* meeting-houses down. The 
 heads of houses have represented that it was 
 begun by the Whiggs." Probably the heads 
 of houses reasoned on a priori principles, 
 when they arrived at this remarkable con- 
 clusion. 
 
 Inconsequence 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 Han- 
 overian 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 
 
High Tory Oxford. 179 
 
 Brunswick, and the Whigs, "that fanatical 
 crew." John, Duke of Maryborough, 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. 
 H earne'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 con- 
 tempt 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 
 1 4th, 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 
 
 N 2 
 
1 80 Oxford. 
 
 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 H earne's time many of her 
 old buildings. It is said, with a dreadful 
 appearance of truth, that Oxford is now to 
 
g 
 
 u > fc 
 
 H Pi W 
 
High Tory Oxford. 183 
 
 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 Exhibi- 
 tion of the Royal Academy (1879), depresses 
 the soul. In the same spirit Hearne says 
 (March 28, 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, &c., 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 
 
1 84 Oxford. 
 
 lived by it, and pretended that it was a detri- 
 ment to his house. As long ago as 1705, 
 they had pulled down the building of Peck- 
 water 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 Pateys Quad in Merton, as 
 represented in our illustration. What the 
 next generation will think of the multitu- 
 dinous new buildings, it is not hard to 
 conjecture. Imitative experiments, with- 
 out style or fancy in structure or deco- 
 ration, and often more than medisevally 
 uncomfortable, they will seem but evi- 
 dences of Oxford's love of destruction. 
 
MERTON 
 COLLEGE. 
 
High Tory Oxford. 187 
 
 People of Hearne's way of thinking, people 
 who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and, 
 like Hearne, must be content sadly to en- 
 joy what is left of grace and dignity. 
 He died before Oxford had quite become 
 the Oxford of Gibbon's autobiography. 
 
VII 
 
 GEORGIAN OXFORD. 
 
/"\ 
 
 VI 1 
 
 Georgian Oxford. 
 
 has usually been described 
 either by her lovers or her malcon- 
 tents. 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 con- 
 cerning 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 
 
192 Oxford. 
 
 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 hypo- 
 chondriac Johnson rugged, anxious, and 
 conscious of his great unemployed power 
 looked down on a much more pleasant Ox- 
 ford, on a city and on schools that he never 
 ceased to regard with affection. This con- 
 trast is found in the opinions of our con- 
 temporaries. 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 
 
Georgian Oxford. 193 
 
 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 friend- 
 ships, 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 miscel- 
 laneous 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 
 
 o 
 
194 Oxford. 
 
 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 Stokes, of Cats' 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 speci- 
 men 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 
 
Georgian Oxford. 197 
 
 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 John- 
 son'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 
 
198 Oxford. 
 
 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 w r as requested to 
 write an ode on the Gunpowder Plot, and 
 Boswell thinks " his vivacity and imagina- 
 tion 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 
 
Georgian Oxford. 199 
 
 that no man could be properly inspired by 
 the Pembroke "coll," or college beer, which 
 was then commonly drunk by undergradu- 
 ates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of 
 collecting Chinese monsters. 
 
 Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora foe fee 
 Ingenium jubeas purior haustus alat. 
 
 In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, 
 and the " bitterness mistaken for frolic/' with 
 which Johnson entertained the other under- 
 graduates 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 John- 
 son'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 fora mother." 
 
 Johnson was a man who could take the 
 
2OO Oxford. 
 
 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 1 746) 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 Noncon- 
 
Georgian Oxford. 20 1 
 
 formist, in times when good Churchmen 
 showed their piety by wrecking chapels and 
 " rabbling " ministers. In our days only the 
 Davenport Brothers and similar professors 
 of strange creeds suffer from the manly 
 piety of the undergraduates. 
 
 Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal- 
 loving, Whiggish assailants of Alma Mater, 
 the author of " Terrae Filius " was the most 
 persistent. The first little volume which 
 contains the numbers of this bi-weekly peri- 
 odical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom's 
 Coffee-house, in Russell Street, Covent 
 Garden, MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and 
 is well worth a desultory reading. What 
 strikes one most in " Terrae Filius " is the 
 religious discontent of the bilious author. 
 One thinks, foolishly of course, of even 
 Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at least 
 in their undergraduate days. The mere 
 aspect of Mr. Leslie Stephen's work on the 
 philosophers of the eighteenth century is 
 enough to banish this pleasing delusion. The 
 Deists and Freethinkers had their followers 
 
2O2 Oxford. 
 
 in Johnson's day among the undergraduates, 
 though scepticism, like Whiggery, was un- 
 popular, 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 " Terrse 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, 
 
Georgian Oxford. 203 
 
 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 
 schoolfellows by a new drugget, a pair of 
 prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen- 
 hiked sword." As soon as they arrived in 
 Oxford, these youths were hospitably re- 
 ceived " 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 
 
204 Oxford. 
 
 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 " Terree 
 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 under- 
 graduates attacked the club, sallying forth 
 from their Jacobite stronghold in Brazenose 
 (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 Brazenose. The Tories, 
 " under terror of this dangerous and unex- 
 pected resistance, retreated from OrieL J) Yet 
 such was the academic strength of the Jaco- 
 
r 
 
Georgian Oxford. 207 
 
 bites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, 
 or a " Constitutioner," could scarcely take his 
 degree. 
 
 " Terrse Filius," who lashes the dons for 
 covetousness, greed, dissipation, rudeness, 
 and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan's 
 report about the bad manners of the under- 
 graduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did 
 not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of 
 the fair. " Terrse 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 him- 
 self 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 
 
208 Oxford. 
 
 back again. He seldom eats any supper, and never 
 reads anything but novels and romances." 
 
 The dress of this hero and his friends 
 must have made the streets more gay than 
 do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our 
 boating men. 
 
 " He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which 
 rustles in the wind as he struts along ; a flax tie-wig, or 
 sometimes a long natural one, which reaches down below 
 his [well, say below his waist] ; a broad bully-cock'd hat, 
 or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white 
 stockings ; thin Spanish leather shoes. His clothes 
 lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the 
 bosom as well as at the wrists." 
 
 These " smarts " cut no such gallant figure 
 when they first arrived in Oxford, with their 
 fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey- 
 woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of 
 hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings, flapping 
 hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin 
 neck-cloths run with red at the bottom. 
 
 After this satire of the undergraduates we 
 may look at the contemporary account-book 
 of a Proctor. In 1752 Gilbert White of 
 
H O 
 
Georgian Oxford. 2 1 1 
 
 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 ^25^. 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 
 
 p 2 
 
2 1 2 Oxford. 
 
 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 Blen- 
 heim 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 China-turene." 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. 
 
VIII 
 
 POETS AT OXFORD ; SHELLEY 
 AND LANDOR. 
 
VIII 
 Poets tit Oxford ; Shelley and Landor. 
 
 A T any given time a large number of poets 
 ** may be found among the undergradu- 
 ates 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 declaim- 
 
2 1 6 Oxford. 
 
 ing 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 " Col- 
 lege Rhymes," a collection of mild verse, 
 which is (or was) printed at regular or irreg- 
 ular 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 Conserva- 
 tive that he looks on Magna Charta as the 
 first step on the path that leads to England's 
 ruin. As a politician, the undergraduate poet 
 knows no mean between Mr. Peter Taylor 
 and King John. He has been known to 
 found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards 
 to swallow the formulae of Mr. Bradlaugh. 
 The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one 
 
Poets at Oxford ; Shelley and Landor. 217 
 
 long warfare with his dons. He cannot con- 
 form himself to pedantic rules, which de- 
 mand 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-undergradu- 
 ates only by this circumstance, that his melo- 
 dious 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 in- 
 clination to attend. 
 
 Now it is (or was) the belief of under- 
 graduates that you might break the deca* 
 
218 Oxford. 
 
 logue 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 industri- 
 ously 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 
 
Poets at Oxford; Shelley and Landor. 219 
 
 fellows, as long as one was in no way re- 
 sponsible for them ; but it was almost im- 
 possible 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 
 f 1 793~ I Sio. Whatever the effects maybe 
 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 com- 
 pelled to generalise. No don, that was a 
 don, could have seen Shelley or Landor as 
 
22O Oxford. 
 
 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 
 
Poets at Oxford ; Shelley and Landor. 221 
 
 that Landor could remember at Oxford 
 " were passed with Walter Birch in the 
 Magdalen Walk, by the half-hidden Cher- 
 well." Hours like these are indeed the plea- 
 santest 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 foi no better com- 
 panions 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 
 
222 Oxford. 
 
 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 rustica- 
 tion. 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 ser- 
 vant. 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 
 
Poets ai Oxford; Shslley and Landor. 223 
 
 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 col- 
 lege 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 Christchurch ; 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 enter- 
 taining persons whom the Jacobin Landor 
 calls "servitors and other raff of every de- 
 scription." 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 
 
224 Oxford. 
 
 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 Presi- 
 dent. Landor adopted the worst possible 
 line of defence, and so the University and 
 this poet parted company. 
 
 It seems to have been generally under- 
 stood that Landor's affair was a boyish esca- 
 pade. 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 un- 
 worldliness, 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 
 
Poets at Oxford ; Shelley and Landor. 227 
 
 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 un- 
 exampled 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 undergrad- 
 uates 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 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 
 
 Oxford. 
 
 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 
 
 IN THE GARDEN OF 
 WORCESTER COLLEGE. 
 
 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 
 
Poets at Oxford; Shelley and Landor. 229 
 
 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 understand- 
 ing, of directing, of aiding the young, who 
 are thus cast at once on their own resources ? 
 One has occasionally heard clever men com- 
 plain 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 edu- 
 cation, 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 un- 
 plumbed seas of thought and experience. 
 
230 Oxford. 
 
 When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend 
 was too much left to himself to study and 
 think as he pleased, let us remember that no 
 one could have helped Shelley. He was 
 better at Oxford without his old Dr. Lind, 
 "with whom he used to curse George III. 
 after tea." 
 
 There are few chapters in literary history 
 more fascinating than those which tell the 
 story of Shelley at Oxford. We see him 
 entering the hall of University College a 
 tall, shy stripling, bronzed with the Septem- 
 ber 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 curi- 
 ous sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, 
 where seven-shilling pieces were being dis- 
 solved 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 conscien- 
 
Poets at Oxford; Shelley and Landor. 231 
 
 tious 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 miner- 
 alogy 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 
 
232 Oxford. 
 
 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 senti- 
 ment 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 in- 
 justice of his expulsion from the University. 
 
Poets at Oxford ; Shelley and Landor. 233 
 
 It is pleasant to know, on Mr. Hogg's testi- 
 mony, that " residence at Oxford was ex- 
 ceedingly 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, 
 
 alff cV^ c'/ieO ia)oi9 vapiBp.ios co^eXc? ei/zei> 
 <ws rot ya)j> eVo/xeuoi/ av a>pca ras KCI\US alyas 
 <f)<j)va$ dcraitov, TV 5* UTTO dpvalv rj VTTO TreuKcuf 
 adv /xeXio-So/zei/o? Kar/CKXto"o, 6cle Ko/iara. 
 
 " Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been 
 numbered with the living, how gladly on the hill? 
 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 1* 
 
IX 
 
 A GENERAL VIEW. 
 
IX 
 
 A General Vieiv. 
 
 AT7E have looked at Oxford life in so 
 many different periods, that now, per- 
 haps, 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. Ber- 
 nard'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 pur- 
 pose, if it is not plain that the University 
 has been less a home of learning, on the 
 whole, than a microcosm of English in- 
 tellectual life. At Oxford the men have 
 
238 Oxford. 
 
 been thinking what England was to think a 
 few months later, and they have been think- 
 ing 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 'wills; 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 homo- 
 geneous) 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 comfort- 
 able people call " dangerous." We have 
 seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never 
 quite died, perhaps, till its eager protest 
 
A General View. 239 
 
 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 dis- 
 turbed 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 cloze 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, be- 
 cause it had no connexion with religion ; or, 
 at least, no connexion 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 
 
240 Oxford. 
 
 which we refer, and much the most power- 
 ful. 
 
 It is curious to read about that movement 
 in the " Apologia," for example, of Cardinal 
 Newman. On what singular topics men's 
 minds were bent ! what queer survivals of 
 the speculations of the schools agitated them 
 as they walked round Christ Church 
 meadows ! They enlightened each other on 
 things transcendental, yet material, on 
 matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, 
 unspeakable. It is as if they " spoke with 
 tongues/' which had a meaning then, and for 
 them, but which to us, some forty years later, 
 seem as meaningless as the inscriptions of 
 Easter Island. 
 
 This was the shape, the Tractarian move- 
 ment 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 
 
A General View. 
 
 241 
 
 made the dry bones of history live, England 
 and France would not have known this pic- 
 turesque reaction. The stir in these two 
 
 OLD EPISCOPAL 
 PALACE. 
 
 countries was curiously characteristic of their 
 genius. In France it put on, in the first 
 place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting, 
 
 K 
 
242 Oxford. 
 
 sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, 
 and bore fruit for ten years. The religious 
 reaction was a punier thing ; the great Abbe, 
 who was the Newman of France, was him- 
 self unable to remain within the fantastic 
 church that he built out of mediaeval ruins. 
 In England, and especially in Oxford, the 
 aesthetic admiration of the Past was promptly 
 transmuted into religion. Doctrines which 
 men thought dead were resuscitated ; and 
 from Oxford came, not poetry or painting, 
 but the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the 
 whole religious force which has transformed 
 and revivified the Church of England. That 
 force is still working, it need hardly be said, 
 in the University of to-day, under conditions 
 much changed, but not without thrills of the 
 old volcanic energy. 
 
 Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be 
 the most powerfully agitating of intellectual 
 forces in Oxford about 1845. A new cur- 
 rent 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 
 
A General View. 243 
 
 apologia of the men who thought most, about 
 the time when Clough was an undergraduate, 
 we should see that the influence of the Angli- 
 can 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 
 mediaeval 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 
 
 R 2 
 
244 Oxford. 
 
 " 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 Uni- 
 versity Commission performed many wonder- 
 ful works, bidding close fellowships be open, 
 and giving all power into the hands of 
 Examiners. Their dispensation still sur- 
 vives ; the large examining machine works 
 night and day, in term time and vacation, 
 and yet we are not happy. The age in Ox- 
 ford, 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. 
 Ccbden. Where is that faith now ? Many 
 
A General View. 245 
 
 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 scepti- 
 cism 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 Uni- 
 versity 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 
 
246 Oxford. 
 
 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 re- 
 ligious excitement and religious discussion 
 being in abeyance, for once, the energy of 
 the place goes out in teaching. The last 
 reforms have made Oxford a huge collection 
 of schools, in which physical science, history, 
 philosophy, philology, scholarship, theology, 
 and almost everything in the world but 
 archaeology, are being taught and learned 
 with very great vigour. The hardest worked 
 of men is a conscientious college tutor ; and 
 almost all tutors are conscientious. The 
 professors being an ornamental, but (with few 
 exceptions) merely ornamental, order of 
 beings, the tutors have to do the work of 
 a University, which, for the moment, is a 
 teaching-machine. They deliver I know not 
 how many sets of lectures a-year, and each 
 lecture demands a fresh and full acquaint- 
 ance with the latest ideas of French, Ger- 
 man, and Italian scholars. No one can 
 
A General Vieiv. 247 
 
 afford, or is willing, to lag behind ; every 
 one is "gladly learning," like Chaucer's clerk, 
 as well as earnestly teaching. The know- 
 ledge 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 un- 
 necessary 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 acquir- 
 ing the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit 
 and Greek ; about the Ogham characters 
 and the Cyprian syllabary ; about early 
 Greek inscriptions and the origins of 
 Roman history, in addition to reading the 
 familiar classics by the light of the latest 
 commentaries. 
 
 What is the tangible result, and what the 
 gain of all these labours ? The answer is 
 
248 Oxford. 
 
 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 pro- 
 portion 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 in- 
 dividual 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 
 
A General View. 249 
 
 valuable to the acquisitions of the world has 
 departed. 
 
 This state of things has produced the de- 
 mand for the " Endowment of Research." 
 It is not necessary to go into that contro- 
 versy. 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 use- 
 less beings, theheadsof houses, whom itwould 
 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 hos- 
 pitality of Oxford. All her doors are open, 
 and every stranger is kindly entreated by 
 her, and she is like the " discreet housewife" 
 in Homer, 
 
250 Oxjord. 
 
 (tftaTci TroXX* eTTi&Zo'a, \fipi^o^vr^ napc'vrwv. 
 
 In some languages the same word serves for 
 " stranger " and " enemy/' but in the Oxford 
 dialect " stranger " and " guest" are synony- 
 mous. Such is the custom of the place, and 
 it does not make ^/'ain living very easy. 
 Some critics will be anxious here to attack 
 the " aesthetic " movement. One will be ex- 
 pected to say that, after the ideas of New- 
 man, 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 di- 
 dactic mood of the Press. " They were 
 friends of ours, moreover," as Aristotle says, 
 " who brought these ideas in ; " so the sub- 
 ject may be left with this brief notice. As a 
 piece of practical advice, one may warn the 
 young and ardent advocate of the Endow- 
 ment of Research that he will find it rather 
 easier to curtail his expenses than to get a 
 subsidy from the Commission. 
 
A General View. 251 
 
 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 fellow- 
 ships. One can hardly take a bird's-eye 
 view of Oxford without criticising the con- 
 sequences of this innovation. The topic, 
 however, is, for a dozen reasons, very diffi- 
 cult 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 philo- 
 sopher 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. 
 
252 Oxford. 
 
 Looking round the University, then, one 
 finds in it an activity that would once have 
 seemed almost feverish, a highly conscien- 
 tious 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 land- 
 owners : 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 neces- 
 sarily 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 unfortu- 
 nate judgment. 
 
X 
 
 UNDERGRADUATE LIFE. CONCLUSION 
 
X 
 
 Undergraduate Life. Conclusion. 
 
 A HUNDRED pictures have been 
 drawn of undergraduate life at Ox- 
 ford, 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 idealizes him- 
 self and his friends, or they are designed by 
 ladies who have read Verdant Green, and 
 who, at some period, have paid a flying 
 
256 Oxford. 
 
 visit to Cambridge. An exhaustive know- 
 ledge 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 
 
M 
 
 s 
 
 
 
Undergraduate Life. 259 
 
 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 Bul- 
 lingdon 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 Ox- 
 
 s 2 
 
260 Oxford. 
 
 ford 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 ad- 
 mired for the audacity with which he 
 smuggled a fox-terrier into college in a 
 brown-paper parcel. There are many other 
 species of undergraduate, scarce^ 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 disap- 
 peared on the war-path 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. 
 
h 
 
 h fo 
 
Undergraduate Life. 263 
 
 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 culti- 
 vated 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 
 
264 Oxford. 
 
 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 con- 
 scious effort. Men are in a position to 
 " try all things " before committing them- 
 selves 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 any- 
 thing. He can flirt with young opinions, 
 which come to him with candid faces, fresh 
 
a 
 
 e I 
 
 x 
 
 O 
 
 O 
 
 fa 
 
Undergraduate Life. 267 
 
 as Queen Entelechy in Rabelais, though, 
 like her, they are as old as human thought. 
 Here first he meets Metaphysics, and per- 
 haps 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 attach- 
 ments too fierce to last long. 
 
 Unluckily there are subjects more engross- 
 ing, and problems more attractive, than 
 politics, and science, art, and pure meta- 
 physics. The years of undergraduate life 
 are those in which, to many men, the 
 
268 Oxford. 
 
 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, pyra- 
 mids, 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 Macrae- 
 ones, is a lumber-room of ruinous philoso- 
 phies, 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 ap- 
 proaches of Time. This is not the place in 
 
\ v : . \ 
 
 a 
 
 
 D 
 O 
 
Undergraduate Life. 271 
 
 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, amuse- 
 ment, friendship, sport, and study. These 
 doubts, after all, dwell on the threshold of 
 
272 Oxford. 
 
 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 Magda- 
 len 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 pull- 
 ing 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, 
 
Undergraduate Life. 273 
 
 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, per- 
 haps, 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 break- 
 
 T 
 
274 Oxford. 
 
 fasts, 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 Univer- 
 sity ; 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 ex- 
 pensive, 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, per- 
 haps, 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 
 
o o 
 
 O ta 
 
 J H X 
 
 fe < O 
 
Conclusion. 277 
 
 summer term. Debts, as yet, arc 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 im- 
 mortal " 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 
 
278 Oxford. 
 
 Oxford.* 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 splash- 
 ing ? 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 child- 
 hood ; 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 
 
 * A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared 
 in the Cornhillfoi September, 1879. 
 
Conclusion. 281 
 
 anxiety, out of all proportion to the real im- 
 portance 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 mis- 
 fortunes 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 ac- 
 quiescing in her grace and charm. These 
 are crowded and hustled out of modern life ; 
 the fever and the noise of our struggles fill 
 
282 Oxford. 
 
 all the land, leaving still, at the Universities, 
 peace, beauty, and leisure. 
 
 If any word in these papers has been un- 
 kindly 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. 
 
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 "It is in truth a most fascinating book, as full of incidents and as various in 
 interest as any other work of imagination, arid, beyond the pleasure in the reading 
 there is the satisfaction of knowing that one is in the hands of a genuine authority on 
 some of the most picturesque subjects that natural history atlbrds. Mr. Selous 
 method is strong, safe, and sound. The volume has numerous illustrations of a high 
 order of workmanship and a handsome binding of striking design. 
 
 School Government Chronicle. 
 
 "This is a very fascinating volume, full of picturesquely written descriptions of the 
 life, habits, and customs of a number of birds and beasts, including beavers, seals, 
 bears, penguins, crocodiles, and a host of other creatures." Graphic. 
 
 "A fund of information and amusement will be found in the pages of this hand 
 somely bound book. From the lowest animals of all, the Infusoria, to the lion ami 
 the elephant, all come within the range of Air. Selous' observation, and he builds up 
 out ol the vast material at his disposal a very readable narrative. The illustration* 
 are carefully drawn, and are very true to nature." Educat ion. 
 
 "The volume would make an excellent present for an intelligent boy, being full of 
 interesting and sometimes thrilling stories from the wide field of natural history. It 
 is well written in a clear, easy style which is to be commended. Mr. Edmund Selous 
 has made a most interesting collection of striking facts, and the book has one of the 
 prettiest covers that I have seen." Daily News. 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF 
 MODERN EXPLORATION 
 
 WITH DESCRIPTIONS OF CURIOUS CUSTOMS, THRILLING ADVENTURES, AND 
 INTERESTING DISCOVERIES OF EXPLORERS IN ALL PARTS OF THE WORLD 
 
 BY ARCHIBALD WILLIAMS, B.A. (Oxon.), F.R.G.S. 
 
 With Twenty-six Illustrations 
 
 "A mine of information and stirring incident." Scotsman. 
 
 " Mr. Williams is most catholic in his choice, taking his readers to soar in a balloon 
 with the luckless Andree, to wander in African forests and Australian deserts, to seek 
 for the North Pole with Nansen, and even to note such an up-to-date expedition as 
 that of the ' Discovery' in the Antarctic Regions, to cite but the most prominent. Mr. 
 Williams has done this work most judiciously, ... a book which will delight 
 both young and old alike." Grapkic. 
 
 " The book unites strong natural attractiveness with valuable geographical inform* 
 tion to a degree probably unequalled by any other that might be ottered as appropriate 
 for the purpose of a gift book or the recreative library." School Government ChronicU 
 
 "It is a kind of epitome of the best travel books of our time, and is exceedingly 
 well done." Academy. 
 
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