THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRESHER—(continued)

The advice tendered to freshmen in Amhurst’s amazing and bitterly satirical letter is for those who have been matriculated. They must, therefore, fulfil all the rites of matriculation before they can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. As the process was vastly different in Georgian times, it is interesting to read the varying accounts of eighteenth-century freshmen. The gentleman who, “being of age to play the fool,” came up with his parents from Hoxton, has written a somewhat indiscreet but all the more laughable description of the ceremony.

“The master took me first aside,
Shew’d me a scrawl, I read, and cry’d
Do Fidem.
Gravely he shook me by the fist,
And wish’d me well—we next request
a tutor.
He recommends a staunch one, who
In Perkin’s cause has been his co-
adjutor
To see this precious stick of wood,
I went (for so they deem’d it good)
in fear, Sir.
And found him swallowing loyally
Six deep his bumpers which to me
seem’d queer, Sir.
He bade me sit and take my glass,
I answered, looking like an ass,
I, I can’t, Sir.
Not drink!—you don’t come here to pray!
The merry mortal said by way
of answer.
To pray, Sir! No—my lad, ’tis well,
Come! here’s our friend Sacheverell!
here’s Trappy!
Here’s Ormond! Marr! in short so many
Traitors we drank, it made my Cranium nappy....”

A View of the Theatre, Printing House &c. &c. at Oxford.

The lad then went out into the town with this same “sociable priest,” bought his gown, and parted from his parents, and then—

“The master said they might believe him,
So righteously (the Lord forgive him!)
he’d govern
He’d show me the extremest love,
Provided that I did not prove
too stubborn.
So far, so good—but now fresh fees
Began (for so the custom is)
Fresh fees!—with drink they knock you down,
You spoil your clothes; and your new gown
you spue in....”

He then retired for the night, and was awakened at six o’clock next morning by a “scoundrel” of a servitor. He rose and went to chapel, very sick and still half drunk. Later in the day, when he had recovered sufficiently, he went with his tutor to Broad Street, where—

“Built in the form of Pidgeon-pye,
A house there is for rooks to lie
and roost in.
Thither to take the oaths I went,
My tutor’s conscience well content
to trust in.
Their laws, their articles of grace
Forty, I think (save half a brace),
was willing
To swear to; swore, engag’d my soul,
And paid the swearing-broker whole
ten shilling.
Full half a pound I paid him down,
To live in the most p——d town,
o’ th’ nation.”

It must not be understood, however, that such orgies characterised the ceremony of matriculation. This writer of fluent doggerel was a gentleman commoner, but he seems to have caught at every lax point that he personally observed as a target for his wit. The more sober matriculation, both literally and figuratively, of George Colman the younger can be most suitably placed in the other side of the scale. “On my entrance at Oxford,” he wrote, “as a member of Christ Church, I was too foppish a follower of the prevailing fashions to be a reverential observer of academical dress—in truth, I was an egregious little puppy—and I was presented to the Vice-Chancellor, to be matriculated, in a grass-green coat, with the furiously-bepowder’d pate of an ultra-coxcomb; both of which are proscribed by the Statutes of the University. Much courtesy is shown, in the ceremony of matriculation, to the boys who come from Eton and Westminster; insomuch that they are never examined in respect to their knowledge of the School Classicks—their competency is considered as a matter of course—but, in subscribing the articles of their matriculation oaths, they sign their praenomen in Latin; I wrote, therefore, Georgeius—thus, alas! inserting a redundant E—and, after a pause, said enquiringly to the Vice-Chancellor—looking up in his face with perfect naivetÉ—‘pray, sir, am I to add Colmanus?’

“My Terentian father, who stood at my right elbow, blush’d at my ignorance—the Tutor (a piece of sham marble) did not blush at all—but gave a Sardonick grin, as if Scagliola had moved a muscle!

“The good-natur’d Vice drollingly answer’d me—that the surnames of certain profound authors, whose comparatively modern works were extant, had been latinized; but that a Roman termination tack’d to the patronymick of an English gentleman of my age and appearance, would rather be a redundant formality. There was too much delicacy in the worthy Doctor’s satire for my green comprehension—and I walk’d back, unconscious of it, to my College—strutting along in the pride of my unstatutable curls and coat, and practically breaking my oath, the moment I had taken it.”

From both their accounts, differing so widely from each other, it would seem that the ceremony of matriculation, which to-day is conducted with an almost ecclesiastical solemnity, was in those days simply a matter of form, a tedious business which the Vice-Chancellor hurried through with all speed. One man performed his part in a condition of semi-intoxication without an inkling of the meaning of the oaths to which he subscribed, while another was presented to the Vice-Chancellor in clothes more suitable to a fancy dress ball than to his formal admittance to the university. Neither man drew upon himself the reprimand which to-day would immediately be levelled at him.

In becoming a member of the university, therefore, the eighteenth-century freshman received his first experience of the complete inanition and futility of the Don world. Apparently he suffered no apprehension on the score of not conducting himself with fitting politeness when in the presence of the authorities. Their opinion of him gave him no concern. He was far more anxious not to contravene the unwritten laws of the Undergraduate world. Once the tiresome but necessary matriculation became a thing of the past, he began to look about him, anxiously at first from the desire to avoid grievous blunders which would make him a laughing-stock. All initiative was far too dangerous when the lynx eyes of the entire college were upon him. Actuated by the firm belief that at least he could not be criticised for politeness and good-breeding, the timid freshman endeavoured to ingratiate himself in the eyes of all by doffing his cap with humble frequence. From “Academia, or the Humours of Oxford,” the following bitter excerpt on the question of the freshman’s manners is vastly entertaining.

“Now being arrived at his College,
The place of learning and of knowledge,
A while he’ll leer about, and snivel ye,
And doff his Hat to all most civilly,
Being told at home that a shame face too,
Was a great sign that he had some Grace too,
He’ll speak to none, alas! for he’s
Amased at every Man he sees:
May-hap this lasts a Week, or two,
Till some Scab laugh’s him on’t, so
That when most you’d expect his mending,
His Breeding’s ended, and not ending
Now he dares walk abroad, and dare ye,
Hat on, in peoples’ Faces stare ye;
Thinks what a Fool he was before, to
Pull off his Hat, which he’d no more do;
But that the devil shites Disasters,
So that he’s forc’d to cap the Masters, ...
He must cap them; but for all other,
Tho’ ’twere his Father, or his Mother,
His Gran’num, Uncle, Aunt, or Cousin,
He wo’ not give one Cap to a dozen.”

What wonders may be worked in a week or two! From almost servile politeness he went to the extreme of discourtesy with the assurance of a second-year man.

Imitation is, however, the essence of life. Because certain things are done, all men are compelled to do them unless they wish to incur social ostracism. We are like sheep and must follow our leaders with docility and readiness. If we decline to bow the neck to convention, and declare for originality and freedom, society turns and rends us. At Oxford the punishment for such a crime as originality is swift. A horde of outraged seniors descends like an avalanche upon the sinner’s rooms. They visit their wrath not only upon his belongings but upon his person, and eventually they leave him in a condition of mental and physical chaos, to realise the utter futility of kicking against the pricks.

In the eighteenth century the same social creed was practised. For any transgression from the commonplace the chastisement of the culprit was inevitable. The freshman undoubtedly realised the truth of this, however vaguely, and conducted himself according to the rules laid down by his seniors. His excessive good manners lasted only until the moment when it was born in upon him that rudeness was the policy of his leaders.

But though he might be no more than a scant fifteen years of age, as soon as he wiped away the last tear caused by the departure of his mother, the fresher became a Man, aggressively and consistently so. “No character,” wrote Colman, “is more jealous of the Dignity of Man (not excepting Colonel Bath, in Fielding’s Novel of Amelia), than a lad who has just escaped from School birch to College discipline. This early Lord of the Creation is so inflated with the importance of virility, that his pretension to it is carefully kept up in almost every sentence he utters. He never mentions any one of his associates but as a gentlemanly or a pleasant man—a studious man, a dashing man, a drinking man, etc., etc.—and the Homunculi Togati of Sixteen always talk of themselves as Christ Church men, Trinity, St John’s, Oriel, Brazen-nose men, etc.—according to their several colleges, of which old Hens, they are the Chickens—in short, there is no end to the colloquial manhood of these mannikins.” This passage might easily have been written to-day and not about the middle of the eighteenth century, for the point of view of the modern Oxford man is exactly the same as it was then.

The parents of the old-time fresher looked at his going up and his immediate assumption of manhood from very opposite points of view. The mother, with regulation anxiety, conceived him to be a hardly-used, homesick, half-starved, uncomfortable, thoroughly wretched fellow, doomed to live in stone walls in a fever-stricken and miasmic locality.

“Most dearly tender’d by his Mother,
Who loves him better than his brother;
So she at home a good while keeps him,
In White-broath, and Canary steeps him;
And tho’ his Noddle’s somewhat empty,
His Guts are stuffed with Sweet-meats plenty.”

This is how “Academia” described the mother’s far-reaching apron-string still feeling out, though some weeks cut, for her far distant son. Not so the father! When his wife sent a servant up to Oxford with a well-stuffed hamper for her boy and fond messages as to his health, he went down to the servants’ hall and, planting himself in front of the returned messenger, asked “If’s Son has got a Punck yet Whores he, and gets ye often drunk yet; Being told by’s Man, he took him quaffing, For joy he bursts his sides with laughing; and prithee John (says he) and how was’t—Ha, Drunk i’ the Cellar, as a Sow, wast?”

Although the father took it for granted that his son had immediately forgotten his home and arrived in an instant at man’s estate—as far as that permits of getting drunk—he was not always in the right. To a certain extent the anxieties of the mother were justified, for, on arriving at Oxford, the freshman did not always fall on a bed of clover. In many instances he was lucky to get a bed at all in some poky little garret with one window, through which could be obtained a minute view of sky and stars, and which was ice-cold in winter and in summer stuffy to a degree. However large the college there were always more men in residence than could be properly housed. Colman said of the House, one of the biggest colleges in Oxford, that it “was so completely cramm’d, that shelving garrets, and even unwholesome cellars, were inhabited by young gentlemen, in whose father’s families the servants could not be less liberally accommodated.” He refers also to a fellow Westminster boy who was “stuffed into one of these underground dog-holes.” Then, too, even up to the beginning of the nineteenth century there prevailed a system of ragging freshers which did not tend to make them any the less homesick. They were swindled by their scouts, and shamefully misused by their bedmakers.

To add to their discomfort their tutors were in many cases fast allies of the bottle, and totally unable to render them any assistance in the matter of finding their feet. Colman made a very illuminative reference, from his own experience, to the scurvy tricks which the scouts and bedmakers played upon the long-suffering fresher. “My two mercenaries,” he wrote, “having to do with a perfect greenhorn, laid in all the articles for me which I wanted—wine, tea, sugar, coals, candles, bed and table linen—with many useless etcetera, which they told me I wanted—charging me for everything full half more than they had paid, and then purloining from me full half of what they had sold.”

His scout and bedmaker had each seen fit to enter the bonds of holy matrimony, and both brought up their better halves to assist in despoiling the luckless greenhorn. He, however, soon lost his greenness and set about putting his house in order—with the result that all four were turned out. In their places, he duly installed a scout and a bedmaker who were married to each other—a tactical move which “consolidates knavery, and reduces your mÉnage to a couple of pilferers, instead of four.” But before Colman had found himself sufficiently to be able firmly but courteously to dispense with their services, his bedmaker, fittingly called a harpy, played him false most condemnably. “I was glad,” he said, writing of his first night in Oxford, “on retiring early to rest, that I might ruminate, for five minutes, over the important events of the day, before I fell fast asleep. I was not, then, in the habit of using a night-lamp or burning a rush-light; so, having dropt the extinguisher upon my candle, I got into bed; and found, to my dismay, that I was reclining in the dark upon a surface very like that of a pond in a hard frost. The jade of a bedmaker had spread the spick and span sheeting over the blankets, fresh from the linen-draper’s shop-unwash’d, uniron’d, unair’d, ‘with all its imperfections on its head.’ Through the tedious hours of an inclement January night, I could not close my eyes—my teeth chattered, my back shivered—I thrust my head under the bolster, drew my knees up to my chin; it was all useless, I could not get warm—I turned again and again, at every turn a hand or a foot touch’d upon some new cold place; and at every turn the chill glazy clothwork crepitated like iced buckram. God forgive me for having execrated the authoress of my calamity! but, I verily think, that the meekest of Christians who prays for his enemies, and for mercy upon “all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks,” would in his orisons, in such a night of misery, make a specifick exception against his Bedmaker!”[4]

In these enlightened days a fresher, even, would not have left her out of his prayers—he would have invented new ones for her especial benefit. Poor Colman found when he rose betimes in the morning, making a virtue of necessity, that a night of misery was not the only torment that the ill-favoured hussy had stored up for him. For, having abluted in ice-cold water in the hopes of refreshing himself, he found that the towel was in an even worse state of hardness than the sheets; while at breakfast the tablecloth was so stiff that he dreaded to sit down to his meal because he feared to cut his shins against the edge of it. With intent, doubtless, to add humiliation to injury, the old hag had also left his surplice in a state of pristine unwashedness, so that “cased in this linen panoply, which covers him from his chin to his feet, and seems to stand on end, in emulation of a suit of armour (the certain betrayer of an academical debutant) the Newcomer is to be heard at several yards distance, on his way across a quadrangle, cracking and bouncing like a dry faggot upon the fire—and he never fails to command notice, in his repeated marches to prayer, till soap and water have silenced the noise of his arrival at Oxford.”

The optimism of a Georgian freshman was truly amazing. The invaluable gift of youth is undoubtedly its explanation. To be thrust suddenly into entirely new surroundings where not only the manners and customs were quite different from any of which he had experience before, but where it was necessary to begin again, to readjust his outlook upon life, was a very trying experience. It was one which men of greater maturity would hesitate to undergo. And yet here was this man, a mere lad of fifteen or sixteen, gladly entering a new world with a vague notion of the things which would be expected of him or of the things to expect. Without a twinge of nervousness he signed his name to long-winded oaths, and unconsciously perjured himself five minutes later. Everywhere he saw strange faces, met with new and incomprehensible experiences, and found himself doing the wrong thing. With undaunted cheerfulness, however, he allowed Oxford to treat him as she chose, to mould him to her own liking, to pull him this way and that, until eventually, with an increased optimism, his schoolboy corners were rounded off, and he became one with Oxford. It was his very lack of experience which enabled him to go through such a difficult time without flinching. He did not realise the tremendous forces at work upon him. He was, in fact, like a seed put into earth. After the rain, the sun, the wind, and all the forces of Nature have been brought to bear upon it, slowly and irresistibly it shoots up and becomes at last a flower. The Oxford freshman burst forth into blossom at the end of his first year in the same helpless way. He was quite unable to tell by what steps his development had been brought about, and was perfectly content to go through his whole university career in the same blind way.