OXFORD MEMORIES. " SHALLOW : By yea and nay, sir, I dare say, my cousin William is become a good scholar. He is at Oxford, still, is he not ? " SILENCE : Indeed, sir ; to my cost." SHAKESPEARE : 2 Henry IV. iii. 2. OXFORD MEMORIES A RETROSPECT AFTER FIFTY YEARS BY THE REV. JAMES PYCROFT B.A TRINITY COLLEGE OXFORD Z/V TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. LONDON RICHARD BENTLEY & SON, NEW BURLINGTON STREET Dublisfirrs in riJinan> to iiirr J-Hairstj) Ifir iteen 1886 [The right of trantlatton and all other rights reterved.] PREFACE. THE greater part of my Eeminiscences have appeared in " London Society " (some of them at an interval of years), but they may claim to be presented in a more lasting form, with numerous additions which from time to time have recurred to my mind. If I speak of things before the present race of Oxonians were either born or thought of, human nature ever is the same. Aristotle in Greece and Horace in Eome, three centuries later, painted youth true to its characteristics in the present day. Men still commit " the oldest sins," though " in the newest kind of ways," and the " years of discretion " still arrive, the said discretion lagging painfully behind. I write of a season when the animal is fighting hard against the moral, and when as to the intellectual it is a light of a very nickering kind. I write of fathers .knowing very little of the weakness of their, own -sons, and of sons knowing very much of the weakness of their 2068077 PREFACE. own fathers. I write of " blessings " in too many cases proving blisters ; but these dark scenes I am happily able to relieve by noble instances of honourable emulation and self-denial. If it is true that every man's life would be in- structive if faithfully written as it is passed, a season of life when human nature if most erratic is most original a transition or hobby-de-hoy state may be a new study for my friends. This I offer in a series of o'er true tales, believing that the moral is ever the more impressive when the reader is left to draw it for himself. J. P. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. HOW I PASSED FROM SCHOOL TO COLLEGE, AND THE QUEER CHARACTERS I MET THERE . , 1 II. HOW THOSE QUEER CHARACTERS ACTED IN A QUEER WAY 26 in. OF CERTAIN DONS OF A PAST DAY, AS QUEER AS THE SAID QUEER UNDERGRADUATES ... .47 IV. OF CERTAIN OLD FRIENDS SOME OF WHOM HAVE "ACHIEVED GREATNESS," AND OTHERS WHO HAVE HAD " GREATNESS THRUST UPON THEM " 66 V. CONCERNING COLLEGE EXAMINATIONS AND CERTAIN CANDIDATES KNOWN TO FAME . . 86 VI. A COMMON CHAPTER OF COLLEGE LIFE, WITH RATHER UNCOMMON INCIDENTS , . . .113 VII. OF CERTAIN CHARACTERS, MORE AS CAUTIONS THAN AS GOOD EXAMPLES 134 VIII. HOW SOME MEN ASPIRED TO THE HONOURS OF "THE IRELAND SCHOLARSHIP," AND OTHERS CRAMMED FOR A "PASS" ..... 155 IX. THE "GREAT GO " AND "NO GO" AT ALL . 180 CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE X. GOING UP FOR A FIRST CLASS, WITH A VERY INTERESTING EPISODE 199 XI. TAKING A DEGREE. SOME NICE BOYS, AND WHAT BECAME OF THEM 213 XII. THE DEBTOR'S PROGRESS FIRST PART ... 229 XIII. THE DEBTOR'S PROGRESS SECOND PART . . 260 XIV. PROCTORS AND ADVENTURES VARIOUS . 288 OXFORD MEMORIES. CHAPTER I. HOW i PASSED FROM: SCHOOL TO COLLEGE, AND THE QUEER CHARACTERS I MET THERE. SINCE " the boy is father to the man," as says the proverb, to understand the natural history of the full-grown boy at College, we may begin with a few words about the said boy's character at school some fifty years since. At that time society generally was in a ruder state. Two-bottle men at dinner-parties, good- fellowship measured by the capacity of the stomach and the hardness of the head ; prize fights so popular as to be detailed round by round in the " Morning Post " ; Tom and Jerry frolics in London, and affairs of honour decided by shooting and being shot on Wimbledon Common such rough play will give some idea of the social atmosphere around the paternal home in which, fifty years since, boys first drew the breath of life. When school-days commenced, many a boy VOL. i. '1 OXFORD MEMORIES. found himself suddenly launched into a sea of troubles ; whether his bill of pains and penalties would be longer from the bullying of the bigger boys or from the severity of the masters it were hard to tell. Professor Creasy bears witness that in his time, about fifty-five years since, the life of an Eton Colleger, in the Long Chamber, was about as hard as that of a cabin- boy on board a ship. As the fate of the fag depended on the character of his senior, naturally his usage was as bad as might be expected from the rough training this petty tyrant, while yet a fag, had himself received. Cruelty begat cruelty, and few would believe the misery which in those 'days any poor, weak and nervous boy has been known to endure. I say weak and nervous, because parents did not then think so much about our constitutions, and some boys I knew who were as unfitted for so hard a life as a consumptive patient is for the frozen regions. Pitched battles were common. Six fights was the smallest number with which I could myself escape. The common course was of this kind "Thompson, would you take a licking from Jones?" "No." "Well, then, come to the corner after school." Happily, however, at Eton, about 1825, a SCHOOL DAYS AS THEY WERE. 3 decided check was put to the frequency of these fights, though by a most painful occurrence. The brother of a nobleman now living, fought pluckily, but too pluckily, was even primed with brandy by his eager backers, and was led back to his room in a state of exhaustion, and in a few hours he was dead ! The aiders and abettors were punished and the conqueror was tried for manslaughter at the Old Bailey, but discharged, as no evidence was brought against him, and, strange to say, he returned to Eton, though, badly received, he soon left. This sad event happened in the days of that Splagosus Orbilio, Dr. Keate, whose name is far more associated with the flogging-block than with learning. No doubt Keate was a scholar, only in " teaching the young idea how to shoot " the breech-loading principle with him was all in all. Once a whole division of seventy boys, hoping to find safety in the multitude of transgressors, agreed to miss a penally imposed " absence." Finding Dr. Keate had put them all in " the bills " for the next day, they resolved one and all to refuse to be flogged, thereby electing to be expelled, for which severe measure they flattered themselves that they were far too many. But Keate 1* OXFORD MEMORIES. was equal to the occasion, and adopted the tactics " divide and conquer," or encounter your enemy in detail. He let them all go to bed, and arranged that about ten o'clock at night each master should call and bring up his separate contingent, without allowing time for unity of action. So when the seventy compared notes in the morning, they found that they were all sore alike, and learnt the wholesome truth that they could never be too many to be flogged when their names were once in " the bills." With names once in these bills, not a word would Keate hear, so he once flogged a dozen innocent boys sent up, not for flogging, but to be prepared for Confirmation ! Keate had called for a list of candidates, and this list had been unluckily made out on one of those ill-omened papers ! The newspapers made much of this harsh measure, but Keate had saved a probable rebellion, as others might have supported the seventy. Some time before this midnight punishment there had been a notable rebellion at Winchester. An old gentleman lately told me the whole story. The boys, treated inhumanly and almost starved on short commons, organised a " lock-out." They laid in a store of food and water, each of the THE WINCHESTER REBELLION. 5 elder boys had his appointed guard and watch, and thus they defied authority, and no one could induce them to come out of their quarters. The obnoxious head-master came to force the door, and was plainly told there was a pistol ready, and he was a dead man if he dared to enter. The other masters were popular : one of them having invited a party, the rebels arranged, strange to say, to open their barriers, and gave the guests a guard of honour ! Then the Mayor was consulted, and a file of soldiers demanded, but the commanding-officer sensibly replied he should not expose his men to bullets in a case to be better settled by birch. Eventually the mutineers were starved out, and, though severe punishment followed, the head-master did not long continue his wicked reign. The early days of Rugby could boast of no higher type of boy civilisation. " Tom Brown " bears witness of the work which Dr. Arnold at his first appointment found to do ; and I am speaking of times rather earlier than "Tom Brown's." Dr. Arnold, too, began with far more severity than would be tolerated now. I remem- ber on one occasion, letters in the newspapers from shocked and indignant parents charging the Doctor with excessive severity, when the Homeric OXFORD MEMORIES. epithet of Polu-flog-boio was wittily applied. In short, before the celebrated letters by "Pater- familias " with which the late Jacob Omnium (Mr. Higgins) inaugurated the "Cornhill Magazine," letters which exposed the shortcomings of Eton, the system of our public schools was such as to necessitate much menial work under the name of Fagging from economy of servants, and to necessitate frequent punishment for want of masters as a sufficient police of prevention. The consequence of such " early training and preparation for college" was naturally to send up some nice boys for future drunken wine-parties and College ro\vs. For such scenes were not un- common in my day. I used to wonder why the generality of men ever came to college at all. At least half of them seemed to be utterly indifferent to all educational influences. They " cut lecture" as often as they could, and left to the last terms any serious preparation either for the Little Go (for the term Smalls was then unknown) or for the Great. The standard of proficiency for these examinations always seemed too low, and the books to be given up too limited, to represent the study of three whole years. "But," said Mr. Short, " it is as far as we can go when the school standard is raised, we can rise too. Nine COLLEGE EDUCATION DEFINED. 7 men out of ten here, as in the world at large, though intellectual animals in a book of natural history, have a much stronger dash of the animal ; few seem to have been in the way when the second share of brains was served out." I see now that between the man and the boy the hobby-de-hoy age there is a very critical period to be passed. At this time, says a dis- tinguished physiologist, the animal nature is developed, but the moral nature lags behind ; it is pre-eminently a dangerous age ; man is supremely sensual, selfish and wrong-headed. To get creditably through this crisis is the difficulty, and so far Oxford serves as a wider school to exercise some modicum of restraint and to give full liberty by degrees. A man if idle had better be idle in good company ; the worst set he can join at Oxford would be an improvement on the rakes of a country-town. Only yesterday a friend asked me about a University education for his son. I replied, " For what profession or course of life do you intend to prepare him ? " He said, " For the Bar." " But does he aspire to become an enlightened jurist, and like Lord Selborne to rise from college to the higher walks in political life ? If so, a OXFORD MEMORIES. college education will be a profitable investment for a rich man's son, but if you only expect him to earn a moderate income in ordinary business, I cannot say that the high road to legal success lies through Oxford." And this leads me to the point ; Oxford should be regarded simply as what it professes to be, a place of education. Except so far as it sharpens the faculties it has no bearing on professional life. Instead of being any aid or preparation for busi- ness, College is decidedly a hindrance ; first, because it is a peculiar and almost to be called an artificial sphere, with a very partial view of life in general, and secondly because the Collegian forms habits of nicety and exclusiveness, studying human nature rather in books than in the wide world, which habits the man of business must at once proceed to correct. " I would back a young attorney's clerk," said an old barrister, " to pick up information by his eyes and ears, and there is no little which a lawyer cannot learn otherwise, faster -than the best scholar that ever came from the University." After hearing this, my friend rejoined : " Then the same time spent first in a solicitor's and after- wards in a conveyancer's office would be so much WHAT TO EXPECT FROM COLLEGE. 9 time and experience gained in advancement for the Bar ? " " Undoubtedly as you say, ' for the Bar,' for Oxford has no more to do with a man's legal habits than with his agricultural habits, in case he were intended for a farmer. Oxford proposes neither to make the lawyer nor to make the farmer, but to make the man. It teaches c man doth not live by bread alone,' having heart, brain and divers mysterious feelings and sensibilities, as important to a properly bred human being as his digestive organs ; it prefers the wide views of a Newton to the L.S.D.-isrn of a Cocker. Of this truth I doubt if fathers used often to think, or think now, in sending their sons to College. Men act from mixed motives and are rarely very logical, if they reason at all, about starting their sons in this busy world ; but a money return commonly stands before a moral one. Some parents have an eye to scholarships and fellow- ships, little thinking that if we regard such prizes as those of a lottery, the cost of a University education is rather too much to pay for a ticket to draw. And some send their sons, they know not distinctly why ; probably because it is held the right thing to do and because others do so ; seeing, as said Conversation Sharpe, l most men 10 OXFORD MEMORIES. have their thinking, like their washing, done out.' " For my own part, for whatever reason I was sent to Oxford, my life has passed all the more creditably as well as pleasantly for the habits, social, moral and intellectual, which I formed there. For how could I have passed ni}^ time, as well, between the ages of eighteen and twenty- one ? Imagine my position at that age, in any house of business or in a lawyer's office. Only reflect, and realise the sharp practice, the chicanery and selfishness in all its forms, which constitute the very atmosphere of the business in this wicked world ; and then compare such early training with a sphere like Oxford, where mere money stands for so little, and where, as nowhere else, the man stands so much for what he is worth. For at Oxford, all social distinctions are justly set aside ; the winner of the Prize poems, of the Ireland Scholarship, of " a splendid First Class," or any other university distinction as also to be one of the University eight on the river, or cf the University eleven in the cricket-ground these personal distinctions form the University Peerage, for there, most truly, we are made to feel with the Poet Burns " The rank is but the guinea stamp, The man's the gold for a' that." COLLEGE AND NO COLLEGE COMPARED. 11 Suppose again this same critical and plastic period of life were spent at home, in any rural village or provincial town, how limited the circle, how mixed the society into which the youth is likely to drift ! The groom, the game-keeper, the billiard-marker, and that questionable set of such out-door acquaintances who are never to be in- troduced to the ladies of the family, form no small part of those daily " communications that corrupt good manners." I doubt not that Oxford still compares as a field for youthful training, very favourably with the alternative sphere which I have described ; but I am sure the comparative advantage of an Oxford education, or call it mere Oxford residence and college society, was decidedly superior some fifty years since. For now, Oxford necessarily reflects general society, where the commercial classes stand higher on the social ladder. True, " gentle is that gentle does," still there is a certain tone and degree of refinement rarely to be found in the first generation of the nouveaux riches, men whose family tree is a mere sapling. In my day, such men were rarely met at college ; it was whispered quite as a secret that Thompson's father was a tanner, though in a large way of business : and I smile as I record that it did not 12 OXFORD MEMORIES. sound respectable that Smithers was only the son of the Colchester Town Clerk Town Clerk and Parish Clerk, in our limited knowledge of such offices, being deemed about identical ! But now Oxford, like general society, cannot afford to be so exclusive. Granted that we may presume that a man of Oxford education is generally fit for a gentleman's dinner party, the test that would try some of them very hard, is how far they would seem at ease in the Drawing-room. I remarked some years since to Professor Max Miiller, that so generally did youths, at the age at which men are sent to college, take the very hue and tone of the society around them, that each College had its distinct style and character. See- ing three or four men standing together, I could in my day have described the College to which they belonged. Max Miiller replied, " That is discernible still ; I can distinguish the same marks and character of the different colleges in the men I meet now." I mention this because nothing could convey so clearly the social influences for the formation of character which an Oxford education involves. My two friends, John and Charles Winfield, were sent, the former to Christchurch and the latter to Dash College, which was known as having a SHREWSBURY MEN OF MY TIME. 13 second-rate set. The result was that John came away even with more polish than he went, and Charlie has not rubbed off the lax and slangy style of Dash College to the present day. It is a day never to be forgotten when, in May, 1832, I first was sent to try for a scholarship at Trinity. I don't plead guilty to having been much inferior to my competitors could I have been tried in my own line of reading ; but the horse must be adapted to the course, and any youth from a private school had as much chance where every examination was adapted to the public school system as a hunter has in running for the Derby. The Shrewsbury men under Dr. Butler then carried off the Scholarships, but not the Classes in the same proportion. Theirs was an early and exhausting crop intellectual. By constant recitation and practice in verses you may turn out a kind of living verse machine and fill the mind with odds and ends of Latin and Greek lines, which come in for every translation likely to be required. But this is to try the memory too exclusively ; reasoning and originality are neglected, and therefore the Shrewsbury scholars proved a disappointment in the sciences, and more than one Ireland scholar missed his first- 14 OXFORD MEMORIES. class. Such a forcing system makes an early show, but the Winchester men proved the better in the end. Palmer, Lowe, Car dwell the names first on the roll-call at Winchester three first-class men of my day, have, entirely from their abilities and training, since met each other in the House of Lords. I entered Trinity College, Oxford, for residence, in the ensuing October term, and had soon an introduction to two men at a Tutor's breakfast, to which I was kindly invited. In this way Mr. Short, better known as Tom Short, who outlived his style and generation, and died at the age of eighty-six years, nearly all spent in Trinity, used-to make his observations of the tastes and habits of his men. He was well suited to deal with the class of men of that day. Very keen and sharp ; idle excuses went for nothing with him ; the reading men met much encouragement, and the hunting and sporting men were rarely refused leave of absence from lecture. I think he had a secret satisfaction in the remark then often heard, that Trinity turned out more red coats than most of the colleges twice its size. As to introducing freshmen, at some colleges the tutor selected a kind of Proxenos, or intro- ducer and patron general. Such a one was my A PLEASANT OXFORD CELEBRITY. 15 old friend Newman, while at Wadham, before he became Demi of Magdalen College. Alas, poor Newman ! Much fun, wit and merriment died when he departed this life not an unpleasant life to him about three years since. Old Dr. Cyril Jackson, a very celebrated dean of Christ Church, once remarked that he should not wish to have all reading men ; he wanted some idle men, to make diversions and fun for the studious. Just such a man was Newman, and such appeared to have been his special mission. He was a very Yoric in Oxford life. Well, Newman, when no longer a freshman, grew impatient of the honours of showing, as he said, a set of raw, beardless boys about the premises, and of explaining for the twentieth time the etiquette and customs of the place. " So," said he, " I thought at last I was entitled to a little amusement in consideration of my off- time duties and as one who had done the state some service. So, after indoctrinating one youth more verdant than usual with strange notions of the exceeding familiarity which existed between the undergraduates and the 'Dons,' I left in his room a note in the name of Mr. Vores, our college tutor, to the following effect : 16 OXFORD MEMORIES. " ' DEAR SIR, Observing that your rooms form an angle with mine at the corner of the quadrangle, and as I presume we are equally inconvenienced by the necessity of a tire for breakfasts these hot mornings, I write to propose and to explain a plan I have invented for mutually boiling each other's kettles. The accompanying sketch will best show how easily a rod can pass from your window to mine, made so that the ends can slip in and out of a groove, to send the kettle on its little travels backwards and forwards by help of a string on your side and on mine. Now I will boil the kettle on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays if you will render me the same service on the Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays and Sundays. " ' Yours truly, " ' A. YORES. " ' P.S. Let me know your shaving hour, that we may arrange matters accordingly.' " It was only last year that my old friend White- head laughed as he related how this simple fellow came into Mr. Vores' rooms, while fifteen men were deep in Aristotle, and put the tutor to con- fusion, and all the class to the titter, by saying : " Sir, I am come to accept your proposal." " Proposal ? About what ? " DR. NEWMAN AND HIS HUMOUR. 17 " About boiling our kettles alternate mornings, and " "I don't understand you but but after Lecture I will speak to you." If this was a specimen of Newman's humour in his undergraduate days at Wadham, he was no less distinguished when advanced to the degree of Dr. Newman at Magdalen. Dr. Newman's name, as fellow of Magdalen, happened to have the same initials as those of the present Cardinal, sometime fellow of Oriel. Naturally there were occasional mistakes in the delivery of letters, and one day our friend received, mis-sent, a letter from a lady, requesting first a subscription for her pet charity, and at the same time some lines for her album. Fancy her surprise in receiving as she supposed from her reverend friend the following reply : " My name is J. H. Newman, And very grieved I am That, like an orphaned lambkin, I haven't got a dam." It was by Newman, my quondam schoolfellow, that I was introduced to some desirable and plea- sant acquaintances no slight advantage to a Freshman. A College, like other societies, is divided into sets, and if you begin in a bad set, you are not likely to end in a better. VOL. i. 2 18 OXFORD MEMORIES. First there was the rowing or the uproarious set, who behaved like big schoolboys. These were the men who made night hideous with drunken and noisy wine parties men who knocked in late and bribed the Porter not to put down their names. Among these the most conspicuous were Charlie Lane and Tom Briggs, par nobile fratrum not to say arcades ambo ; though their behaviour sometimes was too near Byron's translation of the latter. Charlie was a clever fellow, but all brain arid excitement, and Tom was a man of peculiar capacity. In the winners of the Derby or St. Leger his memory was remarkable ; but as to the dates of kings and queens he was nowhere. Indeed, it was said that he thought the battle of Blen- heim was fought in Woodstock Park! Charlie might have done anything in point of talent, but his mind was like a sharp weapon loose in the handle, he was too restless and excitable to fix his attention to any subject for many minutes together. Charlie was one of the many lunatics at large men who only do not count as mad because they are not mischievous, but men whose brains are subject to a periodical effervescence, and who at times are no more answerable for their words than a barrel-organ is for the tunes WILD BOYS AND THEIR DILEMMA. 19 it shall play. I am sorry to say, like the moral of a story-book, Charlie came to a bad end. Having squandered a small independence, he was reduced to beg small sums of his former friends, and Tom Briggs, who had a better eye to the main chance, found it rather unpleasant, when college days were passed and the old set scattered, to have more than one visit on Charlie's behalf from the messenger of a spong- ing house. In the extremity of his misery, Charlie had a legacy of some thousands, and forthwith wrote letters around and returned divers sovereigns and rive-pound notes to his old friends who had helped him, " hoping to take better care of myself in future." But this was more than a man of his habits could answer for. I met him years after in a very threadbare condition. As to bribing the College porter, though these men are not usually to be won over, little Walker was constitutionally indulgent, and Tom and Charlie once found themselves in a sad dilemma. They had been in a tandem to Ascot races, re- turned just in time " to save Gates," that is before 12 o'clock at night, when little Walker, though no one asked him, thought that they would prefer that he should make no formal entry of their late 2* 20 OXFORD MEMORIES. hours. Most unfortunate ! This led to a sus- picion of climbing walls. Entering College by climbing wall has always been made a serious offence. A strange case occurred at Magdalen. A Demi was sent away and deprived of his Demiship for this offence and reinstated seven years after, by which time he had learnt that there had not been in the Common Eoom Dons enough sitting in judgment to form a legal quorum according to the statutes. * Charlie and Briggs lived in the days of the very excellent Isaac Williams, one of the original Tractarians friend of Newman, Pusey, Keble and others. Williams was too good for this world at least for this world of Oxford, as Oxford was in those days. His rule was too strict and his standard too high to work with : in other words, his leges were altogether out of proportion to the mores 'of men of Tom and Charlie's set. Williams abhorring Ascot, and divining that these men had gone fc there, in which case he should detect them by the " Gate Bill," sent his servant to search all the likely rooms, and thus ascertained that at eleven o'clock at night they were not in College, and finding, next morning, no names in the AN OLD-FASHIONED COLLEGE TUTOR. 21 porter's book, lie confidently accused both of them of having scaled the garden wall. This they denied, and thus their words w r ere in conflict with the Gate Book, and this might have been ruin to the porter ; but Mr. Short, I am now sure, guessed the real state of the case and took the matter out of Williams's hands, and so the difficulty passed over. Short was not a man to believe in the perfectibility of human nature, whether in porters or in under- graduates. Among college tutors there was no better friend to a man in a scrape, if he was treated openly and candidly. He was rather sharp and imperative in his manners, formed as they had been by some school work as a master at Eugby, and without being unpleasant he would be rather satirical at lecture. He would say to a man who guessed at everything, "Where is such a place not in Asia Minor ? " and " Where is such an island not in the ^Egean Sea? A most convenient puddle for guessing is that J^gean Sea." As we used to term our lectures Coaches, and would say " the ten or eleven o'clock Coach," one day when a class of pass-men, if not of to-be- plucked men, were blundering over Euripides, Short said, "I heard from my window Mr. 22 OXFORD MEMORIES. Wratislaw call my lecture a coach, and lie named it 'The heavy Euripides,' and most appropriately too, for it is heavy work indeed." The English "Cribs," or translations in common use, Short seemed to know pretty well, and so one day, when Tom Briggs was bringing in some wordy paraphrase in the wrong place, Short said, " Stop a minute." Then, helping him over an intervening line, he said, "Now for it this is the place for those fine words." Poor old Tom Short ! He out-lived his eye- sight, and died at the age of 86. His name was so identified with Oxford, and he will be so long remembered as a survivor of men of the old school, that I may relate two more anecdotes which pre-eminently speak the man. Will B., a well-known Oxford character, having just been alarmed at hearing from a favourite lady that "she was in trouble," asked Short what he should do ; he replied in his usual antithetical style, " Now you're in a pretty mess ; if you do marry such a woman you are a great fool, and if you don't you are a great blackguard." Will B. decided on the former, and in my time he had two pretty daughters whom he contrived to marry to two young but rich pupils, whence we called him " the judicious Hooker." Will was MORE OF "TOM SHORT." 23 once an examiner for the Little Go, and one of his own pupils, Joe Smith, he plucked the first time and passed the second, not, as we used to say, that Joe was any better prepared for the second examination than for the first, only Will wanted to do a little more tuition, and to give time for a longer flirtation with his daughter Sophonisba. Still I must not convey the impression that this was more than a College joke, or that men were at all apt to question the fairness of the examiners. On another occasion, when Short had been invited to the house of a very strict family, he was disappointed in the evening to see no pre- paration for his favourite rubber of whist, but a green baize form for a row of " pampered menials " and a heap of bibles for an exposi- tion. The subject was the shipwreck of St. Paul, and as the very prosy and unlearned expositor enunciated as a false quantity, " they knew that the island was called Mellta " " The deuce they did," said Short, in a stage whisper rather. vawkwardly, but too audibly.* But I was speaking of the uproarious set in College. As I look over the old Oxford Almanac, I find few indeed who have reached like me full * Melita is pronounced short properly. The man pronounced it Melita wrongly. 24 OXFORD MEMORIES. three-score years and ten. They began too fast. The reading set has generally outlived the fast set. There were the two Maunders, who at most wine parties drank more than they could carry one of them rushed hastily into my room one day, and asked me to give house room for certain sporting prints, " for the Governor," he said, " is coming, and he must not know my extravagance." John Maunder married some low woman picked up at Oxford, and came almost to beggary. Then I remember Alex, who was a sharp practitioner, one of those men who would sponge upon his friends a practice all too easy with men of that free and unsuspecting character which commonly marked the age for College. One day as he was CJ / returning from hunting, a man rather wider awake than others, remarked to me : " A cheap amusement is that for Alex : that's Boevey's mare he is riding, Wilson lent the ' Pink ' (the red coat), and the whip is mine, and now Alex will soak some one's wine till he is screwed." I cannot say I was as sorry for him (Alex) as I should have been for anyone else, when shortly after I heard he was severly starred all down the thigh, from a line of revolving spikes in getting over the iron gate opposite Wadham. Well, Alex's reign was a short one seedy at NARROW ESCAPE FROM RUSTICATION. 25 forty, a confirmed invalid at fifty and with a diseased liver, easily accounted for, he ended as a perfect skeleton short of three-score. This scaling gates being a great College offence involved certain rustication ; but there was one exception the case of Dickenson, one of the Scholars, and a wild one too. For the Scholars usually are supposed to set a better example. He was detected and called before a Common Eoom. His rustication would involve the loss of his Scholar's Gown and 80 a year, besides a chance of a Fellowship. While our Dons were halting between two opinions with ideas of discipline on one hand and mercy on the other a shout was heard in the quadrangle " Well done, Trinity, Dickenson for ever!" "What means that shout ? " said old Dr. Ingram, the President. " It means that Dickenson is winner of the Latin Prize Poem," said Mr. Williams, entering the Common Eoom. "Then," said Short, " that helps us out of the difficulty. In Dickenson's case we may make a set-off, do an act of grace, and pardon his offence, for the honour he has done his College." CHAPTEE II. HOW THOSE QUEEK CHAKACTEES ACTED IN A QUEEK WAY. FEOM very peculiar circumstances this victory for Dickenson was a great triumph indeed. While competing for the same Latin verse prize the year before, he had fallen, though I think very unfairly, into disgrace. Dickenson had written a poem, which, compared with that of Pritchard, who bore away the prize, was considered by a friend a good judge to be the better of the two. Much was Dickenson's disappointment to find that his. poem, delivered too late, had never been before the judges at all. Shortly after, an article was seen in the " Oxford Herald," copied from a paper of Dickenson's own town of Dover, to the effect that they might congratulate the son of their respected neighbour on all the honour of the Oxford Prize Poem, though, from want of some punctilious formality on the part of the ex- aminers, Mr. Pritchard had the prize. "Of course Pritchard's friends were quick with a rejoinder. And now the junior tutors were very severe upon Dickenson and would not listen to any explanation, DICKENSON AN ALTERED MAN. 27 though nothing was more probable than what Dickenson pleaded ; namely : that some officious neighbour of his father to whom he had written the true state of the case, had inserted a more complimentary version, however unfair to Pritchard. But now, once more, Short came forth in his proper character ; he admitted the explanation, and said smiling "Now all you have to do, Dickenson, is to win next year to vindicate your character." There was much good in Dickenson, though he set a bad example in his early days. Some four years after, Tom Briggs met him in London and said, " Well Dickenson, the odds are dropping on the favourite for the ' Derby.' I suppose you have a good book for the race as usual." " Oh ! no," was the reply, "I have changed from all that. Some years of my life I did harm enough in this world, and now I am devoted for life to doing a little good. There is an out-door congregation expecting me down in Bethnal Green you'll not believe in me as a street preacher but that is, I suppose, my proper designation now." For about two years he zealously followed his altered and amended course, and then I read of his early death. I thought of poor Dickenson last year when I 28 OXFORD MEMORIES. saw the new spikes on Trinity Gates spikes which I hope are now formidable enough to discourage any attempt to scale them. In my day the spikes served less as an effectual barrier than as a cruel trap, and besides the case of Alex, Croome Mon Croome as we used to call him might have lost his life upon them. He sank down on the spikes, which pierced his leg by his shin-bone. Croome was luckily an athlete, and he told me that it took all his power accustomed as he was to the feat of drawing up his weight by the strength of his arms to raise himself off those adhesive spikes. And where was the so great temptation to enter otherwise than by the lodge ? Suppose a man had been out of Oxford and missed the coach we should say Train now, but there were no trains near Oxford in those days the penalty of a night out of College was certain rustication, with a strong presumption against a man's moral character, and such I remember was the jeopardy in particular of my half-crazy friend, Brownie, the son of a Scotch Member of Parliament. I stayed at College to read one Christmas vacation with, among others, Brownie, who thought it too far to go to Scotland. One A SAD SCRAPE. 29 morning I found the College gate locked, and asked the porter what it meant. "Mr. Short's orders, sir Mr. Brownie's kept out. Mr. Short wants to hear when he comes in. I expect Mr. Brownie will have his walking ticket, sir." Soon after Brownie came in and hastened to my rooms to say what a scrape he was in, and he was going to plead that, if his scout had reported that he had not slept in his bed, he had fallen asleep on my sofa and was not out of College at all. While urging on him that Short had anticipated all such excuses by shutting the gates, that he certainly would send to me for confirmation, and that Short was known to be the last man to be put off with a humbugging story, Short's servant came to summon him. In five minutes Brownie came back to me with such a face ! He had told Short he had fallen asleep on a friend's sofa, at another College. " Let your friend come and say so and I shall excuse you." " But," replied Brownie, " my friend may be afraid of the consequences of such an irregu- larity." " Then say I promise to tell no one and surely he will come, to render you so great a service." 30 OXFORD MEMORIES. Here was a mess indeed ; for a friend to tell a lie is hard to find. Still a man was found, and thereon hangs a tale, or at least an incident which gives me occasion to describe a peculiar phase of College life in my time. The society of undergraduates consists for the most part of youths from the age of 18-19 as late as 21-22 years a period of life in which men are most unsuspecting, simple and, I may add, generous. It is at a later age that men graduate in designing, coldhearted and shameless vice. But unhappily, there used always to be a sprinkling of men of this later and exceptional age and of this degraded character. There was Alfred Wing, who had " seen life," which means the darker side of it. He had knocked about among that heartless, soulless set of betting and racing men, a kind of experience which results in sharp wits and a blunt conscience. He it was who perpetrated the swindle of passing off a Derby horse as his own and rooking his friends in a University sweepstakes. Again there was Scotton, who, four years before, for his high crimes and misdemeanors, had to fly from Oxford, and afterwards compounded with College Dons and Oxford creditors, returned as a married man to take his degree, and, having WORSE AND WORSE. 31 intercepted a note, horsewhipped the gallant Lord Dash, of Christ Church, at the door of the Little Go schools, as he was entering for his examination which, notwithstanding, he did enter and passed. Lord Dash sent for a friend, an officer from town, to challenge Scotton, who simply said he should not thus help him out of his disgrace. Of the same age and class was Brownie's Scotch friend, a man who boasted of that knowledge of the world which teaches "how to commit the oldest sins the newest kind of ways," and who, hearing of Brownie's application having been indignantly rejected by other men, said " What ! all you want is some one to tell a lie for you ? I am your friend at a push," and forthwith he went to Short and said how he and his brother Scot had fallen asleep over a recent importation of small-still whiskey, and that they only awoke too late. But Brownie's day came at last. As an excuse for his absence in London he wrote that he had been very ill, and that both Dr. Brodie and Sir Astley Cooper sat up with him all one night ! This was rather too strong for Short's credulity. He wrote to London, and found the whole plea a falsehood, which, added to other deceptions by Short especially abhorred, caused verbosa et grandis 32 OXFORD MEMORIES. epistola to Mr. Brownie, senior, near Aberdeen, to the effect that the hope of the family was setting too bad an example in the College, and could be tolerated there no longer. Every father thinks that some one else cor- rupts his own son, so much so that where the first lesson of corruption comes from it were hard to tell. Mr. Brownie, the Scotch Laird, soon made his appearance, and, after being duly primed by his son's mendacity, proceeded to argue the case with Short. Now, that there may be no mistake about Short's real opinion of this big baby and jack- pudding of the College, for such he was, I will simply state that Short had taken his measure in these terms " I should say Brownie is too great a fool for a knave, if he were not too great a knave for a fool." So when Mr. Brownie re- marked that there must be bad as well as good in all societies, but that in Trinity College, Oxford, the bad seemed greatly to preponderate, Short fired up and replied that while Brownie was there this would be true enough, and as to the father's expressed intention of sending him into the Guards, if in six months he were not shot for a liar, or turned out for a coward, he should be surprised. Some time after the predicted six COLLEGE DISCIPLINE. 33 months had expired I met Brownie in Bond Street. At first, from his military gait and decent attire, I hardly knew him. He seemed no longer slovenly and loutish, but " clothed and in his right mind." " What," I said, " are you really in the Guards ? " " Yes," he replied, " but I had to mend my manners or I should not have been there till this time ; but let alone manners, as to morals, you thought me fast at college. Why, I was but an infant in iniquity compared to the fellows in our regiment. My father, you know, was so savage. It took 2,000 to clear me. I burnt the candle at both ends borrowed of the Jews to spend among the " certain characters I will not mention. Brownie did not survive his college o life five years. One of many cases where early excess and a ruined constitution made the first serious attack fatal. I thought, when first I went to college, that I was going to be altogether my own master, but I soon found something of the restraint of school come over again. Chapel once a day at least was then enforced, and there were lectures which detained me till twelve or one o'clock. The gates were closed to egress at nine p.m. It was penal to be out after twelve p.m. and after three a.m. it counted the same as if you were out all night, VOL. i. 3 34 OXFORD MEMORIES. and involved a sentence of rustication. And even if you knocked in after ten o'clock you frequently would be treated with a little questioning and admonition. Add to these checks the fact that, with few exceptions, our visiting acquaintances were chiefly in college, and you will see that we lived as regards the Dons very much under their inspection and control. It was not generally con- sidered that the scouts, who commonly held their appointments for life, would naturally be more in the interests of their old masters, matured into Tutors or Fellows, than of the undergraduates, and no doubt much information as to the practices of the men was privately conveyed by this ready channel. The Dons, over their wine in the Common Eoom, would frequently compare observations as to the character and the habits of the men. A knowledge of their " set " and companions would alone tell them much, and thus in various ways we might be said to have lived in glass houses. For great offences, rustication, being sent to the paternal home to ruralize, or, as Short con- strued it, " to give our manners and morals a little airing," was the punishment. But this was not likely to be the fate of any men whose dissolute habits had not previously been scanned as afore- A ROW-ING WINE PARTY. 35 said. Besides the offence of staying out a whole night, a noisy and uproarious wine party has been visited with rustication. I remember Gregson, a man who was almost mad when excited with wine, in a room unfortunately nearest the President's study, once stood on the table and, enacting a shuffle and cut among the glasses and dessert dishes, made a speech and then sang a song with a chorus of men as excited and loud as himself. Eobinson, in whose rooms this outrageous folly took place, was next day summoned before a Common Room, but pleaded it was not his party ; he had lent his rooms to a friend the practice sometimes of men who, near the end of their residence, were indifferent to the wear and tear of the furniture to be passed on to their successor. When asked to name the friend, Eobinson respect- fully declined, having been implored by his friend Leir to save him from rustication. Leir feared his father would be so incensed that he would never trust him at Oxford again, whereas Robin- son's father was believed to be more easily reconciled. Robinson, therefore, had to bear the consequences, and to leave the next day. I happened to be a near neighbour to his family at Bath, and saw a little of the way the news was received. The old gentleman's equanimity 36 OXFORD MEMORIES. sorely tried by one of my friends whom he happened to consult for explanation. " The nature of the punishment is very ingenious and peculiar : in effect it is simply this the Dons visit the sins of the sons on the pockets of the fathers, for not teaching their sons better, and then the fathers are pretty sure to make the home for the time rather hot for the sons." Though rather a laughable, this is a very true explanation. The man who has what the porter called " his walking ticket " finds a sad gloom at home, and very sinister looks in his father's friends and neighbours, as I shall in due course have a tale which will explain. It is always suspected that there may be more than college frolics to account for the disgrace. No doubt there have been some exceptions, but I never knew any men rusticated who were not throwing away all their acade- mical opportunities, and were with good reason a cause of anxiety to their friends. What is termed " expulsion " is very rare ; I hardly ever knew an instance. Men were always allowed to take their .names off, and had a chance of entering not, indeed, another college, for no college would receive them, but at a Hall. Halls were not so particular. For that reason, NEW INN HALL. 37 St. Mary's Hall " Skimmary," as it was called had the name of " Transportation Hall," or " Botany Bay," in those days ; but now the President will admit of no excuse ; he will receive only those who have never been at any other college ; and probably other Halls are also less disposed to give the reprobate a second chance. This leads me to speak of New Inn Hall, and how we men of Trinity had the honour (?) of estab- lishing it. About the time of the Eeform Bill, the idea of reform and the libertjr of petitioning had become very widely prevalent, and I suppose it was this spirit of liberty. which had extended to the Univer- sity. For, one day, being quite a freshman and disposed to look up with reverence to men who had been promoted in Hall some five tables above me as a mark of seniority, I received a visit from Welbore, one of the most distinguished of the Scholars, to ask me to sign a petition ; " some- thing for the benefit of the College." This sagacious document proved to be nothing less than a petition to the President to the effect that Whereas the then Dean, Mr. Mitchell, was in the habit of setting unusually long and very frequent impositions for missing chapel, coming in late, or other minor offences, visited heretofore 38 OXFORD MEMORIES. far more lightly, and whereas thereby the valuable time of studious men was greatly wasted, your petitioners do herewith pray, &c. in short, do pray for the President to interfere with the Dean on behalf of those whom the Dean was officially appointed to keep in order ! As a freshman of course I deferred to the opinion of my elders, supposed to be better acquainted with college ways, and I added my name to this precious document. A few of the old stagers said, No ; the Scholars dare not sign it ; the Dons have a hold on them, and if they do sign they will be the first to give way and eat humble pie. This proved but too true ; the petition was re- ceived with fiery indignation and deemed an im- pertinence and an offence against all college dis- cipline, and the Scholars were the very first to be called to account, being considered as a select class, by the wisdom and bounty of Sir Thomas Pope and other founders, and in duty bound to support authority and to set a good example. Indeed the Scholars were never elected, even after examination, till some inquiry had been made as to their habits and steadiness of conduct. So the Scholars were at once called up and shown a form of recantation and apology, in Latin, BEFORE A COMMON ROOM. . 39 and this they were required to sign. My old friend Webster argued that he had never in- tended to imply any disrespect whatever. " If you didn't," said Short, " the words did. So sign this apology at once, or lay aside your Scholar's gown." " But," said Larken, " I have a right to petition, even the Queen." " Certainly," said Short. " And the Queen can't rusticate you, but we can. Don't talk nonsense ; you are not here as a free citizen of England, but in statu pupillari, and must be taught to behave yourself." Part of the Latin apology ran thus : eo quod contumaciter se gesserint. " What is the meaning of behaving contumaciter?" asked Wratislaw. " Why, bumptiously, to be sure," said Lane, " and a very good interpretation too." After the Dons had settled with the Scholars, I like all the rest was called before the Common Eoom, a most august assembly then held in Hall ; for the usual Common Eoom would not hold so large a number of offenders. After a preliminary address to us, full of words of astonishment and indignation, the old President, with a heavy fist on the table, said, " What in the world could you mean by such a petition ? " 40 OXFORD MEMORIES. Here he paused ; and our friend Charlie who, standing nearest to the President, felt bound to say something put on a very innocent expression of countenance and said, " All I knew, gentlemen, was, that it was a petition. I am not in the habit of reading petitions, they are all so much alike, but I always take the precaution of asking if there is anything to pay but they said there was nothing to pay and so I signed." This was said in Charlie's queerest of all queer ways, and almost disturbed the gravity of the Dons. But there were four men, who partly from prin- ciple, and partly to be quixotic and to show off, refused to sign, or to do an imposition, for this was required of them as seniors and knowing better. Short tried hard to coax them, because I believe he admired their honesty, and said to George Owen who at Tiverton knows not the Reverend George? "Do it in any time and in any wa}', but do it, and don't foolishly separate your- self from Trinity, so near the end of your career and your degree." Still Owen, and with him three others, his old chums, steadfastly refused. Two at least of the four, if not all of them, were till further distinguished as forming the noted COLLEGE TRICKS. 41 crew called the " Ugly four-oar." I am sorry to make so personal a remark, but this crew was so celebrated that Burningham of Trinity reminded me of that ill-favoured quartette only last week more than fifty years after date. These four took their names off Trinity, and went to New Inn Hall a surprise to Dr. Cramer, the Principal, with quite a sinecure office, for at that time there was not a single man in it and thus they gave a realit}- to an institution up to that time a mere abstraction and a name, though one of the oldest foundations in Oxford. These four were soon joined by three others, whose morals and manners happened not to suit their respective colleges, and we called that worthy party " The seven deadly sins." A few years before this there had been an extensive migration from Christ church. Dr. Gaisford, one of the first Greek scholars in Europe, then Dean of Christchurch, held the red coats of the hunting men in utter abomination, and said he would have no such colours within his walls. Whereupon it was voted that he should have rather too much of that colour. And true to the word, one morning red enough met his eyes. The walls and windows of the Deanery, as high as men 42 OXFORD MEMORIES. could reach, were all painted red. This was at first supposed to be the actual handiwork of the same evilly disposed men who planned it, but a glazier, regarding it with more curious eye, said, " No gentleman ever did all that ; there was such a deal to do in the time, and (examining closely) the work is good. I'm blessed if they mustn't have been regularly brought up to the business." This proved to be true. The delinquents had brought painters from London for the purpose, for no Oxford tradesman would undertake it. In a similar difficulty I once knew a workman from Abingdon employed to make a duplicate key for the gate of Trinity Garden. The Oxford townsmen descry danger in such orders, however well paid. The Duke of Wellington's son was fully believed to have been implicated in this strange frolic with the paint, but as evidence failed, the Dons resented the offence on some other pretence. The Duke, as a strict disciplinarian, let his son do the imposi- tion which was set him, and then, from a sense of unfair play, removed him from Christchurch. Another instance occurs to me of the vigilance of the College Dons, and the keenness with which they reason from the known habits of a man. This I first observed in the case of Barham of FOUND OUT! 43 Balliol. Balliol was at that time rather more strict in discipline than most other colleges. Barham used to be quite surprised at the noisy parties which passed unnoticed in his friend Webster's room. They were both Shrewsbury men ; a school at that time by no means as famed for manners as for scholarship. Well, at one of Webster's parties we heard that Barham of Balliol had been confined to gates for the whole term, that is, not allowed to go out after the first closing of the gates at six o'clock, " as a bad boy," we said, " not to be trusted out in the dark by himself." But Barham had found a weak point in the Balliol fortress, in the wall dividing Balliol garden from Trinity, just under the window of Webster's room, and if before we left we would give him a leg up to the top of the wall, he could drop, by the help of a tree to the other side, and be all right. Oh, nescia mens hominum I In due time this was done. We wished him a good-night, singing, " For he's a jolly good fellow, &c.," and with his last words he made an appointment with me about some duck shooting for the next day. The next day I found Barham quite an altered man, and with such a long face that I said, "What, all in the downs! Has anything hap- pened ? " 44 OXFORD MEMORIES. " Rusticated," he replied, " and what's worse, the governor will be up here to-morrow. I have denied pleaded that is ' not guilty,' and have since stuck to it, because the porter admitted he had seen not me, but that he only saw some one like me, drop down from the wall." Next day the father came, and like other fathers believed too readily his own son, though the greatest sinner must be somebody's son after all ; so, fully prepared to maintain his son's perfect innocence, he went to Barham's tutor. A father unless like Brownie's, he turns accuser is sure to be tenderly handled on such an occasion by men of the class of Oxford tutors ; so Mr. Barham was courteously received and addressed with no little sympathy, and then the tutor proceeded quietly to talk over the son's little misfortune, and to explain, for the father's complete satisfaction, the chain of evidence on which the Common Room had acted. First of all, knowing the habits of Barham and his man}^ Shrewsbury friends, which led to far more out-of-college visiting than was good for him, his tutors suspected that Barham would try to defeat them in the attempt to confine him to college ; and therefore they gave the porter strict orders to watch the gate. THE EVIDENCE TOO STRONG. 45 Secondly, the porter had noted, on the evening in question, that Barham had gone out before closing of gates at six o'clock and had not re- turned ; he did not re-enter college that way at all. Thirdly, presuming that Barham dare not enter b}^ the gates, the Tutors had set a man to watch the only practicable scaling-pomt of the garden wall. This man reported that he saw some one, in figure and height like Barham, jump off the wall, dodge him between the trees, and finally escape up Mr. Barham's staircase ; he followed this person as fast as he could, and found Barham's room which a little before had been open and Mr. Barham absent now tenanted, as he perceived by the sound of some one moving within, and the " oak sported," which before had been open, that is that the outer oaken door, which shuts with a spring, was now closed. Fourthly, Mr. Barham's boots were found covered with garden mould, and on comparing the boots with the marks under the wall, the foot-print evidence was by no means weak. And lastly, if Barham had not been all that evening out of college, nothing could be easier for him than to name those friends in whose rooms he must have spent so many hours. 46 OXFORD MEMORIES. By this formidable evidence even Mr. Barham, senior, was convinced, and the son, after his repeated falsehood, was not simply rusticated but ordered to take off his name from the Balliol books. CHAPTEE in. OF CERTAIN DONS OF A PAST DAY, AS QUEER AS THE SAID QUEER UNDERGRADUATES. AMONGST the uproarious set of whom I have been speaking, the boating set, or the " Hydro-maniacs," as Short named them, had the worst reputation. Short once wrote to the fathers of some of the more promising of " the Boat," saying that extravagance and midnight uproar called for parental interference to prohibit sons from belong- ing to the crew, indulging in the very obvious and complimentary metaphor that the son " was too valuable to be wrecked on an eight-oared boat." Lewin the late distinguished Chancery Counsel and author of " Lewin on Trusts," one of the Scholars at that time, being famed for athletics, had thoughts of joining the Boat, but soon received*a hint that it would not do. A " Bump supper," on the occasion of a bump or a place gained on a racing night, used to be unusually uproarious with speeches, hurray- ing, and songs various. At Exeter College, too, the Dons held the Boat in equal abhorrence, and con- sidered any man who belonged to it as keeping rather questionable company. Garibaldi's friend, 48 OXFORD MEMORIES. Col. Peard, who at nineteen years of age weighed fourteen stone, and in the " Tub boats," which pre- ceded the then unknown " outriggers," deemed a powerful ally, was then one of the most celebrated on the river, as was also Bob Lowe, or Whiteheaded Bob, now matured into Lord Sherbrooke, who was the stroke oar of University College boat, and also Pelham of Christchurch, now Bishop of Norwich, who was by far the most distinguished as the best oar in Oxford. I think it was Peard who, one day, jealous of the character of the Exeter boat, took a book of boating rules to Mr. Eichards, the tutor, and showed how, adopting the principle laid down by Horace for athletes and implied in abstinuit vino et venere, they had enacted a set of fines, a five-shilling fine for the former, and a guinea fine for the latter violation both of salus and of mores. Much was his surprise at being met with the rejoinder, "Exactly as I have always maintained ; these rules show plainly and are a written confession of the wild character of the men for whom you can anticipate the necessity for such fines ; no decent men would want such rules." Some men of the Boat were standing in the quad, awaiting the return of their delegate and when the reply was told, Carter, full of Little Go Logic, called out, "I never heard such a THE BOATING SET. 49 fallacy. As well reason because there are laws against robbery that all men are thieves." The college boat account was strictly kept, and the names of those who had incurred the fines were duly entered, with the sums and the offences set against their names, quite in a business way, but with too little consideration that men would grow older and it is to be hoped more moral, perhaps be- come Dons themselves, and then such a record of a past peccadillo might be found rather incon- venient. This proved true of A. B., afterwards fellow and tutor, whose name, for ten years after at least used to be shown with his offence inono- syllabically expressed and credited with 1 Is., duly paid to every freshman, till at last some friend abstracted the page and destroyed all record of their tutor having perhaps consulted the celebrated Dr. Tuck well, designated by a most apt quotation, mercurialium custos virorum. A coUege boat sometimes was purchased by a private subscription amongst the crew who pro- posed it, but generally there was a voluntary rate levied on all the men, it being considered that the boat and its anticipated victories were for the honour of the coUege generally. There were no college boat-houses in those days. Stephen Davis's barge, with a dressing-room on the nearer side of VOL. i. 4 50 OXFORD MEMORIES. the river by Folly bridge, and Hall's boat-house on the opposite side, supplied the only accom- modation: but in my day the racing boats numbered only six or seven, and Christchurch, with its Eton and Westminster training, could always be at the head of the river, unless they took it too easily and failed to practise sufficiently. If I have spoken much of Mr. Short and often quoted his sententious sayings, it is because " Tom Short," his familiar name with all parties there were two other Shorts, Vowler Short, called " the Growler," and Augustus Short of Christchurch was, more than any other man, part and parcel not only of Trinity College, but for many years of Oxford at large. He survived nearly every one of his Oxford contemporaries, Dr. Eouth of Magdalen, who lived within three weeks of a hundred years, included ; though Dr. Symons of Wadham, yclept "Big Ben," Dr. Marsham of Merton, and Bursar Smith of Trinity, all attaining nearly ninety years, were pretty strong com- petitors in the race of life. The last time I saw Short he said he was seventy-five, and in talking of his college experience he said, " A man's fate all depends on the nursery on the mother, not the father ; the father commonly has little to do TOM SHORT'S ADVICE. 51 with the boy till the bent is given and the foundation of character is laid ; all depends on the mother. Of course I am myself too old to marry, but to my young friends I give this solemn caution : " Be sure you never marry a fool ; I have long observed that women who are fools swarm with children and, of course, spoil them all." This advice struck me as quite original, though I had once heard an old lady, a noted character, and an authoress, say, in speaking of the evangelical clergy, "The lower the church, the larger the family "; but that Short's study and observation in natural history should have resulted in a discovery of the law that the greater the fool (feminine), the larger the family, this was quite a new piece of mento-physical in- formation. But there were, in Trinity College in my time, other remarkable characters of a very different kind save that they were quite of the old style and belonging to a now extinct species. Old Ingram, our President, would be as difficult to find in duplicate as Tom Short. And be it remembered, that here I am simply giving my recollections, positive facts, however exceptional, and fact is often stranger than fiction. I " nothing extenuate and set down 4* 52 OXFORD MEMORIES. naught in malice " but as to old Ingram, I am no more setting him forth as a typical president than Tom Short as a typical tutor of the day. Both were anomalies and I may say anachronisms, as " men born out of due time," and that time much behind the present day. For that any one in any day within this nineteenth century ever saw the like I very much doubt. Dr. Ingram was, in my time, publishing, in parts, his " Memorials of Oxford," and as to any college administration, this seemed to be left entirely in the hands of Mr. Short as Vice-President. You heard of the President when a Common Boom was called for a bill of pains and penalties ; the only other cases of interference I remember are indeed such as are never to be forgotten, and would hardly be believed. I once heard of two men on a stage coach, one of whom whispered with much indignation to the other, " This is too bad of these coach proprietors. We are actually paying high fares to sit next to, and in company with, Jack Ketch ! " " Never mind," said the other, " it takes all sorts of people to make -a world." So we may be allowed to record the eccentricities of those designed by nature to break the monotony and fill up the odd corners of life. STRONG MEASURES. 53 I must introduce old Ingram as a church militant or physical-force man. In his youthful days he had attained some celebrity as a Cornish wrestler ; and when you marked his breadth of chest and width of hips you would easily believe it. Perhaps he would have pleaded these early habits for being on sundry occasions too ready with his hands. Poor Graham, who as I shall describe was afterwards drowned with Surtees of Exeter by the swamping of a sailing boat, one evening, just under the President's desk in chapel, sank on his side and feel asleep. As the President rose to leave and saw Graham, he stepped round to him, and as he did not move began pounding the side of Graham's head with open palm. Graham sprang up in a maze, and before he knew where he was he felt a tremendous thrust in his back that sent him staggering out of the chapel. After witnessing this as a freshman, I began to form peculiar ideas of a President, and soon I had a repetition of the same force of character rather nearer home. I happened to have a wine party, consisting not of the uproarious men described, though one of that set, yclept Count Wratislaw this ancestral Hungarian title, long since dropped by his family, we would not let drop at college entered about nine o'clock, rather the worse for 54 OXFORD MEMORIES. a wine party he had just left. He had a French horn in his hand, and this noisy instrument he began to blow, and a few minutes after the door was thrown violently open and in burst the President. All was consternation. "Cut," cried our friend Charlie, and in a moment all had rushed headlong out of the room, awaiting the result in the darker corners of the lower passage and staircase, and leaving me with Wratislaw in a state of heavy stupidity and wholly unconscious of what had happened, for the President was standing behind his chair, " I have been annoyed, sir, by that horrid trumpet for " " Poo-oo-oo," blew Wratislaw. " I have been annoyed, I say " (snatching it out of his hand), "by this trumpet for the last fortnight, and -" " A sure sign it wasn't me, for I've only been up a week." "What! Giving me your impertinence, sir, indeed ! I'll beat it about jour head, if you dare talk so to me." As he said this, he held the heavy and sharp- edged French horn in so menacing a manner to Wratislaw's unprotected scalp, standing right over him, that I instinctively placed myself between them. BEFORE THE PRESIDENT. 55 Ingram, carrying off the horn, soon left the room, ordering us both to call on him the next morning. To me he said very little ; he had heard that Wratislaw had been but a few minutes in my rooms. With Wratislaw, the following was the little confab : " For your conduct last night, sir, I suppose I can do nothing less than send you home." "I have no home, sir." " Well, go back to your father." " I have no father, sir." " Then go to your mother." "I have no mother, sir." " What, no father and no mother either at your time of life ? " " No, sir, and I never had any, that is " " Never had a father or mother ! What do you mean, sir? Why, you surely don't mean to say you came into the world like Adam and Eve, full grown ? " Here he began to relax and laugh a little at his own quaint illustration. " I was going to add, sir, none that I ever knew they died in my infancy." " And so you came here to be your own master. This will never do you have been most irregular 56 OXFORD MEMORIES. ever since you came, missing lectures, and absent from chapel often, and knocking in late very unlike what you ought to be in every respect. Why, see, here's a college cap," he seized and shook it, and as the broken board in the top of it rattled ridiculously, he shook it again ; " Yes, and I heard you brought a live animal into college in a sack at twelve o'clock at night. Go, sir ! go I can't say just now what I shall do in your case." Wratislaw said : "I heard no more of it, but when I found he knew of the badger story, I thought all was up with me." Wratislaw, just before, had bought a badger of Hoskings of Cowley, and brought it in a sack into college. But the difficulty was to know what to do with it for the night. Briggs was so unacquainted with badgers that he let him empty the sack into his cupboard. Little sleep was there that night for any one near, the creature scratched so to get free ; and next day, when the cupboard doer was opened, every man jumped on to a chair for fear of teeth fixed in his legs. At last Hoskings, as before arranged, came, caught up the badger by the tail, as he alone knew how, replaced it in the sack, and took it off to Bullingdon, for all the dogs of all the scum of the slums to chase it. A SUMMARY PROCEEDING. 57 But of the President, in his physical-force character, Tom Crippts, the college confectioner, had a tale to tell a tale so well remembered, that, forty-five years after date, little Walker's successor, the college porter, related it truthfully to me, an instance of most correct tradition. The extravagance of our breakfast parties and supper parties had been very great, so it was arranged that we should have cold meat for breakfast, as we always had for supper, from the college buttery, and then there could be no reason that anything of the sort should be more ex- pensively ordered from Crippts and Co. This law was sometimes broken, as the Dons knew, and they were all at this time on the alert. One morning, the President, just by the iron gates in Broad Street, met Tom Crippts with a large and suspicious-looking hand-basket, stopped him and asked what it contained. " Only a little toast and muffins, sir." " Pull off the cover." This was done. "You infamous liar! Do you call this toast and muffins ? " so giving the basket a whirl, he sent kidneys, cutlets and broiled chickens flying into the little plantation on the left. But any noise in quad, was at any time liable to 58 OXFORD MEMORIES. draw old Ingram from his lair. No doubt, for a busy and studious man, and devoted antiquary, a lot of thoughtless, noisy j^ouths must have been very irritating. Once a noisy party in the quad, near his door, and not far from his study window, were cracking a tandem whip. Out rushed Ingram, snatched the whip from one man's hand, and flipped and flanked about right and left most vigorously, while the men ran screeching with laughter away. After one of the worst of these vigorous sallies of the President, Short tried to smooth things off, and to persuade the indignant party that his offended honour would not suffer in public estimation by any means the same as if half as much had been done by a younger man. Short was one of the best of tutors to keep the men in order. He was so certain and methodical in his ways ; to escape his vigilance was not easy, and the only safe excuse when found out was to be frank and open with him. Certainly he was rather pedagogic, from early training. He told me that after he was elected Scholar of Trinity he had leave of absence for a year to complete a mastership at Eugby, and at lecture he showed a degree of grammatical accuracy and a certainty in his familiar negative, " you're wrong," not AN ODDITY. 59 common with other tutors. For tuition requires practice ; you begin to question your own know- ledge when first you find yourself in a position requiring you to pronounce a decided negative and to correct others. Isaac Williams was a man of more taste and an elegant scholar, yet when a man at lecture made a mistake, he seemed to hesitate and to want nerve or certainty to con- tradict him. Mr. Homer was a celebrated tutor at Eugby in Short's time, and his son, Philip Homer, was con- fided to Short's care at Trinity, but Philip was a strange creature. Once Short said at lecture : "Mr. Homer, that is not the way your father would have rendered that." " My father, sir," was the reply, " was a puzzle-headed sort of man." This utterance was received by Short with a solemn pause, but Philip was called back after lecture. The truth was, the son was crack- brained, and what seemed oddities at college soon developed into something more to be lamented. One vacation Philip went to stay at the hotel at Capel Curig, in North Wales. There his strange ways attracted the attention of some good gentle- man, who watched over him, and treated him kindly, while he communicated with Philip's friends. One day Philip started with some bread 60 OXFORD MEMORIES. and wine, as he said, to administer the Sacrament on the top of Snowdon. As he did not return by the evening, men were sent in search of him, but it was only after a week that a shepherd's dog led the searchers to a kind of natural alcove, and there lay poor Philip on a bed of fern which he had made for himself, and with his feet in the pockets of the skirts of his coat, which he had torn off apparently to give his feet warmth. He had no doubt lost his way in a dense fog, and perished from cold. In 1843 I visited the hotel, where I found the sad story had by no means lost its interest ; and the old waiter led me to Philip's grave, then covered with a large altar-formed monument, to one " who died much to be lamented in 1835." Thirty years after, in another Welsh tour, I sought the same spot ; but in that well-remem- bered corner all now was level and plain turf, and sheep were feeding. Etiam periere ruince ! The explanation readily occurred to me ; grave- stones are stolen like other things and with less chance of discovery. While I was at St. Mary's, Barnstaple, a friend, in turning up his hearthstone, close to the churchyard, read, " Sacred to the memory, &c.," and the gravedigger let me into a secret that GLOOMY REFLECTIONS. 61 it was a common practice to take Smith's old headstone to cover over Jones' new grave. And in the beautiful Bath abbey, asking the sexton if there was room for many more, I was informed : " Why, sir, sometimes we're forced to make room, it may be after twenty years or so, and when the family have .left the place, for then we think they've had enough on't." Still as to Philip Homer's grave, I felt no little at the reflection that one with whom I had spent so many friendly hours, and who had amused me much by his oddities, and with whom I truly sympathized, was already so ruthlessly blotted out of the land of the living the last trace gone of where he once had been. " This way madness lies," says King Lear ; and I think I have had, among my friends, rather more than the average on this broad highway. I agree with Horace that all men are mad : it is only a question of degree, and Dr. Johnson would apply that name very extensively when he says it applies for the time to all persons with whom imagination predominates over reason. Philip Homer was only one of three men at college, counted queer and eccentric, who afterwards went raving mad. " What an odd fellow is Fowler ! " men said, 62 OXFORD MEMORIES. " so fond of pugilism." He one day met an Irish beggar and offered him half-a-crown for one blow at his face, and a blow that so astonished the poor fellow that he would have run away without his money had not a friend gone after him. Some years after, when ordained to a curacy in Wales, Fowler was still more eccentric. His first lesson for the morning service, Sunday after Sunday, was always from Genesis : when asked why he did not adhere to the table of lessons, he said he had a fancy to ground his parishioners well at first start ! No wonder that such a man should have ended in a barred room, with a strait- waistcoat. Luckie was another of the so-called eccentric school. He gave up for his degree twenty-four books, more by half than the best men proposed for the highest honours, and took his seat in the schools, reading a common cram book the very sight of which, as the examiner took it from his hands, to say nothing of the impropriety of taking any book, was enough to prove an alibi of all sound knowledge. As poor Luckie knew very little, and as he floundered over one passage after another, he was told, "Mr. Luckie, we like candidates to bring up a few books and to know something. You have made a very common DANGER OF PRACTICAL JOKES. 63 mistake ; you have brought up many books and know nothing." As to taking any class after this, it was quite out of the question. Luckie just scraped through. " Mr. Luckie," said Short, " what could have induced you to give up so many books ? " " Why, sir, I found it very hard to choose ; I knew as much of one as of another." " At that rate you might have named the whole Bodleian," was the reply. The explanation of 'all this folly was lunacy, developed and declared a few years after. Yes, and not a few men, if they had any feeling, must have been ashamed of the part they once had taken in teasing a weak and nervous creature, as if he were ridiculous and fair game, when they found at last that it was a case to be pitied of incipient disease. This teasing and irritation was carried so far that Short once detained me after lecture and said he wished to speak to me as one he believed kindly disposed to Luckie that Luckie was constitutionally weak and nervous ; and the rough play and tricks to which he was exposed, Dr. Tuckwell had assured him, was confirming a certain nervous tendency, and was most injurious to his constitution. I replied, " I have no doubt, sir, you anticipate 64 OXFORD MEMORIES. my reply. Luckie has acute sensibilities and good feeling, and yet he has unfortunately fallen among a comparatively rough set. I will advise Luckie quietly to draw off from them without exciting resentment by any downright cut, and I will speak to the men in question privately, and draw attention to Dr. Tuckwell's opinion, and let them see the injury they are doing Luckie by what they only mean for jest and play." Short said this was exactly what he desired. But it was all too late ; Luckie became gradually worse and demented, and a few years after he died of a nervous fever. But, short of mental disease, there is usually some poor, brainless creature at Oxford, the victim of many plucks, and quite the notable character of his college and of his day. Such a man was one w r e called the Bishop of Pembroke, for that was his style from the cut of his coat and queer hat, and Pembroke the college he so highly honoured. As often as he went up for his little- go the schools were crowded. Often have I blamed myself for going, on one occasion, with my old college chum Le Breton, father of Mrs. Langtry, a man with the least possible command of countenance, so keen was his sense of the ridiculous. Luckily we were seated nearest the door. The subject was logic, and the question A QUEER CANDIDATE. 65 was about the conversion of propositions, the principle of which, remember, was to alter the form while you preserved the sense. " Now, Mr. Johnson, convert this proposition, 4 Cassar conquered Pompey.' ' " Yes, sir, ' Pompey conquered Csesar.' ' : Had I been by myself I could have been quite serious ; but Le Breton was convulsed with laughter, and this set me off. The examiner made an attempt at indignant reproof, but could hardly resist the contagion of the ludicrous. " Half-uttered accents hung upon his tongue," of which we were not slow to take advantage, and burst out of the schools and ran away, our ex- plosive laughter, as we were told, being audible till we were quite clear of the quadrangle. It was the manner of the strange creature which was so hard to resist. In this examination, as is commonly the case, where examiners know they have some hard- striving man, but invitd Minervd, that is, all against the grain, they were all sympathy, and one of them said, " Pray sit down, Mr. Johnson, and compose yourself." " I am not at all nervous," was the innocent reply, "it is nothing in the world but my ignorance." I am afraid he never graduated after all. VOL. i. 5 CHAPTER IV. OF CERTAIN OLD FEIENDS SOME OF WHOM HAVE " ACHIEVED GREATNESS," AND OTHERS WHO HAVE HAD "GREATNESS THRUST UPON THEM." As to the old friend I have mentioned, not only had he a fine sense of the ridiculous, but he was apt to get into rather ridiculous positions. The very peculiar position in which he found himself one fine morning was rather a case in point. Taunton, the nephew of a judge who had, at the Oxford assizes, sentenced a man to be hanged for rick-burning, came running, about eight o'clock, into my friend's room, and said : " Come along, come, I can let you into a good thing ; I have a ticket to see the man hanged." Away they both rushed, threaded the mob to the jail gates and presented their order. " This way, then, gentlemen, this way," said the warder, "only just in time through the chapel here up those steps," and they found themselves, not as they supposed, only on some commanding height, but to their great surprise and that of the crowd assembled, there they stood two Col- legians, in cap and gown on the top of the THE FATHER OF MRS. LANGTRY. 67 turreted gate, by the side of Mr. Calcraft and the poor creature to be hanged. " How came you there ? " said the Dean of Pembroke. " Quite by accident, sir." " By what possible accident could a man slip on to the top of a jail and by the side of the gallows ? A strange accident indeed ! " All! Le Breton many years the venerable Dean of Jersey at college a man of much taste and strong memory. When ordained he proved an eloquent preacher, a good speaker, and with a talent for recitation, part of which gifts have descended on his daughter, a lady of world-wide fame, Mrs. Langtry, " Some men achieve great- ness and some have greatness thrust upon them." We may add, some inherit greatness : but in this case it is all the other way ; the stream flows back upon the fountain's head and the sire is made even yet more famous from his child. Fame indeed ! One day, at Lord's Cricket Ground, at the Eton and Harrow match, there was some stir at the gate as if some distinguished person was coming : " Who is it, to cause this excite- ment ?" I asked. "Either the Princess of Wales, or Mrs. Langtry," was the reply ; "it can be no one else," Well does Le Breton's child deserve her 5* 68 OXFORD MEMORIES. fame. Here was a young lady, drawn from com- parative obscurity first of all, by no forwardness on her own part, into the highest circles of London society. Idolized and flattered, but not spoilt. Made the pivot for there is always one on which the world's folly for the day shall turn. A little later, by her husband's losses, she feels reverse of fortune ; and, of course, soon finds that no offence against fashionable society is half so unpardonable as proving poor. Not spoilt, did I say ? No, here's the proof. By much laborious study and wonderful force of character, she qualifies for the stage. The night of trial comes ; she dares the criticism of London and the certain opposition of the dramatic press. At once, from this single sample of her power, one of the first actresses of the day exclaims in my hearing : " As to succeeding, it is a success ; she has already done what takes us years." Having carried the war into the provinces, she goes single-handed to America, and in three years, by her astonishing- energy, builds up a fortune and regains the independence from which she had fallen by no fault of hers. Well, but her father could stand hard work too. After a good day's work, to my lodgings in Holy- well he used to come at four o'clock, and we read, HOW OLD FRIENDS PART. 69 till ten o'clock, with one half-hour only for a hasty meal of chops and pancakes, the whole of Aristotle's Ehetoric in six readings. He was at that time reading with one noted tutor, and I with another ; at one time with how times are changed ! the present Lord Chancellor Selborne, who at Oxford, as now, was the foremost man of his day, and afterwards with the late Bishop of London, a man with the best head for science of any of his time, then at Pembroke College ; and thus Le Breton and I used to make a sort of joint stock of what were called the crotchets or best things learnt from our respective Coaches. My friend was ultimately fellow of Exeter. I met him years after. Yes, only after many years : and this exemplifies a great peculiarity of the little world of Oxford life. Oxford draws, as to a centre, many hundreds of men who otherwise might never have seen each other. Friendships are formed. The most attached friends disperse and radiate north, south, east and west, and the friends who for twelve terms were rarely a day apart, never meet for years, if ever again. One casual and passing word I had with my old friend, I remember, the only time in thirty years, and he said he had been " Bear leading," a word in his case most descriptive. " Such a rough and un- 70 OXFORD MEMORIES. civilized young cub," he said, "it were hard in- deed to match. I did my best to cultivate some taste and power of observation ; but after seeing him put his head into St. Peter's at Eome, turn his nose up and back out again, and after seeing him blindly smoking and day-dreaming, and say- ing he saw nothing to look at where the Eighi and Pilatus cast their dark shadows over the Lake of Lucerne, I gave him up." " Don't you think," he said, " it is a palpable misnomer, as to the bills of mortality, to speak of so many million Souls, as if they all had one a-piece, when, as in the case of this mere animal, daily experience contradicts it ? " This bear-leading used to be another pet occu- pation, much desired by some men just after taking their degree, partly because the parental purse about that time can be drawn on no longer for arrears of college debts, and partly because to see foreign parts at some one else's expense was a temptation indeed. Instead of sentence of rusti- cation I have known private advice given to a father to keep his son away from college for a year, to entrust him ostensibly to a tutor, but really to a man to travel with him to keep him out of mischief, and to give time for dissolute companions to leave. There was a chance for that bear-leader to take him abroad to enlarge THE TRAVELLING TUTOR. 71 his mind, of which he commonly had but little, and to keep him out of mischief, though that is found everywhere, and as to travelling, the youth too often happens, " To shape his old course in a country new." But the appointment of travelling tutor was too desirable to be easy to obtain. The more common way to raise the wind in Oxford, after taking a good degree, was by "private coaching." This was of course rather of the nature of a specula- tion for there was the certain expense of con- tinued Oxford residence, and much uncertainty as to pupils. Few men with anything less than first-class honours had much chance of succeeding, and unless socially and widely popular, with all the connection to be derived from a public-school acquaintance, a man found it difficult to obtain a number sufficiently constant to be remunerative. Still, the temptation to make from 200 to 400 a year or more for working only half the year for Oxford terms are little more was so great, that when once it was proposed to appoint as examiners no men who took pupils, it was observed that there were too few men without pupils qualified to be examiners. I could name a Lord Chancellor who, to start with a purse, 72 OXFORD MEMORIES. was obliged to sacrifice time most valuable to him, especially for about eighteen months after taking his degree, and before he could reside in Lincoln's Inn. Another, Lord Chancellor West- bury, lay under the same disadvantage, for some time detained as tutor at Wadham College. Lord Sherbrooke, was, I think, nearly six years tutor and little-go examiner before he left for the Australian Bar, where one of his first cases was the defence of his old Winchester schoolfellow, Knatchbull, for murder. Knatchbull's was a life of crime. At Winches- ter he bore a very unpromising character. He went into the navy and there embezzled a chrono- meter, and laid the blame on an officer, who was dismissed for negligence. Having been entrusted with the care of chronometers taken to sea to be tried and timed, this ill-used officer, with a keen eye for every chronometer, espied the lost one in a shop in Holborn, and traced the sale of it to Knatchbull, who was tried and transported for the offence. In Australia he was at one time the assigned servant to a friend of mine ; and before that, while in the barracks, another of my friends officially employed there said, he remem- bered Knatchbull once came to him and volun- teered for the office of flogger, to accompany him OXFORD TUTORS. 73 daily on his rounds to administer lashes, as the poor wretches were sentenced on daily complaints, and a most savage flogger he was. Having obtained a ticket of leave, he was kindly treated by an old woman, whom he poisoned to possess himself of her supposed riches ; all he obtained was three-and-sixpence ! Mr. Lowe tried to prove insanity, but failed, and Knatchbull was hanged. " Mr. Lowe," said my friend Kendall, " was the cleverest man I have ever read with," He was so near-sighted he seemed to depend very little on his sight and to know all his books by heart. He had the widest Oxford acquaintance of any man of my day. The late W. Mitchell of Hertford Col- lege, much senior to Mr. Lowe and several times examiner, was the most distinguished of all Oxford " Coaches," that is, he could boast of the greatest number of successful candidates for honours among his pupils. He said the best man he ever examined was the late Honourable C. Twistleton, a Scholar of Trinity in 1828. He said "Mine was hard work : with a man like Liddell (now Dean of Christchurch), my lecture was like an hour of pleasant conversation, but sometimes I have counted the very minutes on my watch, so bored with the stupidity of a pupil." One of the latter style of pupils must have been 74 OXFORD MEMORIES. Joe Burdon, whose idea of logic encouraged him mightily as to his chance of passing. He said he reasoned by rules of logic. His syllogism was this. " No man has yet been plucked who read with Mitchell in his present set of rooms. I have read with Mitchell in his present set of rooms. Ergo, I shall not be plucked." A proved fallacy, in more senses than one. Other Coaches had reputation rather for pass-men than for class-men. Among these Clifton of Worcester was most celebrated. I remember one day meeting Woodley of Worcester hastening to be in time for his examination, appointed to come on after two o'clock. He had been listening all the morning to the divinity examinations of other candidates, and as he anticipated many of the same questions, he had run off to Clifton for a final cram. Clifton had before strongly urged him not to go up, disliking to have any plucked men to his account, but Woodley was lucky in having some of the same questions and passed. Private Coaching at Oxford was very hard work. A young beginner soon finds that in order to teach, he must himself learn ; that is, learn a little more accuracy than he already has attained, and this must extend to every book and every part of the book that his pupil proposes to read. THE LONG VACATION TUTOR. 75 A tutor usually desired to take six pupils ; that is, to lecture six hours a day and to pay minute attention, with earnest talk with six fresh men, on various subjects, six full hours. If you add to this work some more hours as a daily prepara- tion, no wonder you heard, as I did, in reading with " Jackson of Pembroke," afterwards Bishop of London, that his head was in a whirl, and that the vacation came just in time to save him. He said, " My head is giving way ; the truth is I have done too much." Most tutors, however, have to commence with smaller numbers, and so become seasoned by degrees. Some men presume that having taken a first class they are fit, all at once, to lecture as a matter of course. With a man of this confident character a party of my friends, one long vacation, went down to Lynton, and before long this so-called tutor was floored with a passage of Thucydides, and after repeated instances of his incapacity, his pupils dispensed with his services, and wrote for another tutor. This man made a great mistake ; he ought to have read early and late and prepared his lectures till he was used to his work. No man was more familiar with his books or found the work easier than Clifton of Worcester ; 76 OXFORD MEMORIES. but he was glad after a time to take a living and retire from the fatigue of tuition. Most men in choice of Coaches gave a preference to a tutor who had been an examiner in the schools, because supposed to be initiated in all the mysteries and the so-called crotchets of examiners. It was too generally believed that, there were in Aristotle's Ethics mysteries which only a certain set of tutors could reveal. After all, the chief assistance a tutor can render a candidate for honours is by directing his reading, and carrying on a system of daily examination. Very little can be done in filling another man's head. This he must be taught to do for himself. Education consists in drawing out rather than in forcing in ; formation not in-formation. The outcry against cramming is absurd. Cramming implies mind to be crammed, and a man who can show the accurate knowledge which examinations require for the time, however short, has a better head than one who cannot. The best mind, like the best gun, is one that carries straight to the mark. Knowledge displayed in examinations is the test of this power, however evanescent, to be regarded only as the ammunition. No reading man in any time thought there was much use in the college lectures. The worst part GETTING UP IN THE WORLD. 77 of it was that the lectures broke in on all that time, from ten o'clock till one, which is most valuable for private study ; and with the best scholars, I am sure that for the morning lost the lecture was but a poor compensation. One advantage I duly estimate in college lectures, namely, the opportunity afforded in a class of from sixteen to twenty men of comparing oneself with others. Self-knowledge is no small part of college education. To have read privately with the then celebrated Eoundell Palmer, the best classic of his day, and also with Jackson, then one of the first men in science, I have ever considered of lifelong benefit. Jackson was eminently an instance, and to some extent Eoundell Palmer also, of the way a clever man may make the University the stepping stone to the highest preferment in life. Jackson was indebted to Dr. Jeune, afterwards Bishop of Peter- borough, for tuition for which he could ill afford to pay. Dr. Jeune's early fortunes had been little more promising. He told my friend, Dr. H , that he had carried sacks of flour to his father's mill. Each of these embryo bishops took a first class ; this led to a connection for pupils at Oxford, in the first place, and after some years testimonials 78 OXFORD MEMORIES. were accumulated for what is a very rich prize for any young men Dr. Jeune became head-master of Birmingham Foundation School, and Jackson of Islington Proprietary College. And why are we said to have too often a set of Schoolmaster Bishops ? Principally because the best men of their day are promoted to the great schools, and they have a fine opportunity of making connections when there. Islington College, however, was not of so high a class, nor could Jackson be said to have, like Palmer, distanced all compeers at the University. Jackson became known as a most earnest and persuasive preacher at Muswell Hill. If persuasiveness is the highest point in oratory, Jackson had that gift ; the rest of his oratory was little indeed. But he was a moving preacher. Lord Aberdeen and the Earl of Derby heard him Sunday after Sunday at St. James', Piccadilly. Both these ministers marked him for a bishopric, though Lord Aberdeen first had the opportunity. Sydney Smith used to speak of Greek Play bishops adverting to Blomfield and Monk and of their " orthodox views of the middle verb." So many years has scholarship and learning led to the lawn. Eoundell Palmer of Trinity College was not only the best classic of his day ; his Latin Prize A MISHAP IN THE SCHOOLS. 79 Poem and his Latin Essay on " Clientship among the Eomans " were among the very best in the whole collection. He also won the Newdigate Prize for the best English Poem, as also the Ireland scholarship and a first class. But strange to say, it became a humorous remark that the plucked men of the University owed him a present for taking away the disgrace from plucks for ever after. Palmer took up three books of Euclid for his Little Go, instead of Logic you might take either and as he did not intend to pursue mathematical studies, he drew the line rather too close, was deemed deficient and failed ! I well remember hearing his examination, and anticipating No testamur. " Never mind," said Short, " he can write better Latin than any one of the examiners." It was believed that his well-known abilities prejudiced him : and that the examiners had determined to make an example of some man whose deficiency could not fairly claim allowance. There was no man in College more respected than Eoundell Palmer, none of whom higher expectations in life were formed. When I read lately of the death of my old friend Gunner, Eecorder for Southampton, I thought of the very words he once uttered, "Whoever lives 80 OXFORD MEMORIES. fifty years will see Palmer Lord Chancellor." Gunner did live to see it. The Eldon Testi- monial, 200 a year, held for three years, was awarded always without examination to the man who had won most prizes and honours, Palmer took this as a matter of course. The winners of Chancellor's Prizes have in nine cases out of fifty-four found their way to the peerage : The Earl of Eldon, Lord Sidmouth, Burgess Bishop of Salisbury, Lord Tenterden, Phillpott Bishop of Exeter, Copleston Bishop of Llandaff, Mant Bishop of Down and Connor, Whateley Archbishop of Dublin and Shirley Bishop of Sodor and Man. We may add Wilson and Heber Bishops of Calcutta, Sir John Taylor Coleridge and Dean Milman. At Magdalen at that time the deed of trust as regards fellowships and demiships was not con- strued to mean that these prizes should be given to the best scholars. Founders of scholarships no doubt intended generally to help poor scholars. In the progress of time school education became general, and that of the highest order to qualify for competition was expensive, consequently to award such pecuniary help and partially free education to the best scholars who came to Oxford was vir- tually to give a bonus most unnecessarily to those WONDERFUL MEMORY. 81 who were probably rich and who least required it. Still any judicious selection of poor scholars is little likely to remain long in force. You can judge of scholarship, but not of poverty. Election must be made either by examination or by favour ; so examination or the hated " Com- petition Wallah" is the better of the two. Magdalen fellowships were so generally given by favour and friendship that the usual examination was a farce. Palmer, however, was advised to stand on his merits. When the fellows came to the election they were about to supersede him in favour of a mere pass-man, when one of the fellows rose and said : " We are carrying this too far. The eyes of all Oxford are on us to see what we will do. Here is a man who would be an honour to the college." This appeal prevailed ; Palmer was not to be denied. As to examinations in Euclid, I can recount three instances of wonderful memory. Two superior men, both gaining second-class honours one was the celebrated Canon Macmullen, so well- known by the Hampden controversy assured me that they learned their books of Euclid by heart without understanding the least of the reasoning. That such stuff as "If the angle A B C is equal to the angle D E F, &c.," VOL. i. 6 82 OXFORD MEMORIES. could be learned by any one, how strange that two men of proved ability as well as good memory should not see the meaning of what young school-boys commonly understand. In re- lating this to Professor Eogers, a man of much experience as an examiner, he said, "I can easily believe it. With a candidate who gave up two books of Euclid, I once observed that the proposition was right by my figure, but he had circles for triangles, and his figure absurdly wrong. When I called his attention to it, he said, ' If you please, sir, I did not think we were required to learn the pictures ' ! " Palmer's schoolfellow Lowe was as widely known as any man of his day. " He would have been elected scholar of Trinity," said Mr. Bursar Smith, " but we perceived he was too near-sighted for the duty of marking the names in chapel." He was first and foremost at the Union Debating Society, and with a few others seceded and formed a club of their own. This gave occasion to a poem in Homeric Greek called Uniomachia ; it has recently been republished, but has no great merit ; the idea of this had been taken from a composition by Lowe, in Latin verse mixed with English, called Macaronic poetry. It was written in 1833, on the occasion of the visit of the Duchess LORD SHERBROOKES VERSES. 83 of Kent with the (then) Princess Victoria, escorted by Sir John Conroy. This piece of classical humour was much praised, and copies sent to every part of the world where Oxford men were to be found ; it began as follows : Dicite Pierides Musse mihi dicite Kentce Dutchess&m, Princesscpae simul Victoria, nostro Singntur versu, Conroyaunsque triumphus Et quam shout&T\int Undergraduates atque Magistri Et quantum dederit Vice Chancellor ipse refreshment. Sir John Conroy was made Doctor of Civil Law, which was still further hit at in the line, Non Lincoln's Inn ilium non Intima Templa tulerunt. After this some good Greek Homeric verses came from the pen of Dr. Scott, now Dean of Eochester. Macbride was then well-known as President of Magdalen Hall, now called Hertford College. They did well to change the name in my day suggestive of all that was low, vulgar and profligate truly the refuge of the destitute destitute of every desirable quality ; but with change of name, and under my old friend Mitchell, a very different state of things prevailed. Well, this Dr. Macbride's name was aptly classified as Parthenopasus. (Parthenos in Greek means a bride.) I remember a strange adventure of Lowe while an undergraduate. Old Allan Park was presiding 6* 84 OXFORD MEMORIES. as judge at the Oxford assizes, and with his usual testiness was complaining of every little noise made in court. Great was the confusion, and very sheepish were the looks of the clerk who represented the sheriff, when at last Park called out, " Don't stand there, sir, with your hands in your pockets ; go down at once among this ill- behaved crowd and keep order, or I'll commit you!" Not long after, the said officer thought he had done something in proof of his energy. He stood forward and said, "My lord, a man has been apprehended for making a disturbance in court and assaulting a constable." "Let him stand up here," said the judge. Immediately a shining white head was seen threading its way through the crowd, with the alleged assaulted officer in charge of its owner ; when a barrister quickly stood on a bench near and said just loud enough for me to hear, "My lord, this is a gentleman of University College, one of the most distinguished undergraduates in Oxford." " Yes, I daresay," said the judge, in a tone and manner which shewed how he meant to act ; and then he said roughly to the officer, " Well, sir, what have you to say ? " A SCENE " J^ COURT. 85 " Please, my lord, the prisoner was trying to get into this part of the court, and I prevented him." " Prevented him, indeed ! What right had you to prevent him ? Don't you see he is one of the University gentlemen? There, you have been admitting all the tag-rag, and those who ought to be admitted you keep out." "As to the assault, my lord," said Lowe, "since he is an old man and I am a young one, I should be ashamed to be supposed to have assaulted him. He made a grab at me as I was passing, and as I eluded him he fell." " Sir, you are discharged," whereupon Lowe improved the occasion and made for the best seat in the court, which an officer at once opened for him. I could not help being struck with the difference of the probable fate of rich and poor in old Park's hands, in his then mood and temper. CHAPTEE V. CONCERNING- COLLEGE EXAMINATIONS AND CERTAIN CANDIDATES KNOWN TO FAME. ADVERTING to the case of noted men who were plucked from carelessness and taking things too easily, two cases occur to me. Once the Dons at Wadham had a candidate supposed to be going so straight to a first class, and to be likely to do his college such honour, that the tutors waived their lectures, and quite a large company were on the way to the schools, when they met their champion coming back. He had been stopped in limine ; plucked for his divinity, the subject with which the viva voce examinations always began. My friend Dickenson, Scholar of Trinity, had put down his name for his " Great Go," when Short tried him with a few questions in divinity and soon exclaimed, " Why, Dickenson, you can't pass you must read your Bible thoroughly, and go up after the long vacation." About the same time a little book made its appearance, called " The Art of Pluck," being a parody on our Aristotelian studies, giving also TAKING THINGS TOO EASY. 87 instances of pluck answers. One very good one I remember was " The herald of Darius came to ask for not earth and water (a token of submission, earth being geen in Greek) but gin and water." To describe this essay were to copy it ; suffice it to say, it spread about the country as widely as Lowe's verses, and added much to the fame of its author, Caswall of Brasenose. This author was reading, as I was, with Jackson, who fully expected him to obtain the object of his ambition, a first class. But Caswall had made a too common mistake ; he thought men could be indoctrinated with divinity by the mere atmosphere of chapel, and as if the general knowledge attained without special study was sufficient. With some examina- tions this might be true, but when question after question, technical and scholastic, comes, a man feels wholly at a loss. Hayward Cox, then examiner, told me he never felt more pained for any man ; and at the end of his examination one answer, giving a Hebrew name as a guess for Eoman officer, appeared incredible for a man of Cas wall's attainments. With much compunction they allowed him to pass, but never before had they stretched a point so far. The question seriously arose Did not Caswall, finding he was doing too badly for a first class, 88 OXFORD MEMORIES. try to put his own art in requisition and to pluck himself, that he might have another trial for his first ? One thing I know ; he said to my friend French " They ought not to have passed me, I am very sorry that they did." Hay ward Cox was an experienced examiner, and a standing Coach for classmen, and was more communicative as to the examinations than most of his colleagues in the school. So I asked him what it was which seemed to cause a little excite- ment among, the examiners when I was in the schools. A man had given up his logic paper in a hurried and determined manner almost as soon as looked at. Something was written on it which seemed to make an impression on the examiners. "You mean the case of Jones of Jesus an impudent fellow ; we ought to have complained of him to his Principal. Jones was seen to look unutterable things at his set of logic questions, and at last he doubled up and emphatically creased the paper walked up with a very determined step, and in a very depreciatory manner gave in the paper to us, and left the schools. When we looked at it we found it endorsed as follows : " * Mr. Jones presents his compliments to the examiners and declines to trouble them any CHARLIE IN HIS ELEMENT. 89 further on this occasion. Mr. Jones would ex- press due deference to the examiners as deeply thinking men, but he cannot conceal- his unalter- able conviction that logic is all a pack of stuff.' " What made this still harder on Cox was that it was he who had set the paper, and it was a paper like logic run mad. So ill did it answer its purpose that two good men had to be examined with a more reasonable set of questions over again. During the paper work of this examination, in June 1836, our old friend Charlie was among our number. When he came out the first morning, he said to me, in his usual very reckless humour : " Do you think you have given up satisfactory answers? I don't know if I have, and what is more, I don't care a blast if I haven't. But there, is to be a meeting in the theatre this afternoon on the great question of the day, and they say no undergraduates are to be admitted. We'll try, though. Won't there be a shindy ! " " But," I said, " you'll be in the schools from two to five." " Never mind, I'll find time, all the same." That afternoon there was a shindy indeed. The doors were closed against not only the 90 OXFORD MEMORIES. undergraduates, but against the reporters for the press too, which these gentlemen did not like, so they set to work to excite the undergraduates, saying : " Gentlemen, you have a right to go in. Surely you have too much pluck to submit to this. We would force the door if we were in your place." This was soon done. Charlie led the way. The men filled the gallery, and about four o'clock Charlie came into the schools with a dilapidated gown, a very flushed face, and a short poker hidden under his coat, and made the best of the time that remained for his examination papers. There was one examiner in my recollection very greedy of pupils, rather a silly and a leaky vessel. No one accused him of intentional un- fairness, but his pupils, when sharp fellows, could guess about the line the examinations would take. There was G of Trinity, who came out nearer a first class than any of his friends ever dreamed of. There was C D , a very sharp practitioner, and, though a very clever fellow, also un- expectedly in the First, and another, P C , whose essay was said to have been one of the best ever seen in the schools. No wonder, the subject had been guessed and predicted from being too frequently dwelt on by the lecturer. OXFORD EXAMINATIONS. 91 This my friend C L told me, as also of a likely part of logic, and also of a part of Tacitus worth especial attention all which surmises proved to be true ! But this examiner was the exception. There must be one weak character out of so many. Still, in spite of this instance of mere weakness, as to the fairness of the schools generally no one in my time ever breathed the least doubt of it. As to the wisdom of the examination, I could not always say the same. The style of examina- tion was not twice the same. At one time it was in favour of men of hard verbal memory, who at another would have failed before a more discursive system, requiring a wider course of reading. Again, the questions were too few. No man could know his sixteen books (required for a First), in every part ; but if he had many questions from which to select, he could not fail to show knowledge, whereas bad luck alone might ruin his chance, with, say only three questions in such a book as Herodotus. At the present time a man takes up his Poets and Histories for " Mods," and can attend exclu- sively to his sciences afterwards, "for Greats," while we used to venture on sixteen books all at once ; but as to Honours, there was a simplicity 92 OXFORD MEMORIES. about the class list which exists not now. Soon after the alteration in the schools for Honours, an old college tutor said, " I hardly understand now what a man's class is worth : when you tell me such a man has taken a first in Mods and a second in Greats, I cannot sum him up as I used to do as a First Class man or a Second." The expectations formed of promising men used to be very frequently disappointed. The man of sound reading and reflecting mind is not always the man to make the best show with a number of written questions. Quick and superficial men with good memory here will often appear to more advantage. Cardinal Newman, was pronounced when an undergraduate at Trinity College, by Mitchell, an unquestioned judge and his tutor, to be sure of his first class he came out only in the third ! Shortly after he stood for his Oriel fellowship ; after the first day's examination, as Isaac Williams, his great friend, told me, Newman met Mr. Short and said he should retire ; he had set down a few stray ideas for the essay and could do no more. Short per- suaded him to continue, if only for practice ; the result proved that these stray ideas showed the man at once. Dr. Whateley, at that time writing his book on Logic at Oriel, used to say, " I look to LORD SHERBROOKE. 93 the promise to what is in a man, and what he will grow to ; just as I choose for my kennel a good, loose-jointed puppy." The third-class men often beat the first for the Oriel fellowship, just as, at Cambridge, the second or third wrangler beats the senior for the Smiths' prize. A fellow of Oriel said, they took rather a pride in not only disregarding but in reversing the verdict of the schools. In the schools I have known the second-class men in science superior to the first at some examinations, and fail because the minute detail of Thucydides or of a decade of Livy was not to their taste. These men would take precedence in a fellowship ex- amination. Lord Sherbrooke was pronounced by his tutors certain of a first in mathematics and not certain in classics ; he came out first in the latter, and second in the former. What was said of him at first of course as a joke, has been repeated since as a fact that being so near-sighted he rubbed out with his nose the figures made by his pen, and thereby lost his chance in mathematics. I am afraid the fellowships are worth much less than they used to be, from 200 to 300 a year. Some little conversation with an ex-bursar showed me how, even before these days of great depreciation of land, a fellowship might, from obvious causes, be worth much less at one time 94 OXFORD MEMORIES. than another. The college estates, like others, imply farm buildings and other subjects of annual expense. Some bursars would put off the evil day for such deductions, and leave an accumulation of necessary work to be paid for from the revenue of their successors. Magdalen College has City property. Dr. Eouth was told that this was much under-let, and more could be made of it. His advice was worthy of his years and experience. " Our fellowships are good enough already, let some one else have the benefit. With rack rents our profits will seem to be so large that our college will excite unpleasant notice ; there may be a commission, and we shall lose some of what we have." I remember, at Trinity College, a rare instance of liberality. My friend Burningham, with Legh Claughton, the pre- sent Bishop of St. Albans, were invited one morn- ing by the bursar to breakfast. On such occasions you always sent your own commons of bread and butter and the hospitable don supplied the tea-pot and an egg a-piece. Great was their surprise to have a cheque for thirty-five pounds each, as an exhibition, I suppose from the superabundance of the college funds. Scholarships and fellowships were founded for the promotion of learning and the education of FELLOWSHIPS, WHEN BENEFICIAL. 95 poor scholars. Even a nobleman at Christ Church benefits by the charity and endowments of former days ; he pays less for a suite of rooms than he would pay for the humblest lodging. Scholarships act as an incentive to schoolmasters. At Shrews- bury school the names of the Kennedys and others, with their respective college honours, may be seen on tablets on the walls. College honours are the best stimulus and the best school advertisement. So far they are beneficial ; otherwise, as " the whole need not the physician," so, as we before observed, those youths who can afford instruction good enough to win a scholarship might do with- out one. In " teaching the young idea how to shoot," there is too much " shooting for the pot," especially at Cambridge. As to fellowships, I question whether they do not as much harm as good. If they tide some industrious men over early difficulties till they are fairly launched and better able to stand the buffets of life, with others they act as an insidious temptation to rest on their oars at the very time they should put forth all their powers. Lord Eldon, who had risen from the home of a coal-fitter to be Lord Chancellor of England, having once an application, pending the decision of a suit in Chancery, to make an order for an allowance of two hundred a year to a 96 OXFORD MEMORIES. young man, asked if the petitioner were in court, and if so, to stand forward. " Young man," said he, " I am asked to do a very serious thing for you. If I had had two hundred a year granted me at your age I should not be where I am now." Such prizes as fellowships fall in just at that critical time of life when the zest for pleasure is greatest and the habits of self-denial least. How often have I seen men grown grey in idling about Common rooms and College gardens a life which is only not a life of luxury because it is a law of nature that there shall be no healthy appetite un- less you work for it, and that a Castle of Indolence shall be the worst quarters you can have. " Life," said Lord Beaconsfield, " is either anxiety or ennui anxiety, if you do take an interest in affairs, and ennui if you feel none." As I walk round New College Gardens, I cannot but reflect on old Dash, one of the senior fellows. His life was a caution to a man. He lived a kind of smoking and deshabille existence and always seemed bored and miserable, most vividly exemplifying the truth that " Man doth not live by bread alone," or, as this was expressed to me in homely words by a pauper in a workhouse, " If you were here, sir, with nothing to do, you would find that a man may feel about ready to hang himself all the same that he QUEER CHARACTERS. 97 has, as you say, a bed to lie on and three meals a day." Yes, the old college fellow, high and dry and stranded, as it were, while some ten youthful generations have successively passed by him, has felt the truth of what Bishop Butler, the author of the Analogy, said when he divided life into " activi- ties and passivities " We are capable of the plea- sures and satisfactions of active duties ten hours in the day for one hour in which we can enjoy mere excitement, and being acted on. Idle men try their passivities too hard ; the human lyre is out of tune and the blase existence of that senior fellow exemplifies the result. Old Dash, in and about New College, had two rather notable contemporaries. This was at a time when no New College man was publicly examined for his degree, and when a small number of Wykehamists had the garden for archery to themselves. One was John Green, who took care of the New College horses and let out tandems a very handy man for the wilder class of gownsmen. One day Billy Mills had arranged an elopement with the pretty daughter of an organist in Holywell, but was checkmated in the very first move, the lady's trousseau, done up in a towel, having been thrown out of her window, and caught by her VOL. i. 7 98 OXFORD MEMORIES. offended papa's hands as he was standing on the watch instead of by those of some traitorous maid- of-all-work. " That's all because Mr. Mills didn't come to me," said John Green. " If gentlemen will do those silly things it isn't my particular line of business to edicate them better. All I say is ' First of all keep straight, but if you must go crooked don't get found out.' That 'ere servant girl, with only ten pounds a year wages and use of the parlour teapot, was to be paid only two bob for her trouble ! 'Twasn't likely, when she could get five bob and more for telling. In them sort of jobs you must always bid higher than any one else is likely to." The other notable New College character was O Tom Winch, who came up to Oxford with a reputation for making Latin verses, and catching rats faster than any other boy at Winchester. He was a very quaint character. His green coat and brass buttons contrasted marvellously with his black or rather rusty gown he was always to be found about John Green's stable, and like Hudibras, "wore but one spur." In those days all men dressed, in the afternoon at least, as gentlemen turn out in Hyde Park in the London season. As to the flannels and loose deshabille we see now in the High Street, even though there QUEER CHARACTERS OF NEW COLLEGE. 99 are ladies to meet there now, you would as soon have expected to see it in Bond Street. Dogs and horses formed the very furniture of Tom's mind ; there seemed hardly room for anything else save slang, ad libitum. One day he was showing the pictures in his college hall to a party of visitors, and pointed out the figures in the grand picture of the Nativity as follows : " This is reckoned one of the finest pictures in Oxford. There, you see, are the Magi, there Mary and Joseph, there in the manger is the little Jesus, and there's the bull terrier." On another occa- sion, when returning with a friend rather late, and rather the worse, from a wine party, a proctor stopped him and said, " This is highly improper ; I must take cognisance of this, gentlemen." Tom, fixing a pair of glaring eyes upon him, replied, " What would you take for your cognisance with- out the ' g,' old boy ? " The proctor passed on, and, perhaps from the absurdity of the scene, decided to take no more notice of the strange interview. Such a man as old Dash in my days must nearly have led a monkish existence ; of female society there then was none. The sight of a petticoat in the High Street was rare. It seemed quite con- traband. Even a Mrs. President took her exercise 7* 100 OXFORD MEMORIES. in some private garden ; and when any under- graduate had sisters or lady-friends on a visit to see Oxford, a breakfast in College rooms with ladies was something to boast of, and at the time of the Commemoration, Oxford seemed newly populated altogether. The many villas about Oxford now represent quite another state of society, and since ladies seem a providential invention to humanize gentlemen, you would hardly find, now-a-days, so dry a fossil as old Dash. Most of the fellows of New College eventually succeeded to livings, though sometimes so late that their college habits proved too stiff and rigid for parish work ! Oxford is a sphere of its own, and the worst place for studying rustic nature. When some young man spoke of study- ing " the Fathers," an old-fashioned rector said rather bluntly, " You had much better study ' the mothers,' or how to take care of the old women and children in a 'parish." One of my friends waited for a living and a lady, and realized his vision of rural and domestic happiness only after sixteen years ! Old Mr. Beresford of Kibworth, the author of a strange book, once with a large circulation, but now rarely seen, the " Miseries of Human Life," WAITING FOR DEAD MEN'S SHOES. 101 held that living of Merton College till nearly eighty years of age. Once he saw some of the junior fellows prospecting, and said : " Walk in, gentlemen, walk in and take stock, not only of the parsonage, but of the present incumbent. Most happy at all times to do anything to oblige you except die." It is a sad life waiting for dead men's shoes. My venerable old neighbour, Mr. Wickens of Blank church, bought a next presentation of a rector of eighty, who lived till ninety-five. All his calculations of the pro- babilities of human life proved delusive, and as to the doctors, he said they knew no more of a man's constitution than so many idiots ; and in these fifteen years he became completely soured, and talked like one of the many much injured men. At last the old Eector died and was buried, and almost the first week a couple, who came to be married, complained to the new rector that he had kept them ten minutes wait- ing ! " Ten minutes, indeed," he replied, " why look at that tomb ; there lies a man who kept me waiting fifteen years." But to revert to my own college. Not the least notable of my contemporaries at Trinity College was Charles Clarke, the " Gentleman in Black " of Baily's Sporting Magazine, and author of the 102 OXFORD MEMORIES. " Dunce of the Family," and other popular novels. He was a very good and clever fellow at college, which character he bore through life, together with his college sobriquet as Monkey Clarke. He had rather a simious form of countenance, and since we had White Clarke and Black Clarke at the same time, we were obliged to find a discriminating cognomen for our friend. He lived and died at Esher, with a large estate in beautiful daughters and a small estate in pupils ; the pupils with the press constantly behind him, I have no doubt killed him. Brain- work kills, though the malady is felt in the body ; but whatever the cause, I, when I come to speak of old chums of fifty years since, find few who have not passed away : for, as Sydney Smith said, " After seventy I felt like a man in battle, quite prepared to see my old comrades drop fast around me." Now the world would persist in giving Clarke a noble, if not an ignoble, parentage. Only last month I had to argue with two of his best friends that the story was absurd and an anachronism. It was believed that he was the son of the celebrated Mrs. Clarke, whose connection with the Duke of York caused an historical scandal in 1810 ; but our friend was not the first of the name credited to the duke, for there was a Cantab Clarke, whose AN OLD POLITICAL SCANDAL. 103 name caused to be set afloat the same story. Such was Mrs. Clarke's influence with the duke, that she established a regular agency for the sale of com- missions, and other kinds of preferment too, at a given tariff. I have read her examination before a committee of the House of Lords ; she had applications for her interest with the duke for deaneries and even bishoprics, though probably from dupes. As to church preferment, a letter was read in which the Duke of York evidently had procured for one of her clerical friends a pulpit to preach before the king. Some doubted that the duke had any guilty knowledge of the way his appointments proved lucrative to his mistress, but as there's nothing for nothing in this world, no one could doubt that if he had no guilty knowledge, he had at least a guilty ignorance. The Duke of York resigned his position as Commander-in-Chief during the Parliamentary inquiry, but was after- wards reinstated by his brother, the Prince of "Wales, during the first Eegency. But how did the report of Charles Clarke's parentage originate, when he was too young for the story to be true not born till at least five years after the separation which provoked Mrs. Clarke to supply Col. Wardle with information on which he based his charges 104 OXFORD MEMORIES. against the duke ? CHarles Clarke had a painting of the Duke of York in his room at College ; the duke was also known to Clarke's family. My friend Eobinson, reading the story of the duke's examination, suggested the relationship, and this thoughtless surmise has passed to this day as a fact. Mr. and Mrs. Clarke, his father and mother, were well known to my friend the Eev. M. Kinsey. Mr. Clarke was a stockbroker. I had been speaking of the uproarious set in. college ; but with Charles Clarke I must enter on a more rational class. Such were the late Sir Crawley Boevey, Hunt, Pulteney, and others, whose fathers could afford to let them keep horses and hunt men who did not pretend to be studious or hard-reading men ; but who went quietly through the academical course and had little difficulty with their degrees. Sir Crawley was a good hand at the thimble rig. I heard that he once played it successfully with the end of a roll for the pea, and three breakfast cups for the thimble. Being always fond of knowing whatever was circulating, I pressed him to teach me the trick ; but for a time in vain. He said he could not tell what trade he might sink to, and I should be a likely man to spoil it ; but at last, being in a hurry to Latinize his weekly piece of Addison's " Spectator," he made a bargain with / LEARN THE THIMBLE-RIG. 105 me to teach me thimble-rigging in exchange for Latin-writing for the rest of the term. Not long after, in London, at a party in Gray's Inn, I was asked to manipulate ; and crossed Holborn to a large draper's shop and asked for three thimbles. The venerable grey-haired master replied by saying, "Sir, I wish you would show me the trick." I replied, " I have said nothing of any trick," but he said : " No, no, but you do not look like an ordinary customer for three copper thimbles." I soon began with the thimbles, and I bet him the value of the thimbles and won them ! which I told him was the best moral lesson I could give him. But afterwards I gave him a little information in return. He said, " This would have been worth more than the threepence when I was young ; but I am too old now to believe money is made as easily as it looked at this game at Epsom." When I returned to my legal friends they were delighted, but assured me I was in the old shopkeeper's power, and he could send me to the treadmill. But Boevey reminds me of the ups and downs of life. He had a friend who seemed to me, and perhaps at that time really was, in circumstances as flourishing as Boevey himself, and with as bright a future, named Bout ell of Oriel. 106 OXFORD MEMORIES. Twenty years after Sir Crawley found his old college chum in Gloucester workhouse and did no little to alleviate his misery! How could this happen ? With family and friends who once could afford a man a University education, how could any man sink so low ? In my experience, which is quite long enough to have seen wild oats sown, and even a second crop spring up, such cases have been few and far between, and generally with men who drank their senses away, or with some men, more to be pitied, who were born with little senses at all. Canon EL, who was tutor at Cambridge and pro- fessor at Haileybury, told me that notwithstanding the difficulties of life, in all his experience with young men, he had never known any man so utterly degraded, unless he had exhausted the patience of his friends by most reckless conduct. I can say the same. But as to those born without sense, too little allowance is commonly made for them. " Have you thanked God for the use of your reason to-day ? " said a lunatic in a lucid interval ; it is not every man out of an asylum who has the full use of it. The Micawber temperament is a very common one. Such men are always hoping that " something may turn up," instead of working for it the men of whom Adam Smith remarked " that the world WILD BOYS. 107 is not in favour of men with a sanguine dis- position." Our spirits and hopeful views of things rise and fall with the barometer, at the mercy even of atmospheric influences. We have all observed the Irish as compared with the Scotch character ; the Irishman will be happy on what he calls a hundred a year " Though, faith, it's only for one year." Paddy seems as if born with half a bottle of champagne in him, and living always in a state of effervescence and hallucination to the day of his death. How, to such a man, can you apply the usual standard of prudence ; how can you wonder if a certain per centage goes to the dogs, especially when the said effervescence becomes yet more sparkling from a friendly glass, for it wants but a drop to scatter the little wit which is fully at command ? Boutell was the victim of both shortcomings. A youth with whom I was reasoning one day said, "You say, sir, 'All would be well, if I would only think.' Why, that is all the difficulty, for in jolly company I can't think." The same was the case with Wing called Jobber Wing at Eton. The fellows heard his father was a cattle agent, and as the boys are not complimen- tary, they said he was a pig-jobber and called him Jobber Wing ever after. Jobber sank rapidly 108 OXFORD MEMORIES. from bad to worse and before lie was twenty-five years of age, Lord Eobert B , crossing over by Oxford Circus, heard " Broom, your honour," and, in a familiar tone, " Surely Bob will give me something, for old acquaintance sake." "Why, who the deuce are you ? " " Jobber Wing, Lux- more's House, in the fifth form with you at Eton." Some words passed Jobber said nothing was to be done. He had made his bed and must lie on it. Lord B dropped a sovereign and went his way. Nothing can indeed be done in such cases, for even if not " tied and bound by the chains " of bad habits, a poor gentleman is indeed a puzzle to the charitable. In business, a gentleman not qualified to be the master is too great a trial to one's feelings to treat with as the man. He looks starving and wretched where a tradesman's son is cheerful and contented, and no one can endure to deal with him. At the time of which I am speaking honours could be taken only in classics and mathe- matics. Dr. Gaisford, of Christ Church, was not very encouraging as to mathematical studies. He once said to a friend of mine, " Oh, mathematics well, they will do to keep vou out of mischief." Save with a view to MEN OF A BETTER SORT. 109 honours, very few men were likely to go far in mathematics. However valuable for the formation of mind, for the information not one man in twenty thousand ever lives to want more than an Equation, if as much. Strange to say, in point of utility, classics are commonly depreciated, mathematics never. Men of other tastes com- monly took refuge in politics, attended the Union, and read little but the newspapers. We were much at a loss for the publications of the da}^ Whitter, opposite Trinity, had a little shop with a few novels to lend, a poor collection. There was then no Mudie to help librarians with small capital, and a bookseller assured me that, however strange, a good circulating library could not be made to pay in Oxford. I have sincere pleasure in dwelling on the histories of the wiser class of men, because there are certain publications which do a positive injury to society, showing but the worst part of college life, and that part shamefully exaggerated. They fill the minds of schoolboys with examples of profligacy and give a taste for dissipation ; and instead of things honourable and of good report, in which neither Oxford nor Cambridge would be found wanting on a fair comparison of good and bad together, scenes of folly and of vice are 110 OXFORD MEMORIES. crowded together and set forth in flaming colours, as an average sample of the whole. And why ? Because forsooth the minds of those writers who condescend, or are fit to minister to the vulgar palate, have an affinity to vice, but not to virtue, and because there are fifty readers of the lives of profligates to one admirer of such worthies as those enshrined in the pages of good old Isaac Walton. Let us forget such scenes ; they have as little claim to the title of Life in Oxford as a certain Tom and Jerry history of cockfights, the prize-ring, sporting taverns, and the lowest dens of thieves and drunkards, deserved to be called Life in London. Stand for a moment in Cheapside ; see the unwearied stream of cabs, omnibuses, merchants' waggons, and vehicles of all kinds ; picture to yourself the establishment, the business, and the commerce of which each must be the representa- tive and the product. Look at the double stream on each side of the way of busy passers to and fro, with quick step and contracted brow, each absorbed in his own enterprises ; and when you have formed some kind of estimate of the count- less thousands engaged in the honourable duties of commercial life, then ask yourself, Where are the brutes and bullies, the madmen and the GOOD SETS AS WELL AS BAD. Ill profligates, whom many are so far imposed on as to believe the chief actors on the vast stage of London Life ? No less erroneous are the im- pressions commonly received of our Universities. It is not to be denied that London has its thieves, its rakes, and roues of every grade, from the titled swindler and adulteress to the lowest pilferer and prostitute of St. Giles's. It is not to be denied that in Oxford there are those who glory in their shame, buy that for which they cannot pay, keep company with stage-coachmen, and seem to think it the height of gentility and manliness to affect the language of the boor and the appetites of the brute. But look about you as you pass through that City of Colleges, and ask, Where are they, and what is the proportion they bear to the many by whom the very mention of such practices are frowned away in disgust? Compare those of academical education with the other members of society, and then say whether their manners and taste are such as to argue that the exaggerated excesses of the Universities are the exception or the rule. Doubtless, youth is the age of inex- perience and folly, of strong temptations to commit error, and utter carelessness to conceal it. This is the case t all the world over, and not in Oxford only. Temptations are not local. 112 OXFORD MEMORIES. They are more from within than from without ; and who will deny that the same number of young men would give quite as much cause for scandal if scattered about the country, as if collected together in colleges. For, though large societies of the young engender a spirit of excite- ment which encourages slighter excesses, we must not forget that they also originate a public opinion and a sentiment by which the more serious failings are kept in check. Whenever, therefore, we hear of defying proc- tors or tutors, being at the mercy of dunning creditors, and using childish tricks to evade them, climbing college walls, mixing with low company, and being countenanced in intemperance of any kind, we shall do well to consider that the persons who amuse us with such stories have only picked up a tale of the extravagances of some silly fellow in an unguarded moment, and that such practices are known to the majority only to be laughed at and despised. CHAPTER VI. A COMMON CHAPTER OF COLLEGE LIFE, WITH BATHER UNCOMMON INCIDENTS. As to the Union, Gladstone and Sidney Herbert had made their mark there, and done much to give a character to that which was then a recent establishment. Soon after, Eoundell Palmer, Eickards, Cardwell, Lowe and also Ward who afterwards seceded to Eome, were first and fore- most. Lowe, I think, was the best speaker. But there was soon a " Cave " party there. Lowe and others, disagreeing with the ruling of the chair- man, started, as before said, a lesser Union of their own ; the right to belong to both at the same time was questioned, but after a great contest they prevailed. This contest it was which was celebrated in the Uniomachia, to which I have before alluded. Of course, it is amusing to recall these days, and the diatribes so boldly uttered against men and measures, which now seem so ridiculous, reminding one too much of what John Bunyan said of men, "Who having got a notion by the end, were twice as positive as nine men who could render a reason." VOL. i. 8 114 OXFORD MEMORIES. We had also smaller clubs in each college we named them Decades of ten men each. The plan was to meet and compare notes after reading on some specified subject. This was very useful, and I can confidently recommend this practice to my young friends. At one time I was reading Herodotus with three or four friends, and we rarely met without trying to puzzle each other with some ingenious question. I remember one day meeting Le Breton. He was primed, as I expected, with something Herodotean, and said, " Why, what an indefatigable traveller Herodotus must have been. He not only travelled about fifteen hundred miles from north to south, and as far from east to west, but once, in Egypt, he went back some two hundred miles to ask one question more from the priests ! Fancy a tourist now retracing his steps over a pathless country, from London to York, to ask one question more of the Dean and Chapter." " Yes," said Prichard, " and can you tell me how much you and I, even, are interested in the defeat of Xerxes ? Had he con- quered at Marathon the Persians would have swept over, not only Greece, but Eome and all Europe. We should have worn all the toggery of Orientals, and worshipped the sun at the present hour." " Yes," said Vowler, " to follow A SAD TAKE IN. 115 the i ifs ' of history would land us in hypothetical positions queer indeed ; for Gibbon says, ' but for the check of the Turks at the Battle of Chalons, we might have had here at Oxford a Mahommedan lecturer to a set of circumcised students.' " Poor Vowler ! Had he read men, or rather women, a little later in life, with as shrewd a mind as he read books at Oxford, he would have been saved from a very ridiculous and a very critical position. Vowler's story must be told. Vowler was one morning walking near the Serpentine, when he saw, simply and neatly dressed, a lady of an interesting appearance, attended by her maid. Some glances were exchanged, and the next morning he met the same couple again, and perceived a look of recognition from the maid, The next morning he went again, and found the maid alone, and had a little talk with her about her interesting mistress. He was told she was a lady of very large property, at that time in a state of melancholy, because an imperious father was bent on controlling her affections in favour of some fashionable roue of his acquaintance. Still further, Vowler was no little flattered to hear that the mistress was very much interested in him. On this hint, 8* 116 OXFORD MEMORIES. he found some pretence for speaking, and eventually of having morning after morning an agreeable walk with the lady, until love and affection were the topic. No sooner was this corner turned, than Vowler happened to meet her apparently in deep distress. She said, with many tears, that she had come to an open rupture with her father, and was afraid to return to her home. Pity is allied to love. Vowler became at once her champion and her friend, and proposed to improve the occasion, and to start for Gretna Green that very day. When once started on the London and North- Western Bailwajr, Vowler began to feel that little disenchantment which want of money is the most likely of all things to produce. How could he contrive to cash a cheque ? But, meanwhile, he had entered into jovial conversation with an open- hearted Irish M.P., Mr. O'B , one of O'Connell's tail, and was after a time encouraged by the genial character of this fellow-traveller to tell his story and his difficulty. Mr. O'B , replied that he was at all times most happy to help his neigh- bour at a push, especially on so interesting an occasion ; but, as a man of the world, Mr. Vowler would not be offended at his asking first to have a little talk with the lady at the Wolverhampton FOUND OUT! "117 station. All proving satisfactory, Mr. O'B said they must consent to stop, and come with him to his house near Crewe, to get the cash required. Arrived there, Mrs. O'B also was fired with a touch of the romantic, and kindly added to the lady's trousseau, which at that time consisted only of one pocket handkerchief in a reticule. From Gretna Green, imagine the fond couple at the father's house, old General V., in Oxfordshire. Homer represents Bellerophon as entertained three whole days by Proetus, before his ideas of hospi- tality allowed him to talk of business ; so some little time passed away before the General spoke of mediating between the lady and her offended father, or of conferring with her solicitor, or of other matters naturally suggested by the occasion. Time after time, these suggestions were waived, or met with some lame excuse, till what at first seemed strange, now seemed suspicious. At last as the letter-bag one morning was emptied on the breakfast-room table, one young lady ex- claimed, " How remarkable ! She has never had one letter yet ! " The game was now up. Inquiry and at last a confession proved that she had no father, cruel or riot cruel, and no character ; and the supposed servant was the same class as herself ! 118 OXFORD MEMORIES. Alas ! poor Yowler ; and was he linked indis- solubly to this artful creature for life ? The lawyers gave little encouragement. The case was not new in law. Having sworn at the altar to " take her for better for worse " this disposed of the moral objection ; while the words " for richer for poorer " disposed of all pleas as to the money she pretended to possess. Some one suggested that the plea, " for better for worse " was all fair, but here was a case of all worse and no better ; but my poor friend's case was desperate, till some one said, " Set a detective at work, perhaps it is not the first time she has played this trick." This proved to be true ; and Yowler though the laugh was so loud for some time that he left his regiment and shunned the paths of men was able to get rid of the bad bargain, at once a happier and a wiser man. Let me describe my first entrance on college life. Parents may be as ignorant now of the steps to be taken in putting a name down as was my father. We walked about from college to college, receiving everywhere the same reply, " Full for two or three years." "My son is very steady," said my father. " They are all steady till they come here," replied the Dean of Exeter. At length, some tutor went so far out of his way as COLLEGES, BETTER AND WORSE. 119 to say that in any desirable college introductions were essential. On this hint, I remembered Dr. Parsons was father of a schoolfellow, and with his assistance I was soon entered at Trinity, as one of the desirable colleges. As I am speaking of fifty years since, and not of colleges as they now are, I may record that Queen's stood very low, so low that many would not visit a Queen's man. The reason was, that there were many north countrymen there at that time, a race far inferior to the civilisation of the south. To Wadham, a prejudice, slowly wearing out, still attached still the connection was not good, and the style of men was inferior. Pem- broke, and yet more exclusively, Jesus, had Welshmen, also to our ideas but semi-civilised. I can confidently say, the tone and style, to last for a life, which marked the men of these less desirable colleges was well worth considering when compared with that which characterized other colleges. Christchurch, University and Brasenose stood highest, though the latter had a gambling set ; and, even now, there is a tradition of a certain club, too nearly synonymous with the queer title of a recent German work, " Letters from Hell." There was a son of the celebrated Crock- ford, a rich sporting man, and the son of Nugee, as 120 OXFORD MEMORIES. celebrated as the late Mr. Poole the tailor, and, ludicrously enough, I remember a friend who after using the common expression, " sitting upon needles," was much afraid he should be supposed to have made a personal allusion to Nugee. New College, Magdalen, and All Souls were all close boroughs. All Souls had only fellows and four bible clerks as undergraduates. A fellow of Trinity was paid for lecturing them. No one in All Souls would condescend to be tutor. How Mr. Hughes, in his " Tom Brown at Oxford," could make a point of the cruelty of snubbing a poor bible clerk I cannot imagine. For besides these four, and one or two others, bible clerks did not exist. New College had only Wykehamists, and at Magdalen there were only a dozen Demies. All the other colleges were in good repute. Oriel and Balliol were colleges distinguished for reading- men, though, from a good selection of scholars, Trinity bore away more prizes than any college, in proportion to its numbers. It also turned out most red coats, in which they fraternised with Merton, where my friend Hogg and a few. others were known as " the swell mob of Merton," a name which may give an idea of rather a fast, though a small college. Society now has become so little exclusive HOW I ENTER TRINITY. 121 in Oxford as well as elsewhere, that these characteristics of the several colleges may no longer prevail. As to exclusiveness, honour and solvency, the mere name of a gownsman com- manded credit at every shop, " but," said an old bookseller, " we are obliged to be more cautious now, and to ask for references or make inquiries, much the same as in other towns." Eventually my name was down at Trinity. " Are you prepared," said Mr. Short, " for some expense for your son ? " " For any reasonable expense." " Then you must not calculate on less than 200 a year." He afterwards in conversa- tion remarked, " I prefer to be explicit ; but I do meet with some great fools. One father replied he wished his son to keep high society ; and in his first term I found a regiment of champagne bottles outside that son's door." Champagne was rarely seen in those days, so of course 200 a year did not go far with the hopeful youth. After a year I had notice to come up for matriculation, that is, to be taken under the wing of Alma mater after a preliminary examination. This examination in those days was at Trinity much lighter than at present. How my friend Wratislaw passed I cannot tell. He had tried at Exeter College, and, after confessing he could not 122 OXFORD MEMORIES. write Latin, unless lie were allowed a dictionary, the tutor soon arrived at an unfavourable con- clusion ; still by some accident he passed at Trinity. We had no divinity in this examination ; more is the pity. Old Drinkard, as we commonly called him, though from Eugby in Dr. Arnold's day, did not know the old Testament from the New. I remember Moore, also from Winchester, equally at a loss, searching in vain for Isaiah " in the wrong part," as he said, which wrong part was the New Testament ! Boys at a public school were supposed, it seemed, to know enough scripture from their nursery lessons, and that perhaps would account for my poor friend " the Count," who never knew a mother's care, being utterly ignorant. Still at matriculation we all were required to sign the Articles, though never lectured in them till two years after. Obviously this early examination should be, though too often it was not, strict enough to prevent any youth from wasting time in hopes of a degree when he was too ignorant to be likely ever to pass. Eooms were now appointed me. For the first time in my life to have an establishment of my own was quite a delightful sensation. I had also about an eighth part of the services of a bed- maker, yclept a scout. Old Budd, who had seen THE COLLEGE " SCOUT." 123 many generations of freshmen pass off in bachelors' gowns, a man with much useful in- formation, was assigned to me. He said how he remembered our then President as an under- graduate, nor could he forget that he once had a glass of gin for paying a biU for him, " Because," said the tradesman, " it comes like a windfall ; it is a six years' tic ! " Glasses, crockery, cruets, &c., Budd was ready to sell me a set that, more or less supplemented, had been passed on from generation to generation. Twenty years after I left college my name was identified on my copper kettle, all such things being a legacy to the scout. Having once bought one set of crockery and glass, no one at all wide awake ever bought any more. Your scout never made any difficulty in finding enough at what paid him so well, with perqui- sites a breakfast or a wine party. He borrowed, as he said, of your friends on the same staircase. The truth was the scouts lent to each other and we knew nothing of it. In many respects we lived like brothers, very much with community of goods, community, that is, where all were good fellows, but there are men who sponge on their friends everywhere. Alex, for instance, was noted for taking all and returning nothing. He once sent to 124 OXFORD MEMORIES. a freshman to lend him his- ham ; he would not trouble him, only he had a breakfast party ! Much as we at first enjoy the independence of rooms to ourselves, we soon miss the family circle, and yearn for society. To " send your commons to my room," meant, to chum for breakfast, the inviter finding little but the eggs and teapot ; and very agreeable these homely hours used to be. Sometimes you would afterwards construe the lecture together. If you did not know where it began, your scout would be sent to ask, and bring back as pat as possible, perhaps, " Medea of Euri- pides, sir, the chorus after the long speech of Jason." From long practice the scouts were quite familiar with classical names and terms. This missing of your family circle, in the loneli- ness of college rooms, led also to frequent wine parties. For, after animated conversation in hall, you did not like to separate from a merry set scampering away to the rooms of the man who had invited " to wine," and to mope away in your own rooms alone, though this involved expense beyond the 200 a year. Nor was this all ; you were soon committed to a certain " set." Oxford and college life is life in miniature ; for in the world at large we are all committed to our " set," and find our- selves not altogether free agents, but at the mercy TANDEMS NOT ALLOWED. 125 of our social circle and its public opinion to do as others do or retire altogether. So an expensive set involved expensive habits as to wine and enter- tainments ; nor did your expense end there. You felt very slow unless you joined, to some extent at least, in their rides and tandems. Tandems were forbidden, as also were gigs or " buggies " near the end of my time, about 1836, and then they were only allowed with the proctor's leave, but this leave merely involved a note to the proctor, sent by the hostler when you ordered the gig. To be seen in a tandem was penal. Proctors would lie in wait for you on your return, perhaps by Magdalen Bridge, though some had a leader put on and taken off clear of Oxford. Not so Maclane. He heard that proctors were waiting, so he took off and hid under the seat his hat and coat, and tucked up his sleeves and drove right by the two proctors, personating and being mistaken for the hostler. As to hospitalities, I could hardly manage with- out a breakfast party and wine party of some numbers once a term, or perhaps a supper party. As to our breakfast parties, our tables would have astonished our families at home, beefsteaks, kidneys and broiled fowls, were dishes quite customary. But this was at an end after the President had, as before said, shied Charlie Lane's expected breakfast 126 OXFORD MEMORIES. into the shrubbery, and we were limited to the cold meat from the buttery. Of this rule I was very glad, as were men generally ; it reduced our ex- penses ; we could not be deemed stingy, though the breakfast was cheap. Wine and supper parties were expensive ; there was no cheap wine in those days, though the Oxford black-strap was an exe- crable substitute for port. Alex used to say, " Now you shall have a glass of the Old Admiral ;" he would wish us to suppose that it was fifty years in bottle, got up by the divers from the Eoyal George, but we found him out, and abused his economy loudly. At supper egg-flip, made of egg and sherry hot, and bishop, of port mulled with lemon and spice, were concocted for us by the Common Eoom man. Supper parties led to much excess, and were most uproarious. A great part of Trinity lay remote from the rooms of the tutors ; when near we were obliged to be cautious as to the noise we made. I have seen a party of a dozen men, some quite drunk and the rest not quite sober. But at that time it was not generally so discreditable to be drunk as it is now ; some boasted of it as manly. After my first term I drew off from this set, or I should have been ruined, having become intimate with reading men, with Prichard, Lee, and a few others of the best AMATEUR HIGHWAYMEN. 127 scholars of the day. Still, I found it necessary to act with discretion, and to preserve an appear- ance of good fellowship, and an accommodating spirit. So my rooms were soon known as a sure " find " for a cup of tea for any solitary straggler at late hours, or for a quiet glass for one or two, when there was no party in college. While you continued in a regular set, men used to " chaff," and resent your absence, as if you were bound to be social, and to keep things going. Of this there was an amusing instance at New College. Some men, just returned from hunting, were disappointed in finding two of their set bent on an Abingdon ball instead of joining a jolly party. They decided on acting highwaymen, as with Falstaff. They first went to Sheard's stables, where the chaise was ordered, and the post- boy was instructed how to act. The chaise was stopped at Bagley Woods a black candlestick, presented, served in the dark as a pistol ; three of the dancing pumps, out of four, secured in a scuffle ; then a cry was raised of " Some one coming," and the men decamped and rode back with their booty, and placed the pumps in the rooms of the robbed, to tell their own story on their return. Whether as to the " lies they told " " Therein lies the jest " were words 128 OXFORD MEMORIES. applicable to them as to Falstaff, before they found the shoes, I cannot tell. " When the wine is in the wit is out." Drunkenness is madness while it lasts, and absurd jokes and frolics are the result. One day the passage between the two quadrangles was found blocked with snow at St. John's College. The offenders were allowed time to compound, under a threat of confining to gates the whole college till they came forward. Worse still, the statue of her Majesty at Queen's was crowned, as new boys at school used to be crowned, in bed-room pottery for the early coaches stopping then at the Angel Inn, opposite, to talk of all down the road. The offender was found out ; he did not consider that with the deficiency in his crockery the inference would be obvious. I used to read till about eleven at night, so my room was a common lounge for any friend who had come in late from an after- dinner drive, or to tell me of some theatricals in a barn, or other attraction not allowed in Oxford, and which there- fore tempted gownsmen to the neighbouring towns. Bethune came one night to say that his mare had been kicking, and something had occurred which had really been a trial to his conscience. A NARROW ESCAPE. 129 " My mare became savage and I heard her heels again and again at the splash-board. Now a difficulty with a horse in the dark is very nervous work when you are all alone, and no one to help you if you come to a crash and a spill, so I thought I should like to take up a passenger. I overtook two men and offered a ride to one of them ; but they could not separate and wanted me to take up both. This my conscience would not allow ; with only two of us the mare's heels might luckily go between, but the man in the middle would be sure to catch it." Little did these simple fellows know how far it was from any dis- interested kindness that one of them had been offered a lift. This position of affairs I well could appreciate ; only a week before a kicking horse had cleared the splash-board and kicked my friend Wratislaw, the driver, on the arm. We soon turned round, the splash-board, by repeated kicks, bent quite out of the perpendicular and drove back to Sheard's, opposite the gate of Christchurch. Old John Sheard was the noted horse-dealer and stable-keeper of those days, and when we com- plained of the dangerous brute, and asked for another, he (John) said : "Well, I never! Why, Bill (to the hostler), VOL. i. 9 130 OXFORD MEMORIES. would you believe it? the mare have been a kicking ! " Of course Bill looked astonished. " Why, do you know, sir, when my wife wants to drive our four little ones over to see their grandmother at Abingdon, she says to me, ' John, let us have the mare. ' : " That's all my grandmother," said Wratislaw, " that brute would scatter their blessed little legs and arms all about the road before you got past Folly Bridge You know I did once hear you say there was no harm to tell a lie about a horse." The occasion of such a piece of moral philo- sophy was this : John Sheard was found one day looking very blue over his ledger, when he burst forth with a strong monosyllable or two, asseverating that he would never trust a gentleman's word again. " At least not in money matters. Why, Muster Watson, as was at Corpus, came to me in much of a fix one morning and said, ' Sheard, the governor is a- coming to see after my tics, and I'd as soon see the devil just now.' 'Make a clean breast of it,' said I, ' Out with it all at once and one row will do for all.' ' But I've told him, Sheard, that your bill of 15 is paid. He's sure to come and ask, so you'll oblige me say it's all right.' Well, as it was only FATHERS AND THEIR WAYS. 131 about a horse, when the old gentleman came I told him that damnation lie. And now, would you believe it, sir, the six years have passed and six years' tic is bad in law and here's Muster Watson's lawyer's letter to say I can't have a penny of it, for he wasn't of age, and time is run out." As to the so-called Governors I am afraid they have been sometimes called Relieving-Omcers there always appeared to be very little confidence or fair understanding between fathers and sons. The fathers never seemed to come on the stage till all the mischief was done. Instead of an ex*: perienced friend and adviser, instead of the cha- racter of a father-confessor, he was more like an inquisitor. Frankenstein, after making a man and galvanizing him into life, was surprised to find that he embodied also certain unruly passions and keen desires, on which he had never calculated. Measles, scarlet fever and other infantine com- plaints parents accept as in the course of nature ; but when I told a father he had only to put himself back to the age of indiscretion, and to expect of his son all the folly and the wrong- he a dedness that cropped up then in him, and in all others in his experience at the same time of life, it appeared quite a new idea to him. 9* 132 OXFORD MEMORIES. One of my acquaintance told his father, "I never asked to be born, and to bring a fellow nolens volens into an expensive world like this, with a big National debt and an income tax, and then to say you have not a screw to give him, is too bad by a great deal." " Blessed is the man that hath his quiver full of them," says the Psalmist. True, if each stands ready with a bow and arrow to fight for you, "when the enemy is at the gate," but not when the duns are at the door ; for then the reputed " blessings " are more like blisters. Certainly, at college, you see men at the most unreasonable season of human existence. Not one man in a hundred at that age ever thinks what his father can afford. Men are as thankless for their allowance and expenses as they are for the light or the air, and as little think where it comes from. Who can reflect on his past self at college but as a thoughtless, selfish piece of animal nature ! A mad doctor once reported to me of a patient " He has recovered as to all that class of feelings which relate to himself; but it will take a little longer to make him sane as to the more disinterested feelings." The two classes of feeling are so separate! In youth you have the former pre- dominating, as with so many young maniacs. OUT GROWING SELFISHNESS. 133 The trials and responsibilities of life happily are an education for the better feelings in later years, nor is anything so likely to make a father truly penitent for the past, as when he identifies his own self-pleasing nature and all the follies of his younger days now mirrored in his son. CHAPTEE VIL OF CERTAIN CHAEACTEES, MOEE AS CAUTIONS THAN AS GOOD EXAMPLES. BUT as to my hours of late reading, they were sometimes disturbed by what was called " storm- ing the oak " by some idle fellows on my stair- case ; this was the bell staircase in Trinity, with rooms over the College Hall. Our rooms had double doors, the outer an oak door, a very strong one ; still, the peckers from the coal-bins, which contained a supply of fuel outside our rooms, were storming tools irresistible. But, save some little row when an entry was made, I never heard of any very serious affair like that of " drawing " out of bed, and smashing of furniture by which an unpopular man is persecuted in a regiment. I had one adventure, however, which I may say I rather brought on myself. I had caused a little resentment in Alex, a man before mentioned as sponging on every one. A friend told me that after many kind and neighbourly offices on my A STORMING PARTY. 135 part, Alex had boasted in a party, of the use he had made of me as his kettle-boiler. This was too much ; so the next time his scout brought, one hot morning, Alex's kettle to be boiled, I said sharply, "Take that away." "Take it where, sir ? Master has no fire." " Take it to " and I am afraid I named a place where it would be likely to boil rather fast. Alex looked rather glum next time I saw him. And one night, espying a lot of men of his party, suspiciously standing together, bent on mischief, I felt sure mine was the oak to be stormed, so I said a word in passing to old Dick Colley, who had lately suffered in the same way, from the same party, and we resolved on an ambuscade to attack the enemy in the rear. We stood on the landing just above the stairs they must pass, and no sooner did they begin to batter than I threw the contents of a pitcher, and Colley jerked, high in the air, some small coal and dust from his coal box. There was at once a panic all were nearly in the dark and on the principle of ignotum pro mirifico fear magnified the danger, and all rushed, wet and bespattered, away. But first a heavy coal-pick was hurled forward. I wonder what the verdict would have been if this had resulted, as was quite posssible, in a fatal accident. The Providence supposed to watch over 136 OXFORD MEMORIES. drunken men has often appeared to me to be watchful indeed. I could name one of the foremost men of the day, who, when at college, in a passion, threw a heavy candlestick across the table. As no harm was done, this was allowed to pass, but, considering all things, serious quarrels were in my time almost unknown. I did know a case of two men squaring at each other in the quadrangle, but friends soon stopped them, even if they would have actually come to blows. Though duels, at this time, were still in fashion so much so, that no man could show his face in society who failed to send or to accept a challenge under certain circum- stances yet the only case I heard was one rather before my day at college. My old friend Weston was second to one of the parties. A blow had been struck and must be expiated. " I did all I could," said Weston, " to arrange that there should be no balls in the pistols, but we were too closely watched ; however, I took twelve as long paces as I could and stipulated both should fire instantly on the word being given ; then I took them by sur- prise, and shouted " Fire "' before either quite expected it. The combatants were cousins ; and I suppose each was so glad he had not shot the other, that, treating the seconds as nothing, they rushed and cordially shook hands in a moment." DUELLING MADE RIDICULOUS. 137 There was a later case, when two men fought, and went home and breakfasted with each other ; reminding me of a solicitor's queer story of two youths one his client who, charged with an in- tention of making a breach of the peace, were locked up about mid-day, while he was finding bail, and when he returned to them, about eight in the evening, he found hunger had overcome wrath. They had sent out for a beef steak and a bottle of wine, and were as jolly as two children over a cake. But I have one case more amusing. One childish coxcomb, who had been soundly rated for some impudence, wrote a formal challenge. This the friends of the party challenged considered so truly absurd, that they agreed with one who volunteered as his second on the best possible means of brininnof " the man of honour " to his O o senses. A hostile meeting was fixed near the place where they used to bathe in Port Meadow. The two seconds agreed to put no balls in the pistols, and that the party challenged should be at the expense of a sixpenny pot of currant jelly to stain his waistcoat and shirt, and that at the moment of firing he should fall down as if wounded, and behave as much like a dead man as possible. The valorous youth was allowed to suffer all the horrors 138 OXFORD MEMORIES. of suspense for one long day, and one night's dreams of sudden death or amputation, being expelled or being hanged, before he came up to the scratch, and then, when he saw his late companion fall, his coat fly open, his gasping and putting his hand to his heart, and, above all, the clotted currant jelly, he dropped on the ground in a perfect agony of horror, and, after a time, got out, " What would he do or suffer to see the dead man alive again!" Whereupon up jumped the slain, and applying a finger of scorn to a nose of contempt, he helped to drag the unhappy mourner down to the water's edge, where having ducked him to cool his courage, they left him the laughing- stock of his college, and, like the Fair Penitent, to " think of what was past, and sigh alone." But duels, if dispensed with at college, were now few and far between anywhere, till, ten years later, in 1845, they came to an end. By this time, one duel had taken place, when Colonel Fawcett shot Lieutenant Munro, his brother-in-law ; this made duelling revolting and another fatal case at Putney, between two low fellows, which made it vulgar. A year's imprisonment was inflicted in the latter case. Two years after this, Sir Eobert Inglis and a large number of men in high society, formed a little Peace Society, and subscribed their NOTED DUELS. 139 name to a declaration that they would never act, either as principal or second, in a duel from that time forth. This was supported by Prince Albert, and soon an order was sent from the Horse Guards, that it should be sufficient vindication of an officer's honour if, in case of offence given or taken, he should refer the case to his colonel and his brother-officers. Imagine how necessary this was when, not long before, Lord Hardinge, who had seconded the Duke of Wellington against the Earl of Winchelsea, said, on hearing of a bloodless duel, not that he was glad nothing had happened, but that he thought the offended party ought to have had another shot ! Pitt, Fox, Canning, Castlereagh, all fought duels Peel challenged, though he did not fight Castlereagh, and challenged O'Connell too. But O'Connell had fought and killed Mr. D'Estair, and " registered a vow never to fight again," but made no vow not to give offence and provocation. Now, change the scene from a state of war to a state of peace, from opposing pistols on Wimbledon Common to the meeting of the same parties at the theatre at Oxford. Five years had passed away, and at the installation of the Duke of Wellington, Lord Winchelsea, was to be presented and in due form advanced to shake hands with 140 OXFORD MEMORIES. the Duke. The shouts that rang through the house showed evident sympathy with the two combatants, by that time reconciled. "And what do I think of the suppression of duelling ? I never heard any man who desired to go back to these murderous habits, but very much good came from very little evil. The fatal cases in my recollection in all England were four or five ; but the men kept in order the roues who now trifle with your affections, and once would not dare ; and other cases of solid mischief prevented are as tens of thousands." As to our rooms and sporting (closing) ouroak, men used to be so careless when going out that the wonder was their rooms were not more frequently robbed. As to the professional thieves, there was little of that convertible spoil which tempts them, but of mere cribbage for any errand-boy who came, there was enough ; and where the blame could be so readily laid on strangers, the temptation was all the greater to the scouts. Scouts at Cambridge are called "gyps," the Greek for vultures, and both scouts and gyps are too commonly regarded as a set of harpies, though really they are much the same as other servants with careless masters habitually reckless of waste and extravagance. COLLEGE SCOUTS. 141 In 1860, the Mayor called a public meeting, to consider the state of idleness and the temptation to which the junior scouts, seventy-five in number, as was represented, were exposed during the June vacation, by the end of which time debt and difficulties had naturally embarrassed them. It was decided to communicate with the hotel- keepers of watering-places where extra helps were likely to be required in the summer and early autumn. A scout's perquisites are multifarious not only all your little goods and chattels, when you leave college, but at all times they claim everything left at meals, and expect the reversion of left-off clothes. " Budd," said Collins, one day, " where is that cold pheasant I left ? " " What them bones, sir ? Trifles like that is our perquisites." Youths as we were, we felt at a disadvantage against these crying abuses. The scouts were our waiters at dinner, and when we left the hall they came in with their baskets and were entitled to clear away all the joints and dishes that re- mained. The reason was that their wages were too low without board, and this explains another charge often called extortion at college. Our " Commons," of bread and butter and other eatables, provided by the manciple, or college 142 OXFORD MEMORIES. caterer, were constantly charged to us more than they cost ; but we paid nothing for the manciple's salary, and this was his profit for his services. Old Budd fairly reminded me that not to sport my oak left a heavy responsibility on him, and endangered his character. When any robbery took place, as when Charlie lost a watch and Edwards some rings, there was much anxiety among the scouts attached to that staircase and set of rooms. One young scout was discharged for ill conduct, and afterwards imprisoned for some slight peculation committed in his new situation. The scouts generally were on the level of other servants. That young scout I was much interested in recognising, fifty years after, lank and grey-headed, cleaning shoes, near Gray's Inn in London. I could not but greet him with some small remembrance. It is pleasing to find any fellow- creature who has started even with us in the race of life and who seems to have run in parallel lines with us, if not side by side, so many years. But as to dishonesty, a painful case occurred at Queen's College, of a robbery com- mitted by one undergraduate on another. A man we will call Fisher after fifty years he should be spared, let us hope as an altered man A SAD TALE. 143 had remarked, when he visited two of my Trinity friends, as by no means of a good style, and when dining with them, no credit to our college hall. One day he dropped into the rooms of his friend Wickens, and said that Jupper the confectioner had been dunning him, and the best way was always " to feed the duns," and give them further orders honest, certainly, to increase the debts you cannot pay ! so he meant to give a spread and hoped Wickens would come. He further talked of men having lost watches and money from their rooms, and Wickens happened to remark, " I have six five-pound notes to pay my battels, and shall hide them in the basket of clothes just come from the wash no one would think of looking there for the money and then I am your man for the promised ride to Wood- stock." Fisher then proposed to construe the lecture to Wickens, for he was a good scholar and had a remarkable memory. His master at Tiverton said Fisher could learn his lesson almost in walking up to class with twice reading lines of Virgil he could repeat them readily. Well, the supposed friends rode to Woodstock, and on their return Wickens said he had an instinctive feeling all was not right, so he hurried to his basket and the money was gone ! 144 OXFORD MEMORIES. Such instinctive feelings are curious. We sometimes arrive at conclusions, unconscious of the steps which led us on. Of course there was once more a stir in college. Poor old Hedges, the scout, who had passed so many years carrying mugs and platters from buttery to college rooms, and, as he said, with no slur upon his character, had now repeated losses from rooms under his care. Gentlemen suspect only servants or in- feriors in such cases. "Fisher," said Wickens, "I always knew was not very particular as to tic and extravagance. I knew also that he would make very queer bets, and was considered a sharp customer ; but who would think his friend could steal ? " But servants think differently. Hedges knew that Fisher was generally short of money, and his door beset by duns, and without Latin and Greek Hedges was acute as his masters. A man is not the sharper for being born a gentle- man. When old Weller said Sam should not have been outwitted, because he had the proper education of the streets, he propounded a solemn truth too little considered, namely, that there is a deal of learning without book learning ; a man's wit can be sharpened in more ways than one. So when Hedges heard all the particulars, and how Fisher had been informed of the ingenious mode of THE THIEF DETECTED. 145 hiding the money, Hedges began to think that the saying, " Those who hide can find," had some indirect reference to Mr. Fisher. Still further Hedges learnt that, at Woodstock, Fisher had left Wickens for some time, very unlike the habit of two friends out for a ride ; also that afterwards Fisher showed several sovereigns when paying for luncheon : this looked as if he had changed a note at the hotel. Hedges thought he had now evidence enough, so for further enquiry, he went to Wood- stock, found and identified the stolen note by the number, and brought back the waiter who had changed it to confront Fisher. Wickens became very much enraged ; he went to the tutor and said he should at once apply for a summons, and was with difficulty prevented from doing so by the tutor's saying that he would be answerable for the money stolen if Wickens would not prosecute. Fisher was confined to his room till his friends could be informed of the painful occurrence. His mother was a widow, doubtless having had no little trouble w T ith such a son. Next term we heard the distressing news that the blow was too sudden and too agonizing for a mother ; the poor lady had lost her reason ! There was always some man at Oxford who had VOL. i. 10 146 OXFORD MEMORIES. either stolen money or done something disgraceful at school, and the story followed him, his old school-fellows being shy of him. Certainly if this applied to an elder boy of the age to leave school for college, it might be right and reasonable to make him feel his disgrace ; but that mere children should find that the misdeeds of their childhood had followed them I thought much to be regretted. I remember some particular inquiries being once made of an Eton tutor, from Magdalen College, as to a youth said to have left Eton in disgrace, and the reply was that the tutor declined to enter into particulars, but that there was a difference between a school and a college, and believed there was no sufficient reason for objecting to him. This man was considerate ; the pupil fully justified this remark by a very creditable career. Still, a blot on one's escutcheon at a public school is serious ; and yet more so at college. Less allowance can then be made for youth, and ill deeds are enacted before a larger audience. It is wonderful how prone men are to spread a painful story ; it is not always from pure malevolence, but rather from love of talking in a sensational way. Vice is more interesting than virtue ; even full-grown children might HOW THE MIND EXPANDS. 147 honestly confess that they like stories about naughty boys better than stories about good boys. As a compensation for the uproarious set of Trinity, there was a religious set in college. We called them the Saints, they were all very Low Church. Tractarianism was in its infancy. There were no High Church saints in those days. If men were less thoughtless and more serious than their neighbours, they were reduced for religious parties and sympathy to the psalm- singing class or none. In those days the Bible was commonly regarded as much one book as v O Homer ; literal and verbal inspiration was the answer to all inquiries. Indeed, the biblical ignorance of those days would surprise any in- telligent people now. Milman's critical remarks in his History of the Jews had excited grave doubt not merely of his orthodoxy, but of his faith. The present Bishop of London's reception, at Exeter, twelve years since, would have been mild compared to what he would have encountered in the times I am describing. There was a strong opposi- tion to Dr. Hampden, as bishop-designate of Hereford, at that time, for what would have been thought a very slight touch of originality now. The very terms in use Latitudinarian 10* 148 OXFORD MEMORIES. for one who deviated in the least from one narrow track, and Rationalism for one who exercised his own common sense and under- standing in biblical interpretation bear witness to the changes we have lived to see. At Cambridge, religious men had preachers a little more to their taste especially Simeon, who was far more reasonable that most of the Evangelical party ; he really touched the hearts of Cantabs, and at the same time there was, Melville, who, said Mr. Yarde " could make tears run down the cheeks of those dry old Dons " almost as much of a miracle as Moses striking water from the rocks. But at Oxford we had the most unemotional Theology and little else. Some years before, Dr. Tatham of Lincoln was, indeed, in one sense, a moving preacher, but moving rather to laughter. Once he said he wished " that all the Garm:in critics were drowned in the German Ocean." Old Mr. Blatter, the bookseller, told me he once heard Tatham say from the pulpit, while depreciating the University studies, " Take care, that what with your Little Go and your Great Go, it does not prove a By-Go." Once we had a very puzzling sermon at St. Mary's, on the subject of Evidences, with "The Christian says this and the atheist says that," THE POET SHELLEY. 149 when, as the present Bishop C came out of church, he said, " The atheist had the best of the argument this morning." This reminds me of an anecdote of the poet Shelley, related to me also by Mr. Slatter : " When Shelley's name was entered at Univer- sity College, his father, Sir Timothy, introduced him to me as one who would require no little printing during academical career. Nor was it long before the poetical son brought me poetry for the press ; and in a little time he became so well-known to my shopmen, that they little heeded what he did. One day he came with a bundle of pamphlets, merely saying, " You can sell these," and scattered them in my windows and on my counter and side table. No one examined them or even saw the title. Some little time after, coming down into the shop, I perceived a well known Don reading one of the pamphlets, with arched eyebrows and looking unutterable things ; seeing me, he said, " Mr. Slatter, you must be mad! You will be hooted out of the University. ' The Necessity of Atheism,' indeed! and you are selling such im- piety." I soon discovered and explained what had happened, and as there was, at that time, an eminent barrister on the circuit, lodging 150 OXFORD MEMORIES. with me, he heard what had occurred, and said, " Send for the young man. He must have a warning ; I will open upon him." Soon Shelley came, looking quite unconcerned ; after a few words from me, my friend enlarged on the poison he was spreading broadcast, and the serious consequences to himself if known to the college authorities. "Why as to that," said Shelley, "the Vice-Chancellor has a copy already, and there was one to be put on the breakfast-table of the President of every college in Oxford." He said, among other things, " These are no new ideas of mine. I have long entertained the same views, and what is more, I have a sister, whom I have made as d d an atheist as myself." This is the exact history of the circumstances under which Shelley left the University. I have the pleasure of knowing some of the sisters one still survives, but no one doubts her orthodox opinions. As to the so-called Saints, this set consisted of two or three who held together and were chiefly distinguished by their absurdly preaching to every one else, and sometimes having the worst of the argument. Certain truths, and promises divine, they would enunciate in too wide a sense, and most erroneously in a temporal sense ; on such occasions STRANGE NOTIONS. 151 to hear the peculiarly temporal replies of those they called " worldly men " was amusing. Bound once maintained, " Whatever you shall ask in prayer, believing, you shall receive." " Yes," said Briggs, " but ' believing ' is all the difficulty. Now, I am backing the ' favourite ' for the Derby if I could 4 believe ' he'd win, you say it would be all right, but I can't." " The doctrine is carried too far," said Charlie ; " it's no use praying for money, for I tried it first thing after a sermon I once heard. And it's no good when out fishing ; I tried that too, and never had a bite." Poor Eound was all but plucked for his divinity, and found that piety and theology were widely different things. However, there he has been, near Portsmouth, working away these thirty years honestly, piously, and most usefully too in a parish of poor fishermen, where I renewed our old acquaintance with no little interest. One of those whom Eound called the worldly and the carnal men Tom Walker I found, years after, as parson of a rural parish. While I was on a visit in Dorsetshire, near Blanktown, I heard of much religious dissension ; the people there were split in two parties, the Walkerites, and the non- Walkerites ; the partisans and the opponents of one Mr. Walker, who was ultra-Tractarian, who was 152 OXFORD MEMORIES. setting up crosses and lighting candles in broad day- light, with floral ornaments, varied with the varying seasons. The non-Walkerite party was up in arms and declared he was preaching Churchianity, in- stead of Christianity. Still further, this church militant was already involved in law with citations and monitions and all the curious processes of the Ecclesiastical Court, instituted by people who found too late that Tom had no money to lose and " it's ill suing a Highlander for his breeks." As Walker is a common name, I little thought of our old friend of Trinity, till Vincent, another old Trinity man, met me and remarked, " What asses people were to follow in all his vagaries ; the most utter ignoramus, who had merely got hold of the catchwords of a party." " Surely," I said, " it is not Tom Walker of Trinity ? Why, he was the most ignorant fellow read less and smoked more than any man in college." " The same the man of many plucks. He passed at last, I verily believe out of pity for his wife, for you remember he left for a year and re- turned to apartments in Beaumont Street, as a married man. He has been a dunce and an ass all his life, I was with the great donkey at the Peck- ham Academy before Oxford days. Being ques- A PRETENDER IN THE CHURCH. 153 ioned one day at Bible- class about Joseph and his Brethren, Tom was asked about ' Fall not out by the way ; ' he said, ' Perhaps they had no tail-boards to the waggons mentioned, and they might tumble out.' " Before long I met a man on the road with a white tie and straight-collared coat, which ill as- similated with that peculiar style and seat on a horse which was never learnt by quiet rides on the Queen's highway. After some little reference to college days, he said, " I suppose you have heard all about me. We are all High Church here ; very busy this Easter with church decorations. All people were Low Church, except those who were nothing at ah 1 , when we were at old Trinity. Tractarians were then finding it out ; but High Church proper could scarcely be said to be invented. It is a fine thing for women ; something for them to do to work monograms, festoon flowers, and help in the choir, and it leads to flirting ecclesiastical no little. I always was musical ; my chants and introits are pronounced first rate. Apostolical succession and " notes of the true Church " are the thing ; it puzzles the dissenters to come up to that." After some sly insinuation of mine, he said, " The people look up to me here ; they know nothing 154 OXFORD MEMORIES. about those plucks at College. You have read about the doings in the Ecclesiastical Court ; the opposition can spend their money if they like. I take no notice of them. I enter no appearance, light my pipe with their citations, and do not spend a penny. But they advertise me gratis, and herald the Eev. Thomas Gerald Walker's name all over England. The Guardian and the Record are full of it every week." The truth was a certain clique in Walker's parish, greeting this vent for their superflous energy, would not listen to the sound advice that the silly fellow had better be left alone, so they really made the land ring with his name by ecclesiastical proceed- ings. Their expenses were thousands, Tom's were not one penny. He made fun for everyone who called with each process that was served him, and at the conclusion of this long affair he showed me as a curiosity the bill of costs, quite a volume, in- curred by the Plaintiffs, for him not to pay. And when a distress was put into the house for costs, he amused himself and friends with the bailiff; for all the goods and chattels were not his but his mother's ! This is not the only case in which I have seen the noted dunces of college rise up in some distant place as very oracles in some great question of Church or State; CHAPTER VIH. HOW SOME MEN ASPIEED TO THE HONOURS OF " THE IRELAND SCHOLAESHIP," AND OTHEKS CKAMMED FOK A "PASS." OF all the sets the Scholars' set was, as it should be, sober, intellectual, and in every sense improving. The present Lord Selborne, then Eoundell Palmer came up with a high reputation as head of Win- chester. Cardwell, Lowe and some of his school- fellows, with the late Archbishop Tait, were fre- quent guests at the Scholars' table. Well do I remember seeing Palmer returning to college, after receiving the announcement that he was elected Dean Ireland's scholar. This prize marked the best man of his day in scholarship, the contest being open to all the winners of other scholarships included. Dr. Scott was then beaten for the second time, as I think he was once more, and won at the fourth attempt. There was also among the Scholars John Thomas, examining chaplain to Archbishop Sumner, and Sir. J. K. Eickards, well known at the 156 OXFORD MEMORIES. bar as late counsel to the Speaker, an office now held by the Honourable Chandos Leigh. A few only of the steadier and the reading men of the college were in this set, and the most part lived as men who duly valued their academi- cal advantages. Thomas Legh Claughton, Bishop of St. Alban's, had just passed into the number of the fellows of Trinity. John Thomas was a man of more talent than steady application. On dit he never would have sent in his Latin poem, which won the prize, had not Palmer and others, who admired what they read of it, shut him up in his room and insisted on his finishing it. The gifts of nature are more equally distributed than they seem. Gladstone, two years before, was second (proxime accessit) for the "Ireland." The prize was then won by Brancker, a Shrewsbury boy, matriculated but not yet in residence, who was advised by his friend Scott to try, if only for practice, but the boy beat him as well as others, and won ! Dr. Butler of Shrewsbury considered Branker worthy to be classed with his old pupils the Kennedys. Dr. Butler must have had some extraordinary pupils at that- time. The Eev. James Hildyard writes : " Brancker actually took the Ireland prize while still a boy at school, and three places below me. Butler was so pleased at it GLADSTONE AT COLLEGE. 157 that on the board on which were enrolled all the honours taken by his pupils at College, he caused that of Brancker to be painted (to use his own words) Literis aureis majusculis, in gold instead of black letters, and in uncials instead of pica. Mr. Gladstone's account of the examina- tion in a letter to his friend Jennings, cannot fail to interest : "I write to give you an account of o */ the strange result of the Ireland scholarship examination. The successful candidate is Brancker, of Wadham. Perhaps you do not know who Brancker is. He is a Shrewsbury boy, i.e., has not yet left school, and sent up here to stand by way of practising himself, and to return probably by to-night's mail. This is all very funny. I now proceed to give you details. In the rear of Brancker is Scott and me, and Yowler Short told us plainly the following news. That he was very sorry he could not congratulate either of us, and that it had been an extremely near thing, and that in consequence the trustees had determined to present us both with books, that ' taste,' which, he said, was a word difficult to define, had gained Brancker his victory, and then he said, ' Indeed I do not know what the result might have been if you two had not written 158 OXFORD MEMORIES. such long answers I ' Scott then asked him to furnish some particulars. He abused him for free translation, and me for my essay, on which he said his memorandum was 'desultory beyond belief,' also for throwing dust into the examiner's eyes, like a man, who when asked who wrote ' God save the King ? ' answered ' Thompson wrote Rule Britannia.' But indeed, he said he had as many bad marks against Brancker as against us Scott says Brancker is not nearly as good a scholar as he was himself when he came up ; but I hear in a roundabout way a report that Butler thinks Brancker the best pupil he has had since Kennedy. The oddest thing, however, of all that Short said, was his exposition of Brancker 's merits. ' He answered all the questions short, and most of them right! The old Growler " (Vowler Short was the real name) "was very kind, and said he had no doubt we should find the disappointment ' all for the best,' to which one of us somewhat demurred. When he asseverated vehemently that it was so, the other assented. Upon this he exclaimed, ' Aye, but you don't believe it, I know ! ' He shook hands with us most heartily, and, though he moralized rough-shod, certainly behaved in a very friendly way." As to the Ireland scholarship, the most decided THE IRELAND SCHOLARSHIP. 159 victory, of a man distancing all his competitors, \vas that of Linwood, nephew of Miss Linwood, whose exhibition in Leicester Square of needle- work (copies of the largest paintings) was, about this time, one of the sights of London. Linwood, about nineteen years of age, surrounded by twenty candidates, most of them already winners of prizes, said, in the hearing of my friend Dickenson, "I know I shall win. True, Holden of Balliol was second last time ; still though inferior in one point I shall make it up in others ; and I shall win." One paper set was an imaginary speech of Medea, in Greek iambics ; the other candidates wrote from 20 to 25 lines ; Linwood wrote 99, only one short of 100! Soon after he contested the Latin scholar- ship, expressed the same confidence, and won. He has since published an edition of Sophocles and a Lexicon to .ZEschylus ; he also edited Musse Oxonienses. In all examinations much depends on luck, however much on merit. A scholar of Balliol was greatly assisted by having the same piece of Shakespeare, for Greek verse, which he had written under Kennedy's correction at School, A candidate at Trinity, set to translate into Latin elegiacs, " By the Waters of Babylon we sat down and wept," showed that he remembered Buchanan's 160 OXFORD MEMORIES. rendering of this the best of all Buchanan's Latin psalms. As to Gladstone and his compeers, I may venture to add an extract from " My Life as an Author," by Martin Tupper. " Fifty years ago Biscoe's Aristotle class at Christchurch was comprised almost wholly of men who have since become celebrated, some in a remarkable degree ; and, as we believe that so many names, afterwards attaining to great dis- tinction, have rarely been associated at one lecture-board, either at Oxford or elsewhere, it may be allowed to one who counts himself the least and lowest of the company to pen this brief note of those old Aristotelians. "Let the central figure be Gladstone ever from youth up the beloved and admired of many personal intimates (although some may be politi- cally his opponents). Always the foremost man, warm-hearted, earnest, hard-working, and religious, he had a following even in his teens ; and it is noticeable that a choice lot of young and keen -intelligences of Eton and Christchurch formed themselves into a small social sort of club, styled, in compliment to their founder's initials, the ' W. E. G.' " Next to Gladstone Lord Lincoln used to sit A DISTINGUISHED LECTURE ROOM. 161 his first parliamentary patron at Newark, and through life to death his friend. We all know how admirably in many offices of State the late Duke of Newcastle served his country, and what a good and wise Mentor he was to a grateful Telemachus in America. " Canning may be mentioned thirdly ; then a good-looking youth, with classic features and a florid cheek, since gone to ' the land of the departed,' after having healed up the wounds of India as her Governor-General. Next to the writer, one on each side, sat two more Governors- General in future, though then both younger sons and commoners, and now both also gone to their reward elsewhere, these were Bruce, afterwards Lord Elgin, and Eamsey, Lord Dalhousie ; the one famous from Canada to China, the other noted for his triumphs in the Punjaub. When at Toronto in 1851, the writer was welcomed to the splendid hospitality of Lord Elgin, and the very lecture- room here depicted was mentioned as ' a rare gathering of notables.' Lord Abercorn was of the class, a future viceroy ; and Lord Douglas, lately Duke of Hamilton, handsome as an Apollo, and who married a Princess of Baden ; and if Lord Waterford was infrequent in his attendance, at least he was eligible, and should not be VOL. i. 11 162 OXFORD MEMORIES. omitted as a various sort of eccentric celebrity. Then Phillimore was there, now our Dean of the Arches ; Scott and Liddell, both heads of houses, and even then conspiring together for their great dictionary. Curzon too (lately Lord de la Zouch) was at the table, meditating Armenian and Levantine travels, and longing in spirit for those Byzantine MSS. preserved at Parham, where the writer has delighted to inspect them ; how nearly Tischendorf was anticipated in his fortunate find of that earliest Scripture no one knows better than Lord Zouch, who must have been close upon that great and important dicovery. Doyle, now Professor of Poetry, Hill of Mathematics, Vaughan of History all were of this wonderful class ; as also the Earl of Selkirk, celebrated as a Mathema- tician ; Bishops Hamilton, Denison and Words- worth, and Cornewall Lewis, late Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Kynaston, Head Master of St. Pauls' ; and a member of Parliament or two, as for example, Leader, once popular for West- minster. " Now, other names of almost equal eminence may have been here accidentally omitted, but the writer will not guess at any more than 'he actually recollects. Sometimes for the lecture was a famous one members of other colleges OXFORD IN PATTISON' S DAY. 163 came in ; Sydney Herbert of Oriel, in particular, is remembered, and if Robert Lowe, of Univer- sity, was only occasionally seen, it must have been that he seldom went abroad till twilight " strange as stroke of his college boat ! The readers of the life of Mark Pattison will see that about the time- 1 entered, there was in- deed much room for improvement in Oxford though reformation had set in " Men not much interested in classics or mathematics had nothing before them but aimless, idle hours, and even in those subjects there was comparatively little temptation to read for honours." Pattison says of his friend, Lord Coayers Osborne, that, had he lived, any hope of his fulfilling his intention of reading for a class was early dissipated by the demoralising atmosphere of Christchurch. He was possessed by the opinion of his " set," that it was unworthy of a man of his position to be " a sap." " At Oriel lectures were regarded as a joke or a bore, con- demned by the more advanced and shirked by the backward. In less than a week I was entirely disillusioned as to what I was to learn in an Oxford lecture room. Denison was a scholar, according to the measure of those days. He knew his Greek plays, and could let fall a clever thing ; but I never heard any observation 11* 164 OXFORD MEMORIES. that was not in Monk's notes. Copleston was a dunce, and could teach you nothing. Pattison dwells on the slackness of duty, the slovenly teaching and personal favouritism of the whole system. The election of fellows was specially discreditable ; but public opinion ap- proved the method, and, provided the man was, or was about to be in Holy Orders, and came from the specialised locality, he might be bad indeed for all the rest. The fellow was elected rather for his jovial qualities than for his intellectual or moral merits. The colleges were clubs, and clubs to which were elected only clubable men. Oriel was the first college that reformed itself, requiring mental gifts, and above all originality. A man must have ideas in the first place, and the force to make those ideas tell in the second. With these quali- ties the electors cared little for the honours a man had taken. Keble, Hawkins and Jenkyns were double firsts, but Whateley, T. Mozley, Newman, and Hurrell Froude, were all men of lower classes, chosen before men who had taken higher honours for original ideas. Fifty years since a man might read for honours in classics or in mathematics ; there was nothing else. Two men, I remember good scholars both who could not explain the mysteries of an NATURAL PHILOSOPHY NOWHERE. 165 eclipse or tell the name of the reigning family in France. It was only exceptional, I allow, that good scholars were more deficient than bad scholars in general reading. The same intellect which leads to the one study is not likely to be un- accompanied with an interest and curiosity about the other. Still any favourite pursuit as well as classics is known to render men occasionally in- different to common topics. This was so far true of Alexander Dyce, of Shakespearean reputation, that his friends used to say that he asked how the Reform Bill was progressing six months after it had passed. Still it was a decided loss to many men that there were no schools and no prizes to excite emulation in modern history, law, or natural science. As to natural science, it had far less attraction to students generally than at the present time. Comparatively few believed in geology ; and many said the study was worthy of an infidel, as involving a questioning of the Mosaic cosmogony. No wonder a Jesuit's edition of Newton's " Principia " shows, by a particular reservation in the preface, that even mathematical demonstrations must yield to the received doctrines of the Church. Dr. Buckland was at this time gathering a few pupils with equestrian lectures in the country around Oxford. 166 OXFORD MEMORIES. I remember his saying that the Earl of Abingdon was digging for coal in Oxford clay, but he would consent to be burned, like another martyr, in the Corn Market of Oxford with the first cart-load which was brought out. The " Little Go " and the " Great Go " were the only two examinations in three years of residence to make the idle men work in earnest. Half of Horace, four Greek plays, and logic, or sometimes three books of Euclid, were the usual programme. The degree of proficiency exacted in classics was far less than ten years after. Men like Briggs I have heard examined and passed when the sum total of their acquirements, whether for mental formation or for useful information, was worth little indeed. I used to give a little friendly coaching in Latin writing to our friend the Count. He did contrive to pass his Little Go, though after seeing sitivationibus in some supposed Latin he brought to me to correct,' I almost despaired of my pupil's success in the Schools. With men of this class, the longer at Oxford the less they were likely to know. School know- ledge evaporated faster than it could be replaced by the mere atmosphere of college. The Little Go served to cause just a little flicker in the socket, to prevent the flame from quite going out THE ART OF CRAMMING. 167 by the time for the Great Go and the degree. Here then came the struggle between wits dull from disuse and a certain quantum of book learning to be attained. Clifton, or some other noted cramming " coach," was like Gull or Paget to a sufferer in extremis. Briggs, Robinson, and Perrott first-rate men across country and well up in racing and sporting subjects but in little else I well remember in this critical position. I used to go from room to room during their last term to judge of progress, and I used to lend no little assistance. Indeed, I had some reputation in amateur cramming, for on one occasion I had made a hit, quite by accident I admit, but as my friends were disposed to allow me credit for a happy conjecture I continued to trade on the reputation it gave me. I had led Tom Locke through the history of David, and next day he had the same in the schools ; and on another occasion with Harry Green I anticipated most of the questions set in logic. Briggs, Eobinson, and Perrott had been at Oxford a month before the October term began, to make one final effort with a daily cram from Clifton. On the first day of that term, arriving about seven o'clock, and expecting to find no one to speak to that evening, I was glad to have from 168 OXFORD MEMORIES. old Budd the usual recognition and useful informa- tion: " Happy to see you again, sir. Hope you had a pleasant vacation. You'll ask who's up, sir. Well, there's Mr. Eound and Mr. Wandle, but they're not your set, sir. But Mr. Briggs and Mr. Perrott and Mr. Belton are all your friends. You know all them well enough, sir. Well, they're up reading for their Great Go, sir, and don't seem to like the work, sir. Not much in their line, is it, sir? I'm blessed if Mr. Briggs don't grumble above a little every time I go to put his rooms a little tidy, and if Virgil or Euripides, sir, was to be learnt by cussing, Mr. Briggs would pass sure enough. But you'll be in time for some coffee, sir, just taken to his rooms." At once I hied to Briggs' rooms, and found him and Perrott looking very seedy, with books and papers shoved aside to make room for the tray of cups and saucers. His room would have suited Hogarth, for a picture of the idle Oxonian. Such a mixture of things for play as well as for work ! papers, sporting and divine ; books of divinity and logic ; a lexicon, Horace and Euripides, with English translations of both, covered the table. Pictures of hunting, and opera dancers pirouet- CRAMMING FOR A DEGREE. 169 ting ; a fox's head ; and whips and spurs hung on stags' antlers, widely branching over the fire-place, marked the natural man while one scheme of logic and another of types and prophecies on large cards, with a list of last year's meets (of hounds) pinned up in the space between, were stuck on the walls below, while two fancy pipes and cigars in a tumbler, with a stuffed pike and date of his catching, formed the chimney ornaments. After the usual greeting Tom said, " You've had no dinner, I suppose ? The buttery will soon be open for an early supper. I can give you a glass of egg-flip, for Charlie is expected ; but that is more than I may take. Why, my coach would forbid anything stronger than tea or coffee, or perhaps aperient medicine, but I tell him not to draw it too mild or the body would rebel against the brains. Still, we all live by rule, the rule being not to get drunk. Very hard, but it can't be helped it is only for a time. He says I shall win if I only stick to it. I am pretty good in logic, and have a slovenly notion of divinity, which by luck might do, but Clifton says another week's work will make it respectable ; though as to my other books I'm not safe all round. But ah 1 this time I've had no partridge shooting, and by the time I know my fate pheasants will be 170 OXFORD MEMORIES. scarce enough. Now, my good fellow, where is the good of all this stuff. Three months ago I didn't know a syllogism from a predicable, and as to divinity, I had only that misty notion of types and prohecies you pick up in church, sup- posing you listen to the sermon, though in all this kind of learning the dirty boys in my father's Sunday school could have beaten my head off; and three months hence it will be all like last year's snow. Yet without this cram there's no degree ! Why, some years ago, I have heard the governor say you could choose your own examiner, and after a little pretence over wine and walnuts you had a testamur of course. One system was a deal pleasanter and not more of a sham than the other." This was true of such men as Tom Briggs. The whole art of cramming is to impose on an examiner to confine attention to likely subjects and so supply a parrot-like set of answers, which seem to imply deeper knowledge, and this they would imply if the answers were the result of well-digested reading, but being culled from a book of questions and answers they stand for little indeed. Still, with the better class of men, a degree used to imply some steady reading, no little mental THE COUNT CANNOT STAND IT. 171 discipline, and daily communication with a tutor, as also with some men of superior mind in the lecture-room, and generally it formed a better preparation for life than any of the non-academi- cal were likely to attain. While talking with Briggs in came the Count, as he said, "Just to have a look at this poor grinding creature and enjoy a sense of compara- tive security." " I shall have my fling till next Mid- summer : though, Clifton said, if I would only go steadily on, I should be pretty safe in one more month but that one month would have been the death of me ; so I have shied the post." " Now, be persuaded. Take good advice ; go on," I replied. " Go on, indeed ! Why, I've stopped for a week ; all those days lost in training ; the cage door open, every idea has taken wing and flown away by this time. Clifton must catch them again at my next Go. Besides, here are Mark Murrell's hounds handy for a near meet and the Duke's about Bicester, and I have a chance of good shooting near Abingdon all instead of stewing away over these horrid . books. So I intend to have my fling." And most vigorously did the Count set about for what he properly called " having a fling " 172 OXFORD MEMORIES. pursuing pleasure without overtaking it ; for that depends on a certain relation of the dainty to the appetite, of the excitement to the tone and spirits to respond ; sometimes the human lyre is out of tune, and jars and vibrates without the harmony required. If rushing from one place and form of amusement to another ; if flinging down the reins of self-command ; if flinging away present time and thoughts of future strenua inertia with all one's might and main ; if fling- ing oneself out of bed into a breakfast party, jolly to others but not to all, with appetite spoiled by the last night's wine ; if flinging oneself thence upon a horse and galloping after hounds all day long, liable of course to cold drenching showers by the cover's side when the hounds do not find ; if flinging oneself off the horse into hall and thence into a wine party, to be followed by a supper spread but scarcely tasted for those wild birds live more by suction and if reckless, wretched and reeling, spent with fatigue and exhausted with excitement, fevered with punch and puffed with tobacco smoke, to fling one's clothes on the ground and to fling oneself on the bed if this is to have one's fling, Count Wratislaw had his fling to his heart's content. After leaving Tom Briggs, I found Belton and AN ORIGINAL STUDENT. 173 Phipps alike seedy, weary, and disgusted, as men compelled to toil through subjects for which they had more aversion than taste all against the grain as much as the most horrible pages of the old Eton grammar ever used to be to a boy. It was a little relief to drop in on Charlie, who was also up for Greats. Charlie had, I said, been born with too great excitability of brain. Some brains are like peas-pudding ; some men are about as highly organized as a suet dumpling. Such generally are the "highly proper and correct characters " ; men who are less likely to go wrong because there is no go in them at all. But Charlie, sharp and brilliant, had wits for ever in effervescence. He could rarely settle to read till late at night, when the day's supply of animal i spirits had time to evaporate. Well, Charlie I found about ten o'clock ; he saluted me with, " Ah ! my good fellow, I heard you were just come up. Here am I, digging through Virgil and Euripides these are my two books and I have dug up two or three things worth having. Tuus, Regina quid optes explorare labor ; that is, the only hard work fine ladies do is to find out what the}'' want.' Some such people are more bored at ordering dinner than others are in having no dinner to order. Don't you wonder this piece ofVirgilian 174 OXFORD MEMORIES. satire has never been quoted before ? Now, there is another bit in Euripides I've never seen it quoted ; have you ? where Medea, quite like a modern lady, sums up her miseries thus : " ' Of all animated nature we women come into the world with the most wretched lot. First of all, if we can't bid high for a husband we must go with- out one, and at best we are the slaves of his humour. And to run the risk of a bad one is the sorest trial of all ; for separations are no credit to us, and as to a divorce, it is out of the question.' " The samp is the case now. The man can easily make out a case for a divorce ; the woman has more to prove. " And when, perhaps, you have just come into a new neighbourhood (and ladies have a poor chance where they are seen every day), how can you tell whom you choose as a partner for life ? If you find a good one the yoke is easy and life's burden light, but if a bad one you had better make a die of it at once. " Now I like that idea, that when dropped down and arrived among people new, and when drawing new covers on a distant visit, girls have their best chance, ' but,' says Medea, ' it is quite a blind bargain." And then, in a most modern strain, Medea goes on to say, ' If a man is bored with READING WITHOUT A CRAMMER. 175 being at home he can get rid of ennui by going to his companions, that is, his club, but our life is centred in one living soul alone.' And as to the men being as they boast alone exposed to the dangers of war, Medea thought the ladies had some set off against that, for she says : ' I would rather be three times under fire than once in the straw.' ' This was a sample of the spirit in which Charlie read the classics. He once construed, in lecture about the poor pilot Palinurus, who was a spoil for the wreckers, praedam putdsset, " they took me for their perquisites." Charlie read widely, though in translations, and said he liked to go, like Ulysses or JEneas, to those in the shades below and hold a sweet converse with departed spirits ; and thus he had enlarged his acquaintances, now actually spread over some two thousand years and more. He continued, " I spend no money on Clifton or other Coaches. I am as apt as possible in logic by coaching Briggs and Co. My divinity I have rubbed up in the same way. I advised Briggs and Perrott that if they would only question each other, however small their stock, they would find that teaching another was the best way to learn for themselves. Briggs said to me, ' How is it I can remember a dozen winners of Oaks and Derbys, 176 OXFORD MEMORIES. and all the jockeys' names, but as to the Kings of Judah and of Israel I can't retain them for a day ? ' He does not consider that he gives his mind to the one and not to the other. But Tom Briggs, wild as he is, has a very steady going father, who, Tom says, ' would cut him off with a shilling, he believes, if he did not pass.' The father reasons like a man of business. ' Two hundred and fifty pounds a year, for nearly four years, for a degree! that is, in your case, Tom, for the honour of two letters B. A. or M.A. after your name all the instruction there- by implied vanished into thin air from three to six months after date. That is all I am to have for the thousand pounds spent on college educa- tion. I had better have bought you an annuity and kept you to my brother's office in Mineing Lane.' ' So,' says Tom, ' fancy what a face he will pull if this term coaching and all goes for nothing aye, and tics, too ; which he has got to hear of. Oh ! don't talk about it.' " As to the tics, if Tom's mind was distracted enough at all times, two or three times a day he would hear a quiet step on the stairs, and then a single knock, followed with " Please, sir, Mr. Smoothall's account, or Mr. Cheatem's small bill," one perhaps of two year's standing. Belton, Phipps and Perrott were, in different READING FOR A PASS. 177 degrees, subject to the same pecuniary worries, for however long suffering were the Oxford tradesmen in my time, they always tried to make you pay before you left, and for this purpose they eagerly scanned the names on the examination list, quite in the way of business. Debts could not come at a more cruel time for what are called a Bilious fever, and tic doloreux added miseries of its own to the work of the schools. As three weeks of this anxious work were pass- ing, the Count would occasionally drop in ; some- times about breakfast time, in red coat and overalls ; sometimes with a great coat ovei** the same, all splashed and mudded, on his return from a run, and sometimes at supper, returned -in his buggy from some theatre of strolling players in a barn, or other diversion in Abingdon or Woodstock. What he chiefly came for was to*see if any other man had taken off his name to keep him company ; he would then feel better reconciled to the thoughts that he had done a silly thing. He made very short visits. Sometimes he would hardly enter the room, but would stand with the door in his hand, or at most he would only come in and lean against the fire -place and scrape his boot on the fender, impatient that his friends at this critical time took so little interest in his amusements. " You vote VOL. i. 12 178 OXFORD MEMORIES. me a bore," he would say. " I see you would cut me, now these confounded books are in the way." The Count, in his heart of hearts, hardly wished they should get through ; not but that he was a very good fellow, too good to acknowledge such feelings even to himself ; but men act from mixed motives, and those who understand the self-alloyed sentiments of even the best of human hearts will readily enter into his feelings ; for if his friends were wise in reading on, he was foolish in leaving off, and therefore their success could hardly fail of proving an extra sting to him. " You need not come here pretending you desire our success," said Tom Phipps, " with formal good wishes we should rather take as granted, when we know you do not above half wish us to get through after all." " Speak for yourself," jsaid Tom Briggs. " Thank you, Tom," said the Count ; " why, Phipps, you are too hard on a fellow. Don't you remember, when out shooting one day at Wood- stock, saying you didn't half enjoy looking at that long-tailed pheasant I had brought down, when you could not touch a feather? Well, that is just ivhat I feel now. A man never likes to realize that he has been a fool. At all events I shall not be plucked.' READING FOR A PASS. 179 " No great damage to your literary character if you were," said Pliipps. " But I am getting on swimmingly though the Thirty-nine Articles are the bother to me. I wonder why there are so many of them ? " " Why," said Charlie, "it is all for your sins, to be sure ; just forty stripes, .save one as you seem smarting under the affliction." 12* CHAPTEE IX. THE " GKEAT GO " AND " NO GO " AT ALL. MY next visit was to a student of very different character, to Hilton, one of the scholars who was just making the last skimmings, as he said, over his list of sixteen books for a first-class. In the days of Mods and Greats, my friends may be curious to see a first-class list of olden time, all at once to task the memory of some fifty years since. Hilton's list was Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric, Butler's Analogy and Sermons, Herodotus, Thucydides, two books of Xenophon's Hellenics, First Decade of Livy, Sophocles, ^Eschylus, four plays of Euripides, four plays of Aristophanes, Virgil, Horace, Terence, Juvenal, and the " Annals " of Tacitus. Mods seems to be an invention to divide and concentrate attention on about half at a time. Many men tell me that they have now-a-days some decided advantages in getting up their books ; that they have lexicons, notes, and various ON SOUND READING. 181 facilities now, which we did not in my time possess. I reply that such facilities are also hindrances. Hilton had correct views on such matters. No lexicon, he said, can give those nice shades of meaning which you may perceive for yourself by comparison of passages, and proving in effect a lexicon to yourself. Of lexicons nothing is more true than the old Greek proverb, " A big book is a great nuisance." I remember Dr. Giles, who afterwards wrote a lexicon, boasted, when at Oxford, of the very few words he ever wanted a lexicon to explain. And what are your ingenious grammars and notes to Sophocles, JEschylus, &c. ? They are accessories, I admit, but only accessories after the fact that is, until you are familiar with the forms and phrases on which they comment, and not before, you cannot digest them. Though when, and only when, so familiar, they serve usefully to confirm and to give form and ex- pression to your own observations. So wisely did John Locke say, " Grammar (that is, anything beyond nouns and verbs) should come at the end of education, and not at the beginning ; as it should be used as the analysis of language you already know." This will show what kind of a scholar was 182 OXFORD MEMORIES. Hilton. But Hilton had a strong stimulus to exertion. I knew Hilton's family they were very poor and his private history, of exceeding merit and self-denial. His father, the vicar of New- church, had been through life one of those ne'er- do-wells who are a heart-ache to all their relations. Eeckless and extravagant at first, he had recourse to money lenders, which, as usual, made bad worse, and resulted in a sequestration of his living ; and but for the fact that his son Hilton had won the esteem of all who knew him, Hilton's talents might have been poorly cultivated. But there was a maiden aunt in the family who had nursed him as a baby, and ever after found a sphere for her maternal instincts in the sister's child. This good creature in most families there is one could scrape together 600, which with a Trinity scholarship, made up enough for the necessities, but left no margin over for anv of the follies of O / Oxford. A fellowship of about 200 a year Hilton considered depended on his first-class ; he then could take pupils and keep house with a favourite sister, and insure her some comfort and diversion too, so necessary amid all the domestic worries daily arising from the vagaries of the hare- brained father. Hilton was truly self-denying. I was not the only one who, deeply sympathizing READING FOR A DEGREE. 183 and liking the society of so good a fellow, used to ask him to the Magdalen ground, to bat and bowl by turns in cricket practice ; or to take an oar on the river ; and sometimes he had the loan of a horse from friends, who were well aware that Hilton felt he had no right to any recreation which cost him a shilling. It is therefore easy to imagine what mixed motives, what feelings of a more generous kind than the mere ambition of other reading men, surged in the breast of Eobert Hilton. The whole o family watched and listened to every anticipation of his success, and had occasion indeed to be anxious for his future. Hilton felt that on his class in this examination the mainstay of the home might depend. Such striving men used to be common enough to keep each other in countenance at Cambridge, but less so at Oxford where Hilton's position among men in more easy circumstances had peculiar temptations and difficulties. "It is an anxious time," said Hilton, as he turned over the leaves, looking for the passages he had marked with D, for difficult. " No man," he said, " can be equally ready with every part of sixteen books ; and who can tell how far he may be fortunate in the questions or passages to try his reading for three long years ? " 184 OXFORD MEMORIES. I remarked that he looked rather pale, and as if rest was much wanted. " Yes," he replied, " but I am told this is the common lot of all reading men, such is the brain work of these last days of preparation. But think of the zest with which I shall read when it is no more to satisfy examiners, and as it were to screw up my mind to the measure of theirs, when this crisis of my life is over. Eeading for a class they say is discipline, a- preparation for the dry work of life." " Suppose you go to the bar," said Short, " a solicitor may bring you a brief of dry facts say that John Doe broke Eichard Eoe's head, the provocation being perhaps a long story of intricate parish matters, and all this you must master with far more accuracy than the details of a fight in Thucydides, ready for the court next morning. A class man is ready trained for the dry work, while a man who is only used to pick and choose, reading for his own improvement, as you would say, would be unfit for the practice. Again, in a statesman's life, see what facts and figures of the least interesting kind form by far the greater part of a life which some suppose to be all scientific diplomacy or legislative. So," argued Short, " all life is reading up to examinations of some kind ; your competitors in all professions are your OUR PARTY FINDS A FRIEND. 185 examiners, ready to hit a weak point, and soon see whether you have learnt your lesson ! " True, too true ; but this is anything but a pleasant prospect to a man of literary tastes. " In other words," I said, " you must agree with Hodge, when he said he began to find that ' this here world is not all beer and skittles.' ' The time now drew near ; about four days remained. Already that long list of candidates, in which men feel nervous in reading their own names, had appeared on the doors of the schools and in college halls. You have only to divide the names into sixes, to see when your turn comes for vivd voce. And now Belton, Phipps, and Perrott are surprised with an invitation to break- fast with Isaac Williams, who, my youthful friends may be reminded, was author of the " Cathedral," and one of the originators of the then new Oxford Tract party. " The idea of Williams asking us," said Belton. " Why, he would like to fill the college with one half reading men like Hilton, and the other half with saints like Eound. He began very civil to us as freshmen, but after that row in the Count's rooms, and finding we cut both chapel and lecture with every excuse we could invent, all of a sudden we found ourselves no longer in his classes." 186 OXFORD MEMORIES. The explanation was that Short had the sense to see that the rougher class of men had better be handed over to him and the more promising and milder set left to Williams. " And what can Williams want of us now ? " was the question of one and all. Williams not long before had come into residence as tutor, fired with sanguine hopes of renovating the college that is, of making young men other than the young men of that stage of society always were and always would be. He had invested his future pupils, as parents invest their unborn children, with all the high qualities he wished them to have as the result of his own high moral and spiritual influences. Poor Williams ! Among the wilder set of Trinity he was as much out of his element as a High Church missionary among the wild tribes of Timbuctoo. Still Hilton, Prichard, Lee, and a few others afforded some little scope for his energies, moral as well as literary. But when Isaac Williams, reflected that these wild birds were about to take their final flight and disperse, for better or for worse, to show the result of their education north, south, east and west, he desired to do them what little good he could before they departed college life. When they came to breakfast, Belton and ISAAC WILLIAM'S KINDNESS. 187 his friends were taken quite by surprise with that cordial greeting and hearty sym- pathy, which at once thawed the icy manner with which, for twelve terms, they had taken off their caps to Williams. "Pray, take off your gowns," he said, " as more comfortable at breakfast. You will not want these gowns long. Time flies. So short a time it seems since you began in my Herodotus lecture. I know you are not reading men, but many men, being more practical, find a useful sphere in life as well ; only we say less of that here, because this place is, I may say, consecrated to the love of learning ; though Mr. Short reminds me truly of the Wyke- hamist motto that the ' manners ' even of the place ' make the man,' and we are all liable to be moulded by our environments. There is a moral and a social just as there is a physical atmosphere, and we cannot live insensible to it." During breakfast he continued : " You have several days left, and in that time I think I can do you a little good. You must come to me every evening about seven o'clock, and we will practice examination. I know the cardinal points and how to make your papers far more presen- table to the examiner than may occur to you. In Latin writing especially, most men know quite 188 OXFORD MEMORIES. Latin enough if they would only use such words as are familiar to them, and not attempt some style beyond them. Above all, answer only what you honestly know. Guesses or 'shots,' as you call them, rarely pass for knowledge and too often betray ignorance, for on paper you cannot explain yourself, whereas with vivd voce an examiner might see a ' method ' in what seems ' madness,' and put you in the way of doing yourself full justice." The party came away perfect converts to that Christian goodness before supposed to be the mere fanaticism of one of the college saints. When Charlie heard it he said it was only what he expected. "Williams always was a good fellow, only out of tone and tune with such a set of ungodly scamps as you. You'll say I am preach- ing to you, but you must put -up with sober truth for once." Lord Eldon's account of his examination in 1770 is amusing : " I was examined in Hebrew and History ' What is the Hebrew for the place of a skull?' I replied, 'Golgotha.' 'Who founded University College ?' I stated (though more than doubtful) ' King Alfred founded it.' " " Very well, sir," said the examiner, "you are competent for your degree." STRANGE CUSTOMS. 189 This is quoted in Dr. Knox's essay, in which he says, " The greatest dunce gets his testamur as easily as the greatest genius, though he knows no more than his scout : and even the masters who examine are sometimes equally unacquainted with such mysteries : but Schemes, as they are called, or cram books, containing forty or fifty questions are handed down from age to age, from one to another, to make a show of knowledge for ex- amination." I remember seeing a man locked up by Purdue, then the clerk of the schools, for two or three hours to qualify for his Doctor's degree, that the clerk might be able conscientiously to certify that the said candidate had been ready for a learned disputation with any comer, according to some old statute of course no one could come but through the keyhole ! So long does the form survive the substance ! Mr. Bedel Cox says, as late as his day, the examination for a degree was a farce, with merely a set of stock questions. There were "Eegent masters " to go through the ceremony for a ceremony it was, and nothing else. Some men were too scrupulous to enact this farce, and joined in a cry for a real examination, though examiners generally did not object to dine with the candidate 190 OXFORD MEMORIES. after the fatigues of the morning ; and the following was said to be the grace : " Say no more, my young friend, we've complied with the ' Norma Loquendi, qucerendi and eke respondendi ; ' I'd no reason to sing out ' Non stabat pro forma ' So now we will stand on no forma edendi." Non stabat pro forma was the old form of plucking. In some college exercises at Cambridge the plucked man heard " Descendas you may go down," made, satirically, sometimes to sound like ' Descend ass!" The Class List for Honours, as a stimulus to study, was established, chiefly by Cyril Jackson, in 1807. Like Hogarth's idle apprentice side by side with the industrious apprentice, we left Hilton working in a most generous spirit, side by side with Belton, Perrott and their friends, men who would not care if every word they were dozing over passed clean out of mind could they only finger that slip of paper which testifies that the bearer had " satisfied " the examiners sometimes too easily satisfied by a great deal. Isaac Williams had given this select party a sample of his art of teaching. In Latin writing he impressed that good Latin was better for the schools than near translation with any Latin not COMING TO THE END. 191 classical. Belton was surprised to find how by a little ingenuity he could render passages for which at first he wanted words. " Every man," said Williams, " can turn Latin into English ten times more easily than he can turn English into Latin : he has a habit for the one but not for the other ; the art of teaching Latin writings is to practise and form a habit for both." And for a Divinity lecture what was their surprise when Williams began with the Church Catechism and the Prayer book and made his pupils search their memory for scriptural proofs, gradually radiating from that centre ! In all these lectures he evinced such cordiality and sympathy as made them ashamed of their long indifference to a man capable of proving so good a friend. And now the schools are opened ; the eventful day has come " big with the fate " of Belton and Perrott and about one hundred and fifty others, for that was about the average at each half-year's examination. Of course a breakfast was prepared by sym- pathizing friends. The loan of white bands was volunteered, those most in request being the lucky ones, that is, those worn before without a pluck, for there is generally a little superstition with men on these critical occasions. 192 OXFORD MEMORIES. All kinds of rumours as usual were mentioned of the expected strictness of the examiners. Wilson, a new examiner, was reputed a great saint, so it must be a good divinity examination to satisfy him ; while Dixon, whose crude ideas of logic had just been published, would be equally formidable to those who were weak in Aldrich. As to the style of our friends, these sporting men had been got up in quite a new character, with nothing like duck-shooting coats or shawl waistcoats (the fancy of the day), but Clifton had suggested a quiet attire, like men of steady characters and V deserving young men." To see a hundred men, or more, most of them looking serious if not anxious, to note more pale faces than florid, and to reflect that the occasion marks a crisis in the life of so many the season of preparation past and the wide world in various counties and countries about to open before them this were an interesting study to any man who has lived long enough to understand this life as it is. Count Wratislaw's comment was more character- istic of his set : " What a lot of men in the so-called pursuit of learning without a ghost of a chance of overtaking it, a chase in which the further they go the further they are behind, like old Matthews' THE DAY COME AT LAST. 193 cockney at the Epping Hunt, who cried out 4 Coachee, drive me a-one-and-sixpenny fare, after the stag.' Three-fourths of these fellows would make a clean slate of all the knowledge they are here to make a pretence of, if only sure of that one slip of paper. What a pity it is they don't sell the bits of paper at once, and save all hypocrisy or humbug about the matter." Charlie alone seemed easy and confident enough. He knew they must pluck half the men at least if not satisfied with what he could offer. He whispered to me, "Perrott's chance is very doubtful. Belton and Phipps may shave the right side of the post if luck favours them, not otherwise, for Clifton's men are all for appear- ance. Why, what can Clifton do at all genuine in three months' reading after three years' idle- ness ? with men who know less than when they were fresh from school. All these men have been in the proctor's books, and they are all afraid of the effect of bad characters, though Isaac Williams told me that though a good word may be heard, but that rarely, for a very deserving man, as to others the examiners con- fined their attention to the work before them." I had provided luncheon for this party at one o'clock. The Count was with me awaiting the VOL. I. 13 194 OXFORD MEMORIES. return of our friends, " and to hear," as said the Count, " whether they had floored the logic or the logic had floored them." In they came almost breathless and in a great state of excitement mixed with indignation. Belton first spoke, " Perrott has got his ticket and no mistake Scandalous ! Whoever heard of a man plucked at the very first start ! The case is too plain ; they are down upon us for our scrapes the proctors choose the examiners and no doubt they have a list of us and the story of that Jericho affair too. I'll not wait to be bullied I'll cut it at once," and so saying he tore off his bands and threw them under the grate. Perrott now came in tears in his eyes choked and could hardly speak ; but the Count snatched the note from his hand and read that the senior examiner was sorry to tell Mr. Perrott that his logic paper was so deficient that it were useless for him to continue the examination. . Belton repeated with no little violence of language, " They are down on the Trinity set ; they know our set as well as they know ' the swell mob of Merton ' they are down on us for our characters, I say, or they would have given Perrott another chance." " Come," said the Count, " be reasonable, A SAD MISHAP. 195 Belton ; don't shy the post : you may be well in the running still ; besides Perrott didn't train with Clifton's lot ; and we all knew he was the weakest horse in the field Here," he said, picking up the bands from the fender, " put on your colours ; you can but lose after all." " True, true," said Phipps ; " perhaps my morals are as shaky as any, and as black in the proctor's books too, but I'll see the end of it." Meanwhile the Count had poured out nearly a tumbler full of sherry and was administering it to Perrott as a general panacea for all the " ills that flesh is heir to," the " mind diseased " included, with, " Here, Perrott, my good fellow, only get this inside of you and you'll be better. Don't be down in the mouth ; why, you are a free man now ; quite a gentleman at large, now. Yes, and Mark Murrell's hounds meet at the quarries to-morrow and you shall ride my mare till her tail drops off." Meanwhile Charlie took Belton aside and said, " I would bet five pounds that the examiner took an early glance at Perrott's logic papers, because he suspected copying. See that deep gash on that picture frame ; I saw Perrott cut some leaves out of Aldrich's Logic against that frame in a nervous hurry, and pocket them just as he was starting for the schools. This never answers ; it 13* 196 OXFORD MEMORIES. is easy to see if a man is copying ; he is fumbling at something and looks suspicious." This explanation of Perrott's mishap satisfied Belton and he resolved to try on. " It is very odd," said Short, one day to me, " how men do contrive to get some of their work done for them in the schools. One man I knew could not write Latin fit to pass, and I was told he meant to have it done by a friend ; so I cautioned the examiners, but my informant told me the Latin was done for him after all." " A cat in a corner must fight," and man in his utmost need becomes very ingenious and not the more conscientious either, as the following case will show : At three o'clock the schools re-opened. The subject for that afternoon was a translation from Latin into English ; and as I was reading quietly in my room, glad to escape from all this excite- ment, in rushed Phipps, breathless with running and just gasped out : " Nullus argento color est avaris. Write out a translation of that ode as fast as you can." As soon as he had breath enough he related, as I wrote, that on entering the schools, Mr. Moberley, the late Bishop of Winchester, one of the examiners, was standing with his back to the TRICKS ON EXAMINERS. 197 door and only about three yards in, and distribut- ing the Horace papers for that afternoon's work. Phipps peeped over his shoulder, read the first line and backed out without being seen by Mr. Moberley and caring little for the amazement of the other candidates looking on. Whether Phipps could have passed in Horace without this assistance I do not know, but at the same examination Bob Eobinson Crazy Bob we used to call him, from his reckless conduct and scattered wits could not write a single pro- position of those set from Euclid, yet passed from copying two from a selection of the most difficult he had in his pocket. I cannot but reflect that if these three cases of imposing on the examiners occurred in my experience alone, how many other instances of similar bad tricks may there not have been ! My friend Canon H. told me of a Cambridge man, a first-rate classic, whose mathematical papers excited the suspicion and incredulity of the examiners, being so much beyond the man's college reputation so he was watched and found copying from one of the best men of his day while sitting opposite him. In one instance he had arrived at a right answer with some figures wrongly copied in the premises ! Charlie said these tricks did not come up to 198 OXFORD MEMORIES. his sense of honesty, especially because the can- didates were treated as gentlemen without any uncomplimentary espionage : but Wratislaw said that if imposing on examiners was dishonesty they were all dishonest alike, and Clifton, who dealt in these make-believe scraps of knowledge, was not better than the man who sold wooden nutmegs or painted canaries or "flowers without roots," said Charlie, " doomed to wither as soon as planted for this is the true illustration of the said imposition." " If it is not ' obtaining money under false pretences,' it is obtaining money's worth, degrees," said Hilton, when he heard of this question of morals. Nothing worth mentioning occurred on the third day's examination, but then came the day for vivd voce, which was in divinity alone. Charlie and Phipps, the former from curiosity, but the latter in hopes of anticipating the same questions, watched the examination continually till it came to their turn to present themselves, and numerous were the questions and answers which they brought away for their own benefit as well as Belton's. An experienced examiner had told Charlie that to vary an examination was not easy and that most examiners naturally fell back into their own particular grooves. CHAPTEE X. GOING "UP FOE A FIEST CLASS, WITH A VEKY IN- TEEESTING EPISODE. AT length the day arrived. Belton had notice from Purdue, many years clerk of the schools, to appear next day with five others : Five of the six were usually seated with papers of questions while one was examined. " Belton will be up at twelve," said the Count, as he looked into my room, with his gown on his arm, " of course you will come and hear him. Not that I trouble the place very often the very look of it makes me melancholy, and as to old Purdue I would as soon meet my undertaker." When I entered, one promising man, Baxter, who might have gone in for a class, had just finished with eliciting some complimentary remark from the examiners. "This will make it worse for Belton," said the Count, " to come after such a swell examination as that." 200 OXFORD MEMORIES. And now Belton was called from the side desk where he had been employed. He bit his lips and walked resolutely up with a glance at his friends, as much as to say, " Here goes at last, neck or nothing." The Greek Testament was put into his hand, and he was told to read. It was no little satisfaction to identify a passage in which he felt safe, and as he read as slowly as he could to make the little he knew go a long way, the Count said to Phipps, " Well done, Belton, there's a good ten minutes run without a check." After that followed a question or two on the Articles, one or two on types or phophecies " all out of Vincent's Cram book, so far," whispered the Count, and then after a question as to Elijah and Elisha and the building of the Temple, " How would you define a sacrament ? " said the examiner. " A poser and no mistake this is " was the next com- ment from the Count, but when Belton, inwardly blessing Mr. Williams for his hints about the Catechism, gave the right answer, the Count at once exploded : "Well, I never should have thought of such a charity boy's answer as that." This last reply seemed to give some satisfaction and ended the examination, which as far as divinity was con- cerned, was evidently in Belton's favour. As he AN ANXIOUS MOMENT. 201 came out all his friends ran out to congratulate him. " Fool that I was," said the Count,^" to be afraid of such an examination as that. Why, I could have answered most of the questions myself." True, true, but the first you missed would have been followed up by others probing you in your weakest points. This is a common mistake, my friend ; it always seems easier to the lookers-on. Still there were some anxious hours to be passed by Belton. He had heard from Isaac Williams that after the divinity examination all the papers of the candidate were surveyed together, and the question had to be decided, whether in the balance the candidate had done quantum suff. or not. At five o'clock the examiners came out and brushed hastily past half a dozen men anxiously waiting. Immediately after Purdue appeared, holding the testamurs high over his head for fear they should all be snatched away at once. The Count, who volunteered to stand for a painful quarter of an hour with the five friends, waiting for the other candidates, was nervously swinging his gown strings and pacing about the door of the schools. At once all the six friends rushed forward. " Don't be in a hurry, gentlemen," said 202 OXFORD MEMORIES. Purdue, standing high on the step to be above them. ^" Here are five out of six ; all safely through but Mr. Wilkins of Oriel." "Hurrah for Belton ! " cried the Count, and soon with similar exultation from the other friends in waiting, you might have seen them running at O y / O < ' their best speed their gowns flying out like black wings behind them north, south, east and west, though poor Wilkins' friend stood sorrow- fully fixed to the spot, till he had asked one more question of Purdue, and then he walked painfully away with heavy step and heavier heart, to perform what many a man has felt to be the most trying duty of college friendship, to return to a fellow collegian empty-handed from the door of the school, to find him trembling with excite- ment and listening to every footstep, as it crushes along the gravel or sounds upon the stairs, and to have to break to him the sad news that there is no testamur for him ; that he must cheer up better -luck another time and try to think of something else and drown his care with jolly companions and a glass of wine. Very hard to do ! " Miserable comforters are you all " in such a mood ! "Plucked, ah, plucked! How stinging is the word, all my labour for nothing! The same PLUCKED! HOW HORRID! 203 drudgery and self-denial to be followed by the same sickening anxiety and torture of suspense over again ; and all ending in another pluck, too, I should not wonder. I feel as if I never could bring myself to try again. Plucked am I ? and I must write it home yes, home ! There's no way to hide it, and in a week every one that knows me here or at home must hear it all." The sad soliloquy of many a man. Oh, what a misery it is to be plucked ! I remember one undergraduate who was driven mad by it and committed suicide. Some will speak lightly of a pluck at college ; for, of course the idle and shameless will everywhere find a few to keep them in countenance. But I never knew a man so bold as to deny that a pluck was a very sore subject at home. First of all, the very name of being plucked sounds in almost every ear as the just punishment of a brainless idle dunce. The term itself is con- temptible ; it is associated with the most stupid, spiritless animals of creation. When we hear of a man being plucked, we think he is neces- sarily a goose. This is the general association of ideas not always the just conclusion perhaps, for we know that some few clever men and good scholars have been plucked from too little atten- 204 OXFORD MEMORIES. tion to some one subject ; still public opinion is never modified by solitary exceptions. As long back as my memory will carry me, down to the present day, there has been scarcely a mono- syllable in our language which seems to convey so stinging a reproach or to let a man down in the general estimation half as much as this one word "pluck." It is an imputation which admits of no reply, no defence, and no remedy. It cannot be concealed, and in some cases is never forgotten. "A worthy kind of man that, I believe," was remarked to me once of a clergy- man nearly fifty years of age, " but not much brains though ; he was plucked at college." Ah 1 the University may know by the lists who go up, and have nearly an equal opportunity of dis- covering who are plucked. Country friends and relatives must know it also ; for even supposing that a man refrains from mentioning that his examination is coming on, some of his father's neighbours have sons at college who circulate the news. Besides, who can control the tongue of his fond mamma in her morning calls ? How natural for her to remark how she longs to hear her dear boy is safe through his examination ; and thus when the sorry news comes all ears are open to receive it. PLUCK" "WHENCE DERIVED. 205 As regards the university regulations, there is no limit to the number of attempts you may make or to the plucks you may sustain, but few colleges will allow more than two. At Christchurch I have known a single pluck to involve a hint to leave. The term plucked, or now " ploughed," some say is derived from the habit of plucking the proctor's gown to whisper a non placet to stop the degree, chiefly on the part of a creditor for debt, though some say it originated from some such incident as this : The clerk of the schools was one day sweeping up torn papers and worn out pens and quills, and said to a passing friend, " See what sport to-day see the feathers of the geese we have plucked." One of the logical definitions of a man, giving his genus and differentia, is Bipes implumis, very like " a plucked man." But to resume our history : Briggs and Phipps escaped, as said the Count, by the skin of their teeth. Wine parties followed and healths were drunk, and speeches to their honour, as if they were the heroes of the hour ; and to pass seemed all the easier from their success. This reflection made the Count more down in the mouth than ever, thinking, "Why shouldn't I have done as 206 OXFORD MEMORIES. well as the others who trained with Clifton's lot." At last he said such luck was too good to last and as some had still to read for Ordination he said, rather characteristically, " They are all going down hill at a swinging pace at present, but the Bishop will put the skid on some of them." But much as I was interested in these idle fellows who had just escaped the penalty of three years thrown away, all the time that good fellow Hilton was my chief interest and anxiety, for fear bad luck, as in the case of Cardinal Newman and others, should place him lower than the first class. It is wonderful how increasing knowledge increases our consciousness of our own ignorance our standard of perfection rises, " Alps o'er Alps arise," and a wider field still opens to our view : so, for the highest honours at Oxford I never knew any man who went in confident. Our friends are often sanguine and our private ' coach ' too, but the latter rarely tries his pupil in all his subjects, and I knew one, considered to have every prospect of success, who returned a chorus of Sophocles, almost the only part of Sophocles he did not know, wholly unattempted : this infallibly would lower him from the first class to the second. READS FOR A FIRST CLASS. 207 And now the pass men had cleared away, and the schools reopened for the classes, and we heard all the usual prognostication that Balliol would have, say, two firsts, Christchurch three, and other colleges as many in the hopes of their partisans as would soon double the highest number on record. The number used to be about six : in the Midsummer of the year 1843, strange to say, there were none, and about the same time no Latin verse was good enough for the usual prize. The largest number of firsts I ever remember was in 1834, when Lord Sher- brooke, the late Bishop Jackson and Mr. Allies formed part of a class of twelve. There were four days of paper work, eight papers in all, mornings and afternoons. And I was pleased to see from Hilton's looks and spirits that he had every reason to be sanguine. Then followed six more days for desperate reading, before the day for the vivd voce of Hilton of Trinity Hilton Edwardus e Coll : Trin : as it stood in the list of candidates. There was no little college pride in Hilton's pros- pects in the class list. Benham of Balliol at the same time was at the height of his fame, and more than once it had been observed that though Brahma from earlier advantages had stood before Hilton for the 208 OXFORD MEMORIES. Ireland scholarship, they would find that Hilton had made up his lee-way and would show the better of the two for his degree. Therefore, Nor- man and Wilton felt disappointed, as I was, when I heard that Hilton had not been able to afford " a coach " during the long vacation, though his rival could afford one for these four precious months, which, as every Oxford man remembers, so often witness the final struggle for a first. For this reason, the nearer the day drew to Hilton's examination the greater was the excitement in the college. Some sanguine non-reading men protested that " pluck must win the pace was in him ; Hilton was the man to go in and win." But all good scholars knew that a quantum of book-work must be done, and that no degree of talent or of fire could make up for certain text- books unread, or for a failure in certain technicali- ties which formed the conventional test of exact knowledge and hard study. The reading men therefore always had their misgivings till they read the result on the doors of the Schools. " It will take me seven days' hard work," said Hilton, " for a final reading of the seven plays of Sophocles, without which by bad luck I shall be floored." " We will do it together, in two hours each READING FOR A FIRST CLASS. 209 play," said Norman. " I have marked out for my own use all the passages a man would not take at sight. This will save time and leave you fresh for something else." Accordingly Norman led Hilton as he said over all the most dangerous ground, and tried him in all the little niceties of scholarship before breakfast seven days together. There are those who never will forget the day of this particular examination in the schools. It commenced late in the day, an hour and a half devoted to divinity and the sciences most about the latter. Now the sciences were not Hilton's forte. Though not supposed to be really deficient in science, every other subject was known to be more to his mind. In these days a certain party of private coaches more especially, Hayward Cox, threw a mystery over Aristotle and secured a monopoly in private coaching, by encouraging a belief that no candidate was safe unless initiated by one of this clique into the " crochets of the schools " crotchets not to be learnt by any plain under- standing from the books alone so, the idea that Hilton with no such preparation was entered for the University stakes was deemed as daring a dis- regard of the odds as when Lane of Queen's, des- pising the training or the style of Stephen Davis, VOL. i. 14 210 OXFORD MEMORIES. trained his own boat for the head of the river, or when the home-trained Wild Dayrell, with the Littlecot groom for a jockey, was entered for the Derby. And now the sciences are done, and well done the Aristotle examination over leaving the strong points for next morning and Isaac Williams who had sat behind the examiners all the time, a very picture of sympathy and nervousness, said there had not been a better science examination that term. Great therefore was the triumph of those sceptical individuals who had ventured to maintain that Cox and Co. were now at a discount. Hurrah for the reign of common sense, or as Charlie said, " The force of humbug could no further go." Great also was the confidence with which all Hilton's friends looked forward to the morrow. Hilton's turn for vivd voce did not come till two . o'clock on the first day ; so many friends were not prepared for this day's examination, but the way in which he disposed of his sciences that day was news which soon spread and filled the schools the next morning. I went to Short to excuse my lecture that I might hear Hilton examined. " He said " this is the fourth application. I think I had better send you round to say ' No lecture this morning,' especially as I have reason to believe HILTON IN THE SCHOOLS. 211 that Hilton is in a fair way to do credit to the college." The schools were early crowded with Hilton's friends and others interested in the honour of Trinity. The examination, though prolonged for three hours, passed off in every point as well as could be desired ; but towards the end there was a little consultation and whispering among the examiners, one of whom was about to hand Hilton one more passage to translate when the senior examiner seemed to be saying, " Enough." This gave Hilton time to look around to the left and to exchange glances with his friends. It was fortunate for Hilton's equanimity that he did not look in that direction before ; for that hasty glance was not too hasty to reveal a certain bonnet, however quickly shrinking back by the door ; and in a moment Hilton was overpowered by the sense that his fond sister had found a friend to bring her over that day from her home near Abingdon to witness this critical examination in which her hopes and those of all the family so long had centred. Hilton was a strong-minded man with much self- command ; still the utmost he could do was to take the book presented to him with lips convulsively pressed together in stolid silence and to take time 14* 212 OXFORD MEMORIES. to choke down his emotion, no discredit to the bravest heart. It was plain to the examiner that some sudden feeling had overcome him ; and the senior examiner once more interfered and briefly said, in the name of all the examiners, that on every part they thanked him for a very good ex- amination. I, need not describe the well-known sounds and trampling over the benches which tell the examiners that the candidate is in a moment to be surrounded by " troops of friends ;" still less need we intrude upon those solemn confidences and words of endear- ment which were rapturously exchanged when Hilton hafl escaped to the further corner of the quadrangle, where the same neat bonnet and the aged Eector of Grrimley were waiting to receive him. Life has happy moments, and these are of them. This indeed was a scene hard to forget, and even after a lapse of fifty and more years I am sure that one at least of my surviving friends will be reminded of the soft feelings which that day stole over him when he reads this touching incident. CHAPTEE XI. TAKING A DEGEEE. SOME NICE BOYS AND WHAT BECAME OF THEM. ONE more remarkable occurrence I must chronicle of this term's examination: Lord C , of Jesus College, who eventually took a second class, strangely and absurdly broke down in his divinity on the first occasion. He was asked as to a King of Israel. He replied rightly " Saul." " Quite right sir." " Afterwards called Paul." L " Stay, 'we are sp eaking of the Old Testament and you say ' Saul, afterwards called Paul.' Am I to under- stand that this Saul, King of Israel, was the same person that was afterwards called Paul ? " " Yes, certainly." *" Then (shutting the book) it is quite needless to continue this examination." Lord C was followed out of the school by his friends and Welbore, of Trinity, among others, who said : " How could you be such a 214 OXFORD MEMORIES. fool ? ' Saul ' was all right ; why did you not leave off a winner ? You must have seen there was something wrong." "Never mind," he said, "if the examiner's ideas and mine differed as widely as all that, there was no use in humbugging any more about the matter." And what became of Hilton ? Fifty years, you say, have passed. What was his fate and fortune after so auspicious a beginning ? Oxford and Cambridge have proved the stepping stones by which many a man has passed from village obscurity and narrow means to the highest rank in Church and State. A clever youth, provided he has that inflexible per- severance which the facilities of ability are too apt to discourage, is no sooner at college than he has his foot on the ladder, with a chance to rise. I heard nothing of Hilton but on an occasional exchange of newspapers, which each believed to be entertaining to the other, for thirty years, when he wrote to ask my interest at Madras for his son, just appointed to the Civil Service. Hilton was then Dean of Blanktown, to which eminence he concisely said he had risen first by Oxford CHARLIE DOWN IN THE WORLD. 215 coaching, secondly by a Fellowship with college tutoring, and his turn at the offices of Dean and Bursar of his College ; then university proctor, and lastly head-master of Blank School, where his eminence as a preacher, and the wide interest that such a mastership in time commands, enlisted so much sympathy for a long and laborious life that on the principle of solve senescentem he was shunted into a Deanery. Here I have enumerated the steps in the career of many a rising University man, who begins with nothing, and ends in an Obituary with, "Dr. Blank died, aged 75 ; Will sworn under thirty thousand pounds." Less studious men, beginning too fast, burn out the candle of life in less than seventy years. Of Briggs, Charlie, Belton, and Perrott, Perrott alone survives to laugh with me over what once choked his utterance his pluck, and frolics various. Charlie, as he drew more and more deeply on his patrimony, I used to meet in the reading-room of the British Museum, one of the many poor scholars who go there morning after morning, distracted with the literary wealth at their command, while they hope to freshen up some worn-out subject and turn a penny in Paternoster Eow. These are the men who add to the 216 OXFORD MEMORIES. prejudice against publishers, simply because they will not buy what they know from long experi- ence that the public will not read. There is a fashion in books as in dishes and dresses. The poem that made Byron famous in a week, Murray said, not long since, would, from an unknown author, never find at the present day a re- munerative sale. Poor Charlie ! Talent without ballast of a certain kind will keep no man afloat. He would flit over the flowers and cull the sweets of literature, but never could master any single subject. As to writing for the Press, with that .untiring engine ever crushing behind you, and like time and tide waiting for no man, Charlie was a heart-ache for any editor who was per- suaded to depend upon him. It would be painful .to dwell too minutely on Charlie's downward course. He had in his father's lifetime " received his good things," and by the time all his college bills were paid a sad surprise to the father his share, .and more than his share, of the family estate was gone, and when the father and mother slept that -long sleep which alone gives rest from