I gazed with wild prophetic eye
Into the future vast and dim:
I saw the University
Indulge its last and strangest whim:
It did away with Mods and Greats,
Its other Schools abolished all:
And simply made its candidates
Read Science Agricultural.

They learnt to hoe: they learnt to plough:
To delve and dig was all their joy:
But O in ways we know not now
Those candidates we did employ:
No more, accepting of a bribe
To take these persons off our hands,
We sent them off, a studious tribe,
To distant climes and foreign lands.

We did not then examine in
The subjects which we could not teach
To those who Honours aimed to win
We taught their subjects, all and each
We made the Professoriate
Take from its Professorial shelf
Authorities of ancient date,
And teach the candidates itself

My scanty page could ne'er contain
Of works the long and learned list
By which it was their plan to train
The sucking agriculturist:
In brief, the arts of tilling land
Sufficiently imparted were
By great Professor Ellis, and
By great Professor Bywater.

One taught th' aspiring candidate
In Hesiod each alternate day:
One showed him how the crops rotate
From Cato De Re Rustica:
The bee that in our bonnets lurks
He taught to yield its honied store
By reading Columella's works
And also Virgil (Georgic Four).

Yet not by Theory alone
Did learning train the student mind—
Its exercise was carried on
In places properly assigned:
From toil by weather undeterred
In winter wild or burning June,
The precepts in the morning heard
They practised in the afternoon.

The Colleges, whose grassy plots
Are now resorts of vicious ease,
Were then laid out in little lots,
With useful beans and early peas:
Each merely ornamental sod
They dug with spades and hoed with hoes:
The wilderness in every quad
Was made to blossom as the rose.

The gardens too, with cereals decked,
Where tennis-courts no longer were,
Showed Agriculture's due effect
Upon the student's character:
No more by practices beguiled
Which Virtue with displeasure notes,
No longer dissolute and wild,
He sowed domesticated oats.

It was indeed a blissful state:
For Convocation's high decree
Dubbed the successful candidate
Magister Agriculturae:
And if he failed, his vows denied,
The world observed without surprise
That those who learnt the plough to guide
Were objects of its exercise!