’VARSITY LITERATURE (continued)

On the first day of January, 1750, there appeared the first number of The Student. The sub-title read: The Oxford Monthly Miscellany. For two years it ran successfully, and, at the beginning of the second, it was found that Cambridge took such an interest in its doings that the sub-title was enlarged. It then read: The Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany. In make-up it differed entirely from Terrae Filius, and contended to be a far more serious and high-minded journal, aiming not so much to amuse as to teach its readers. Thus it contained Latin prose and verse, religious discussions, essays, medical dissertations, and a carefully selected variety of lighter matter in English prose and verse. The tone of the work may be gathered from the sedate foreword to the public.

“In the course of this work particular care will be taken that nothing be inserted indecent or immoral, and as we are determined to give umbrage to no Person or Party, all political disputes and whatever is offensive to Good Manners will of consequence be avoided. Our design being only to promote learning in general, we shall not confine ourselves to any particular subject, but occasionally comprehend all the branches of polite literature. Each number will consist of such originals in Prose and Verse as we hope will prove agreeable to our readers. And tho’ we might with impunity comply with the common practice of preying indiscriminately on the labours of others, yet we shall not to our knowledge publish any thing that has been printed before, or without the consent of the respective authors: for the one we consider as a fraud upon the publick, and the other an invasion of private property. These considerations we presume will remove any prejudice which the Learned may conceive against our undertaking, and induce them not only to encourage, but assist us in the prosecution of it. And as we must necessarily depend on the publick for the Success of our work, we hope it will meet with their indulgence. No endeavours on our part shall be wanting to render it worthy their approbation; and we no longer desire their favour, than while we continue to deserve it.”

In the first number there were some five or six pages of Latin verse, a translation of the chorus at the end of the second act of Hecuba of Euripides, an elegy in imitation of Tibullus, an article on “Intellectual Pleasure”—the author of which was requested, in an editorial note, to favour the paper with his further reflections—the speech of John Fell, D.D., Bishop of Oxford, at his Triennial Visitation in the year 1685, an article entitled “Leaning of no Party,” and one or two lighter imaginative contributions, such as “The Speech of an Old Oak to an Extravagant Young Heir as He was going to be Cut Down,” and an “Address to an Elbow Chair Lately New Cloath’d.” As there were no advertisements to assist the editors with the printing bills, it speaks well for the literary taste of the period that the paper lived two full years—the period to which the editors limited themselves at the outset. Such a periodical at Oxford in the year of grace 1911 would prove to be a hopeless anachronism. It would arrive at a circulation of three copies per month—a free copy to the British Museum, another to the Bodleian, and the third to the editor’s mother. The Undergraduates might finger it casually on the bookshop counter, and the Dons read the first number on account of its novelty, but it would die a speedy death unless by the second issue the editor announced its coalition with the comic paper whose editor runs his motor-car on the earnings of butcher and express messenger boys.

One of the lighter features of The Student was a series of letters from Cambridge written by the female student. Her epistles were full of humour, and she poked fun at the Undergraduates quietly, and in a manner not wholly unlike Terrae Filius. Perhaps it is unfair to compare her efforts to those of Amhurst, because as he jested and quipped in every conceivable style and way, any one coming after him might be accused, quite unjustly, of plagiarism. That the female student was not guilty of any false modesty is easily to be seen from the account of herself in her preliminary letter; while the care with which the editors of The Student guarded the decencies and the moralities ensured that she did not in any way cause a breach in them by her broad-minded and outspoken contributions. She began by claiming the student as a brother, a claim based upon her birth, education, and the whole conduct of her life. She asserted that she, too, was a student, having sounded the depths of philosophy and made greater progress “in academical erudition” than most of the Dons whose profound knowledge consisted in a “little cap with a short tuft and a large pompous grizzle wig.” She was born and brought up in Cambridge in the care of an aunt. Her studies were directed by a grave Fellow of a college. Her aunt was so fond of her that she was suffered to “give a loose to her passion for literature,” and the girl absorbed information from curling papers and the lids of wig-boxes. When she was seventeen her tutor died of a surfeit occasioned by feeding too freely at a gaudy, and the secret at last came out that there had been a union between the Don and the aunt for nearly twenty years. The aunt became, therefore, a mother, and she produced documents to show that the Don’s possessions were hers. The result of the selling of the deceased’s effects did not raise the good woman to a condition of luxury.

“However,” said the girl, “she resolved to continue at Cambridge on my account, and we lived together in a manner much genteeler than our fortune would afford. My person (which, by-the-bye, I took as much pains to cultivate as my mind) now began to be cried up as much as my parts. I was a charming, clever, sweet, smart, witty, pretty creature, in short, I was as much feared for my wit as ador’d for my beauty. From hence I had vanity to fancy I could have anybody I pleased, and had therefore resolved within myself to be run away with by a nobleman, or a baronet at least.”

But this witty, pretty creature unfortunately over-estimated her possibilities. The next ten years passed in a round of gaiety which took the form of courtship by no one under the rank of gentleman commoner. With the baronet in view, however, such mere mortals fell in their hundreds. Some she rejected “because a better might offer, some because they had too much sense; others because they had too little; this was too old, that too young,” and, in consequence, she was gradually deserted, as her physical charms waned, until at last her name was never mentioned “without the odious reproach of ‘she has been’ added to it.”

At the moment of writing this first letter she was compelled to work for her bread and the support of her mother. This she did with her pen, turning out poems and novels; being, as she informed The Student, at present engaged in “composing sermons for a bookseller, which he designs to sell for the MS. Sermons of an eminent divine lately deceased, warranted originals.”

The Student, liking the tone of her first letter, encouraged her to write further, and from time to time she sent in various articles, such as a scathing criticism of Academical Gallantry, in which she roundly chaffed all gownsmen for their bragging propensities and gallant follies, and gave an account of the various Dons and their habits who had laid vain siege to her heart, and a discussion on the sin of living single, and the fustiness of old maids—a plight in which she admitted herself to be, though not by “desire or inclination.”

In spite of the editorial desire to give umbrage to no person or party, certain of the Bucks seem to have considered her an unamusing, brazen creature, whose inclusion in The Student was a sad mistake, for she received the following crushing letter from one of their number.

Whether this letter really caused the good lady to take up sewing in earnest it is impossible to say, but the fact remains that she was no more seen in The Student—not even to the extent of an indignant feminine outburst against Mr Fizz-Puff.

Among the “never before” printed verses which the editor secured for his columns were some written by Sir Walter Raleigh at Winchester in 1603, as he lay under sentence of death. They were printed from a manuscript with due care to preserve the spelling exactly as it was. The editor, however, was in ignorance of the fact that they had already been published in 1608 in the second edition of Davison’s Poetical Rhapsody.

“Goe, soul, the bodyes gueste,
Upon a thankless arrante,
Fear not to touche the beste,
The truth shall be thy warrante.
Goe, since I needs must dye,
And give them all the lye.
“Goe, tell the court it glowse,
And shines like painted woode;
Goe, tell the church it shows
What’s good, but does no good.
If court and church replye
Give court and church the lye.”

The moribund knight pursued his muse to the thirteenth verse, giving everybody and everything the lie. The editor of The Student, undoubtedly with the idea of pandering to all tastes, was careful to place these verses in between a translation of a Latin epigram—

“I stole from sweet Gumming two kisses in play,
But she from myself stole myself quite away;
I grieve not I play’d, tho’ so cruel the sport;
I’m more pleas’d than griev’d at the hurt.”

and an epistle in verse to Lord Cobham, written by Congrave, while in the very near neighbourhood, was—

“THE HERMAPHRODITE.
“From the Latin
“My mother, when she was with child of me,
Consulted heav’n what gender I should be.
Female, cried Mars; Apollo said, a Male;
Neither, quoth Juno; both your judgments fail.
My birth did prove the Goddess in the right;
Nor boy, nor girl, but an Hermaphrodite.
Again she ask’d them what my fate would be.
One said a sword, another said a tree;
Water a third, and they were right all three.
For from a tree I fell upon my sword,
Feet caught in boughs, head dangling in a ford.
Man, Woman, Neither, I at last was found,
Just as the Gods foretold, hang’d, stabb’d, and drown’d.”

A few numbers before that in which the coffee-house wit told the female student just precisely what he thought of her, the editor received a letter from another of these gentry at one of the coffee-houses. On behalf of all his brother Smarts, Mr Harry Didapper took it upon himself to offer a little friendly advice to the paper. He informed the editor that The Student was read with keen interest by them all, but that at times it indulged in boring and pompous articles which, however they pleased the editor himself, or the cultivated taste of his wig-maker, hosier and wine merchant, left them angry and disappointed. The Smarts wished to have no more abstract speculations and religious introspections. They wanted more brightness and humanity about the paper. Consequently in the next issue the editor published the following lamentation:—

“A RECEIPT FOR THE GOUT.
“Oh Gout! the plague of rich and great!
Thou cramping padlock of the feet!
Oh Gout! thou puzzling knotty point!
You nick man’s frame in every joint;
You, like inquisitors of Spain,
Rack, burn, and torture limbs to pain.
First, miner-like, you work below,
And sap man’s fortress by the toe....
And what is worse, the wounded part
Finds small relief from doctor’s art.
Great Wilmot’s skill confounded stands
When patient roars ... my toe! my hands!...
’Tis said that bees, when raging found,
Are charm’d to peace by tinkling sound;
Shrill lullabies in nurse’s strain
Asswage the froward bantling’s pain,
When cutting teeth, or ill-plac’d pin,
Molest the tender baby’s skin,
So when Gout-humours throb and ache,
The present soft prescription take.
In elbow-chair majectick sit
In full high twinge, yet scorn to fret;
Divert the pain with generous wine;
Read news from Flanders and the Rhine;
Hold up the toe like Pope of Rome;
Forbear to scold, and swear, and fume;
Let double flannel guard the part,
To mitigate the dreadful smart;
Wrap round the joint this harmless verse;
And let dame Patience be your nurse.”

Would any doctor in these times prescribe wine as a remedy against gout? Whether the advice was sound or not, the Smarts appeared to have been appeased, for there came no further complaints as to the stodginess of the fare served up to them.

In the same number of The Student there appeared a letter from Bishop Atterbury to his son Obadiah, who was up at the House. How the editor procured it is not recorded, nor is it easy to see why he included it in his columns. It cannot have been vastly entertaining to a list of subscribers who devoted most of their time to ale and coffee-houses, or in dallying with Amaryllis in the shade of Merton Wall. It is greatly interesting to-day, however, as an example of what an eighteenth-century parent indicted to his son. The contrast between this letter and the replies one receives in 1911 in answer to one’s brief epistles written, mostly, solely in order to “touch the dad down for a bit” is not unstriking.

“Dear Obby,—I thank you for your letter, because there are manifest signs in it of your endeavouring to excel yourself, and in consequence to please me. You have succeeded in both respects, and will always succeed, if you think it worth your while to consider what you write and to whom, and let nothing, tho’ of a trifling nature, pass through your pen negligently. Get but the way of writing correctly and justly, time and use will teach you to write readily afterwards. Not but that too much care may give a stiffness to your style, which ought in all letters by all means to be avoided. The turn of them should always be natural and easy, for they are an image of private and familiar conversation. I mention this with respect to the four or five first lines of yours, which have an air of poetry, and do therefore naturally resolve themselves into blank verses. I send you your letter again, that you may make the same observation. But you took the hint of that thought from a poem, and it is no wonder therefore, that you heightened the phrase a little when you were expressing it. The rest is as it should be; and particularly there is an air of duty and sincerity, that if it comes from your heart, is the most acceptable present you can make me. With these qualities an incorrect letter would please me, and without them the finest thoughts and language would make no lasting impression upon me. The great Being says, you know—my son, give me thy heart—implying that without it all other gifts signify nothing. Let me conjure you therefore never to say anything, either in a letter or common conversation, that you do not think, but always to let your mind and your words go together on the most slight and trivial occasions. Shelter not the least degree of insincerity under the notion of a compliment, which, as far as it deserves to be practis’d by a man of probity, is only the most civil and obliging way of saying what you really mean; and whoever employs it otherwise, throws away truth for breeding; I need not tell you how little his character gets by such an exchange. I say not this as if I suspected that in any part of your letter you intended only to write what was proper, without any regard to what was true; for I am resolved to believe that you were in earnest from the beginning to the end of it, as much as I am when I tell you that I am,—Your loving father, etc.”