'The women longed to go and see the college and the tutour.'

'The Guardian's Instruction' by Stephen Penton.

When the late Mr. Bright asserted that the tone of Oxford life and thought was 'provincial with a difference,' great indignation was aroused in the breasts of all Oxford men--residents, at least; whether it was the provincialism or the 'difference' wherein lay the sting of the taunt. Probably it was the first. For, although it is a tenable hypothesis that KleinstÄdtigkeit has really been a potent factor in the production of much that is best in art and literature, still nobody likes to be called provincial by those whose business is in the metropolis. Caesar said that he would rather be a great man at Gabii, or whatever was the Little Pedlington of Italy, than an ordinary person at Rome; but the modern Little Pedlingtonian would seldom confess to so grovelling an ambition, whatever might be his real feelings. He would much sooner be one of the crowd in London than mayor of his native city: so at least he says. And so he is very angry if you call him provincial, and venture to insinuate that his views of life are limited by the jurisdiction of his Local Board or City Council; and thus the University of Oxford refused for a long time to forgive John Bright, and did not quite forget his strictures even when it gave him an honorary degree and called him 'patriae et libertatis amantissimus.' And yet the authorities had done what they could to keep the University provincial. It was only after many and deep searchings of heart that the Hebdomadal Council consented to countenance the advent of the Great Western Railway; while the ten miles which separate Oxford from Steventon preserved undergraduates from the contaminating contact of the metropolis there was still hope, but many venerable Tories held that University discipline was past praying for when a three-hours' run would bring you into the heart of the dissipation of London. Some there were who could not even imagine that so terrible a change had really taken place; it is said that Dr. Routh, the President of Magdalen, who attained the respectable age of ninety-nine in the year 1855 (he was elected towards the close of the last century as a warming-pan, being then of a delicate constitution and not supposed likely to live!), persistently ignored the development of railways altogether; when undergraduates came up late at the beginning of the winter term, he would excuse them on the ground of the badness of the roads.

We have changed all that, like other provincial centres; and undergraduates who want to 'see their dentist'--a venerable and time-honoured plea which we have heard expressed by the delicate-minded as 'the necessity for keeping a dental engagement'--may now run up to town and back between lunch and 'hall;' the latter function having also marched with the times, and even six-o'clock dinner being now almost a thing of the past. Not so long ago five was the regular hour. In the early seventies seven-o'clock dinner was regarded as a doubtful innovation; and there we have stopped for the present. But the fashionable world outside the colleges imitates London customs--always keeping a little way behind the age--and what has been called the 'Parks System' actually dines as late as 7.45 when it is determined to be trÈs chic. It is only one sign of the influx of metropolitan ideas; but there are many others. Oxford tradesmen have learnt by bitter experience that the modern undergraduate is not an exclusive preserve for them like his father. That respected county magnate, when he was at Oriel, bought his coats from an Oxford tailor and his wine from an Oxford wine-merchant, to whom--being an honest man--he paid about half as much again as he would have paid anywhere in London, thereby recouping the men of coats or of wines for the many bad debts made by dealing with the transitory and impecunious undergraduate. But his son gets his clothes in London, and his wine from the college, which deals directly with Bordeaux. And the tone and subject of conversation is changed too. Oxford is thoroughly up to date, and knows all about the latest play at the Criterion and the latest scandal in the inner circle of London society--or thinks it does, at any rate: there is no one who knows so much about London as the man who does not live there.

But if Oxford goes to London, so does London come to Oxford. Whether it be fitting or not that the site of a theoretically learned University should be in summer a sort of people's park or recreation-ground for the jaded Londoner, the fact is so: the classes and the masses are always with us in one form or another. It has become a common and laudable practice for East-end clergymen and the staff of Toynbee Hall and the Oxford House to bring down their flocks on Whit-Monday or other appropriate occasions; and one may constantly see high academic dignitaries piloting an unwieldy train of excursionists, and trying to compress University history into a small compass, or to explain the nature of a college (of all phenomena most unexplainable to the lay mind) to an audience which has never seen any other place of education than a Board school. As for the classes, they have raised the Eights and 'Commem.' to the rank of regular engagements in a London season, and they go through both with that unflinching heroism which the English public invariably display in the performance of a social duty: they shiver in summer frocks on the barges, despite the hail and snowstorms of what is ironically described as the 'Summer' term; and after a hard day's sightseeing they enjoy a well-earned repose by going to Commemoration balls, where you really do dance, not for a perfunctory two hours or so, but from 8.30 to 6.30 a.m. In spite of these hardships it is gratifying to observe that, whether or not the University succeeds in its educational mission, it appears to leave nothing to be desired as a place of amusement for the jaded pleasure-seeker. People who go to sleep at a farce have been known to smile at the (to a resident) dullest and least impressive University function. Ladies appear to take an especial delight in penetrating the mysteries of College life. Perhaps the female mind is piqued by a subdued flavour of impropriety, dating from a period when colleges were not what they are; or more probably they find it gratifying to the self-respect of a superior sex to observe and to pity the notoriously ineffectual attempts of mere bachelors to render existence bearable. So much for the term; and when the vacation begins Oxford is generally inundated by a swarm of heterogeneous tourists--Americans, who come here on their way between Paris and Stratford-on-Avon; Germans, distinguished by a white umbrella and a red 'Baedeker,' trying to realise that here, too, is a University, despite the absence of students with slashed noses and the altogether different quality of the beer. Then with August come the Extension students; the more frivolous to picnic at Nuneham and Islip, the seriously-minded to attend lectures which compress all knowledge into a fortnight's course, and to speculate on the future when they--the real University, as they say--will succeed to the inheritance of an unenlightened generation which is wasting its great opportunities.

At Commemoration a general sense of lobster salad pervades the atmosphere, and the natural beauties of colleges are concealed or enhanced by a profusion of planking and red cloth; the architectural merit of a hall is as nothing compared to the elasticity of its floor. The Eights, again, provide attractions of their own, not especially academic. The truly judicious sightseer will avoid both of these festive seasons, and will choose some time when there is less to interfere with his own proper pursuit--the week after the Eights, perhaps, or the beginning of the October term, when the red Virginia creeper makes a pleasing contrast with the grey collegiate walls. Nor will he, if he is wise, allow himself to be 'rushed' through the various objects of interest: there are, it is believed, local guides who profess to show the whole of Oxford in two hours; but rumour asserts that the feat is accomplished by making the several quadrangles of one college do duty for a corresponding number of separate establishments, so that the credulous visitor leaves Christ Church with the impression that he has seen not only 'The House,' but also several other foundations, all curiously enough communicating with each other. And in any case, after a mere scamper through the colleges, nothing remains in the mind but a vague and inaccurate reminiscence, combining in one the characteristics of all; the jaded sightseer goes back to London with a fortunately soon-to-be-forgotten idea that Keble was founded by Alfred the Great, and that Tom Quad is a nickname for the Vice-Chancellor. Samuel Pepys seems to have been to a certain extent the prototype of this kind of curiosity or antiquity hunter, and paid a 'shilling to a boy that showed me the Colleges before dinner.' (Curiously enough, 'after dinner' the honorarium to 'one that showed us the schools and library' was 10*s.*!)

He who is responsible for the proper conduct of a gang of relations or friends will not treat them in this way. He will endeavour, so far as possible, to confine them within the limits of his own college, where he is on his native heath, and, if he is not an antiquarian, can at least animate the venerable buildings with details of contemporary history. He will point out his Dons (like the great French nation, 'objects of hatred or admiration, but never of indifference') with such derision or reverence as they may deserve, and affix to them ancient anecdotes whereby their personality may be remembered. He will show to an admiring circle the statue which was painted green, the pinnacle climbed by a friend in the confidence of inebriation, and the marks of the bonfire which the Dean did not succeed in putting out. Even the most ignorant and frivolous-minded person can make his own college interesting. When he has succeeded in impressing upon his friends the true character of a college as a place of religion and sound learning, he may be permitted to show them such external objects as form a part of every one's education, and which no one (for the very shame of confessing it) can pretermit unseen, such as the gardens of New College or St. John's, the 'Nose' of B.N.C, the Burne-Jones tapestry at Exeter, or the picture of Mr. Gladstone in the hall of Christ Church. Those who absolutely insist on a more comprehensive view of the University and City may be allowed to make the ascent of some convenient point of view--Magdalen Tower, for instance; it is a stiff climb, but the view from the top will repay your exertions. This is where, as since the appearance of Mr. Holman Hunt's picture everybody is probably aware, the choir of the college annually salute the rising sun from the top of the tower by singing a Latin hymn on May morning--while the youth of the city, for reasons certainly not known to themselves, make morning hideous with blowing of unmelodious horns in the street below. At all times--even at sunrise on a rainy May morning--it is a noble prospect. The unlovely red-brick suburbs of the north are hidden from sight by the intervening towers and pinnacles of the real Oxford; immediately below the High Street winds westwards, flanked by colleges and churches, of which the prevailing grey is relieved by the green trees of those many gardens and unexplored nooks of verdure with which Oxford abounds; to the south there are glimpses of the river flowing towards the dim grey line of the distant Berkshire downs. To the historically-minded the outlook may suggest many a picture of bygone times--scenes of brawling in the noisy High Street, when the old battle of Town and Gown was fought with cold steel, and blood flowed freely on both sides--in the days when the maltreated townsman appealing to the Proctor could get no satisfaction but a 'thrust at him with his poleaxe!' Down the street which lies below passed Queen Elizabeth--'Virgo Pia Docta Felix'--after being royally entertained with sumptuous pageants and the play of 'Palamon and Arcyte' in the Christ Church hall. Over the Cherwell, in the troublous times of the Civil Wars, rode the Royalist horse to beat up the Parliamentary quarters below the Chiltern hills and among the woods of the Buckinghamshire border--enterprising undergraduates perhaps taking an exeat to accompany them. Here it was that certain scholars of Magdalen, having a quarrel with Lord Norreys by reason of deer-stealing, 'went up privately to the top of their tower, and waiting till he should pass by towards Ricot' (Rycote) 'sent down a shower of stones upon him and his retinew, wounding some and endangering others of their lives'--and worse might have happened had not the 'retinew' taken the precaution, foreseeing the assault, to put boards or tables on their heads. At a later day Pope entered Oxford by this road, and there is a pretty description of the scene in one of his letters--it will no doubt appeal to the nineteenth-century visitor who departs through slums to the architecturally unimpressive station of the Great Western. 'The shades of the evening overtook me. The moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by whose solemn light I paced on slowly, without company, or any interruption to the range of my own thoughts. About a mile before I reached Oxford all the bells tolled in different notes, the clocks of every college answered one another, and sounded forth (some in a deeper, some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at night. All this was no ill preparation to the life I have led since among those old walls, venerable galleries, stone porticos, studious walks, and solitary scenes of the University.' Jerry-built rows of lodging-houses rather militate against the romance of the Iffley Road as we know it now.

But, after all, the majority of sightseers are not given to historical reflections. What most people want is something that 'palpitates with actuality;' they want to see the machine working. They are temporarily happy if they can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and rise to the enthusiasm of 'never having had such a delightful day' if the Proctor happens to 'proctorise' an undergraduate within the ken of their vision. 'It was all so delightful and mediaeval, and all that kind of thing, don't you know? Poor young man--simply for not wearing one of those horrid caps and gowns! I call it a shame.' This is the reason why a Degree Day is so wonderfully popular a ceremony. There is a sense of attractive mystery about it all--the Vice-Chancellor throned in the Theatre or Convocation House, discoursing in unintelligible scraps of Latin like the refrain of a song, and the Proctors doing their quarter-deck walk--although the dignity of the function be rather marred by the undergraduates who jostle and giggle in the background forgetting that they are assisting at a ceremony which is, after all, one of the University's reasons of existence. It is the same kind of curiosity which causes the lecturer to become suddenly conscious that he is being watched with intense interest--an interest to which he is altogether unaccustomed--by 'only a face at the window' of his lecture-room, to his own confusion and the undisguised amusement of his audience.

Such are sightseers: yet every man to his taste. When Samuel Pepys came over from Abingdon to see the sights of the University town, it is gratifying and rather surprising to learn that what most impressed him was the small price paid for creature comforts: 'Oxford mighty fine place,' such is the diarist's reflection, 'and cheap entertainment.'