IMPRIMIS! we put up at the Mitre Tavern in Oxford.

Nota Bene: never to do it again.

It is an interesting rookery to look at—and to leave. Stuffiness and extortion were words that borrowed new and pregnant meaning from our sojourn in what we were recommended to try, as “a chawming old place. Best of service and cookery, you know, thoroughly respectable and—ah—historic and arntique, and all that, you know!”

Dux, who had noted down the recommendation, proposed at our departure, to add: “Mem.: Never to stop again at a hotel where illuminated texts are hung in every bed-room.”

Opposite the bed allotted to me, who am obliged continually to stay my fearsome soul upon the wholesome promises of daily grace for daily need, upon exhortations to be careful for nothing, and with the day’s sufficiency of evil to cease anxious thought for morrows as rife with trouble,—opposite my bed, where my waking eyes must meet it, was a red blister-plaster:

“Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”

In the adjacent closet, allotted to Prima, the only ornamental object, besides a wash-bowl so huge she had to call in her father to lift and empty it into the tiniest slop-jar ever made, was the reminder in brimstone-blues, “The wages of sin is Death!” One of our collegians was admonished that the “wrath of God abideth upon him,” and the other had a mutilated doctrinal text signifying quite another thing when read in the proper connection. Caput, in his character as Mentor and balance-wheel, checked the boys’ disposition to detect, in the lavishment of Scriptural instruction, a disposition to establish an honest equilibrium with the weighty bills. Extras in one direction, they reasoned, should be met by extras in another.

“All Scripture is profitable,” he reminded the jesters. “It is only by misuse it can be made, for a moment, to appear common, much less, absurd. Therefore,” emphatically, “I object to texts upon hotel walls!”

We were not tempted by in-door luxuries to waste in sleep or sloth the daylight hours, but gave these to very industrious sight-seeing. Yet we came away with appetites whetted, not satisfied by what we had beheld. The very air of the place is redolent of learning and honorable antiquity. Each of the twenty colleges composing the University had a valid and distinctive claim upon our notice. To name the attractions of one—say, Christ Church, or Balliol, would be to fill this chapter with a catalogue of MSS. books, pictures, dates and titles. It is a queer, fascinating, incomparable old city. Few of the streets are broad, none straight. The shops are small, usually ill-lighted and devoted to the needs and tastes of the students. The haberdashers are “gentlemen’s furnishers,” the booksellers’ windows full of text-books in all known tongues, interspersed by the far-famed Oxford Editions of Bibles and Prayer-books. Pastry-cooks are prominent and many. The colleges are imposing in dimensions, some magnificent in architecture. University, the oldest, is said to have been founded by the Great Alfred. Restored in 1229. All are so blackened and battered that the youngest looks at least a century older than the Roman Pantheon. Ancient edifices in the drier, hotter air of Southern Europe have been worn by the friction of ages. The Oxford Colleges are gnawed as by iron teeth. “Worm-eaten,” is the first epithet that comes to the tongue at sight of them. From cornice, walls and sculptures, the stone has been picked away, a grain at a time, until the surface is honeycombed, and to the inexperienced eye, disintegration of the whole seems inevitable. The lugubrious effect of age and seeming dilapidation is sensibly relieved by the reaches of turf, often bordered by gay flowers, forming the quadrangles, or court-yards, enclosed by the buildings.

The quadrangle of Christ Church College was laid out by Cardinal Wolsey, the founder and patron. It is almost square, measuring 264 feet by 261. “Great Tom,” the biggest bell in England—the custodian says, in the world,—hangs in the cupola over the gateway. It weighs 17,000 pounds, and at ten minutes past nine p.m. strikes one hundred and ten times, the number of students “on the foundation.” The pride of this college is the immense refectory, or dining-hall. The ceiling, fifty feet in height, is of solid oak elaborately carved, with graceful pendants, also elegantly wrought. Among the decorations of this roof are the armorial bearings and badges of Henry VIII. and Wolsey. Two rows, a hundred feet in length, of portraits of renowned patrons, graduates and professors of Oxford are set high upon the side-walls. At the upper end of the hall hangs Holbein’s full-length portrait of Henry VIII. The swinish eyes, pendulous cheeks, pursed-up mouth and double chin would be easily caught by any caricaturist, and are as familiar to us as the jaunty set of his flat cap upon the side of his head.

Holbein was a courtier, likewise an artist, who never stooped to caricature. This, the most celebrated likeness of his master, was said to be true to life, yet so ingeniously flattered as to find favor in the sight of the original. Holbein was a master of this species of delicate homage where the rank of the subject made the exercise of it politic. He practised the accomplishment once too often when he painted the miniature of Anne of Cleves. Keeping these things in mind, we saw a bulky trunk capped by the head I have described, one short arm akimbo, the hand resting on his sword-belt, the feet planted far apart to maintain the balance of the bloated column and display the legs he never wearied of praising and stroking. He wears a laced doublet and trunk-hose; a short cloak, lined with ermine, falls back from his shoulders. The portrait-galleries of nations may be safely challenged to furnish a parallel in bestiality and swagger with this figure. Yet the widow of a good man, herself a refined and pious gentlewoman, became without coercion, his sixth queen, and colored with pleasure when, in the view of the court, he paid her the distinguished compliment of laying his ulcerous leg across her lap! Such reminiscences are not sovereign cures for Republicanism.

On one side of Henry hangs the daughter who proved her inheritance of his coarse nature and callous sensibilities, by vaunting her relationship to him who had disgraced and murdered her mother, and declared herself, by act of Parliament, illegitimate. Much is made in Elizabeth’s portraits of her ruff and tower of red hair, of her satin robe “set all over with aglets of two sorts,” of “pearl-work and tassels of gold,” of “costly lace and knotted buttons,” and very little of the pale, high-nosed face. Her eyes are small and black; her mouth has the “purse” of her father’s, her features are expressionless. At the other hand of King Henry is the butcher’s son, created by him Lord Cardinal, cozened, in a playfully rapacious humor, out of Hampton Palace, and cast off like a vile slug from the royal hand when he had had his day and served his monarch’s ends. Wolsey’s portraits are always taken in profile, to conceal the cast in the eye, which was his thorn in the flesh. It is a triumvirate that may well chain feet, eyes, and thought for a much longer time than we could spare for the whole college.

Across this end of the room runs a platform, raised a foot or two from the hall floor. A table, surrounded by chairs, is upon it. Here dine the titled students of Christ Church College (established by the butcher’s boy!)—the Élite who sport the proverbial “tufts” upon their Oxford caps. Privileged “dons” preside at their meals, and Bluff King Hal swaggers in such divinity as doth hedge in a king—and his nobles—over their heads. The gentlemen-commoners are so fortunate as to sit nearest this hallowed dais, although upon the lower level of the refectory. The commonest drink small-beer from pewter tankards in the draughts and dimness (social) of the end nearest the door.

Lex’s handsome face was a study when the fitness and beauty of class distinctions in the halls of learning was made patent to him by the civil guide. By the way, he wore a student’s gown, and was, we surmised, a servitor of the college.

“How much light these entertaining items cast upon quotations we have heard, all our lives, without comprehending,” said the audacious youth, eying the informant with ingenuous admiration. “‘High life and below stairs!’ ‘Briton’s sons shall ne’er be slaves!’ ‘Free-born Englishmen’—and the rest of it! There’s nothing else like an old-world education, after all, for adjusting society. Under professors like the Tudors and Stuarts, of course! Why, do you know, we ignoramuses over the water would set Bright and Gladstone at the same table with the most empty-pated lord of the lot, and never suspect that we were insulting one of them?”

Caput pulled him away.

“You rascal!” he said, as we followed the servitor to the kitchen. “How dare you make fun of the man to his face?”

“He never guessed it,” replied the other coolly. “It takes a drill and a blast of powder to get a joke into an English skull.”

The kitchen is a vast vault, planned also by Wolsey, whose antecedents should have made him an authority in the culinary kingdom in an era when loins were knighted and entrÉes an unknown quantity in the composition of good men’s feasts. The high priest of the savory mysteries met us upon the threshold, the grandest specimen, physically, of a man we saw abroad. Herculean in stature and girth, he had a noble head and face, was straight as a Norway pine, and was robed in a voluminous white bib-apron. His voice was singularly deep and musical, his carriage majestic. I wish I could add that he was as conversant with the natural history and rights of the letter H as with the details of his profession and the story of his realm from 1520 downward. He exhibited the Brobdingnagian gridiron used in the time of James I., on which an hundred steaks could be broiled at one and the same time, and enlarged upon the improvements that had superseded the rusty bars and smoky jacks, kept now as curiosities. In one pantry was a vast vessel of ripe apricots, ready-sugared for jam; a huge pasty, hot and fragrant from the oven, stood upon a dresser, encircled by a cohort of tarts.

“H’out h’of term-time we ’ave comparatively little to do,” said the splendid giant. “Therefore I ’ave given most h’of my h’employees a vacation. But there h’are a few h’undergraduates and a tutor h’or two ’ere still, and”—apologetically for mortal frailty—“the h’inner man, h’even h’of scholars must be h’entertained. ’Ence these”—waving a mighty arm toward the pastry.

He pleased us prodigiously, even to the sublime graciousness with which he accepted a douceur at parting. We turned at the end of the passage to look at him—a white-robed Colossus, in the dusky arch of the kitchen doorway. The light from a window touched his hoary hair and the jet-black brows that darkened the full, serious eyes. He was gazing after us, too, and bowed gravely without changing his place.

“Are there photographs of him for sale?” asked we of our guide. “Surely he is one of the college lions?”

“I beg your pardon!”

We directed his attention to the statuesque Anak.

“Oh! he is the cook!” with never a gleam of amusement or surprise.

“Artistically considered,” pursued Prima, with another lingering look, “he is magnificent.”

This time the black-gown was slightly—never so slightly, bewildered.

“He is the cook,” he said.

parodied Dux. “Wordsworth was an Englishman and ‘knew how it was himself.’”

We spent four hours in the Bodleian Library, Museum, and Picture Gallery, leaving them then reluctantly. It was “realizing our history” in earnest to see the portrait of William Prynne, carefully executed, even to Archbishop Laud’s scarlet ear-mark. The clipped organ is turned to the spectator ostentatiously, one fancies, until he bethinks himself that the uncompromising Puritan received the loving admonition of Church and State in both ears, and upon separate occasions. The miniatures of James III. and his wife are here given an honorable position. Some years since the words, “The Pretender,” were scratched by an unknown Jacobite from the gilded frame of the uncrowned king’s picture. The custodian pointed out the erasure with a smile indulgent of the harmless, if petulant freak. It is odd who do such things, and when, so vigilant is the watch kept over visitors. Three of the delicate fingers are gone from the hands of Marie Stuart in Westminster Abbey, and, if I remember aright, as many from the effigy of Elizabeth in the same place.

We paused long at one small faded portrait, far inferior in artistic merit to those about it—the first picture we had seen of Lady Jane Grey. She has a sickly, chalky complexion that might match an American school-girl’s. This may have been caused by the severity of her home discipline and Master Roger Ascham’s much Latin and more Greek. She toiled for him cheerfully, she says, “since he was the first person who ever spake kindly to her.” She was the mistress of five languages and a frightful number of arts and sciences, and married a sour-tempered man, chosen by her father and his, when she was seventeen years old. The lineaments are unformed and redeemed from plainness by large brown eyes. They have an appealing, hunted look that was not all in our fancy. A “slip of a girl” compassionate mothers would name her; frightened at life, or what it was made to be to her by her natural guardians.

Across the gallery are two portraits of Marie Stuart, one of which was painted over the other upon the same canvas. This was discovered by an artist, who then obtained permission from the owners to copy and erase the upper painting. He succeeded in both tasks. The outermost portrait wears a projecting headdress, all buckram, lace, and pearls, and a more ornate robe than the other. A casual glance would incline one to the belief that the faces are likewise dissimilar, but examination shows that they are alike in line and color, the difference in expression being the work of the tawdry coiffure. The lower likeness is so lovely in its thoughtful sweetness as to kindle indignation with astonishment that it should have been so foolishly disfigured. The story is a strange one, but true.

We recognized Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s picture, from its resemblance to the effigy upon his tomb, and liked it less than that. The opened eyes are fine in shape and color, but sleepy and sinister, the complexion more sanguine than suits a carpet-knight. There is more of the hunting-squire than the polished courtier in it. Close by is the pleasing face of the royal coquette’s later favorite, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. Another profile of Wolsey is not far off. A nobler trio are Erasmus, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Cranmer pendent upon the same side of the gallery.

I once read in a provincial journal a burlesque list of the curiosities in Barnum’s Museum. One item was, “a cup of cream from the milky way—slightly curdled.” Another—“a block from the marble hall the Bohemian girl dreamed she dwelt in.” The nonsense recurred to me when we bent over a glass containing Guy Fawkes’ lantern, “slightly” rusted. In fact, it is riddled by rust, and so far as apparent antiquity goes, might have belonged to Diogenes. The various parts—candle-holder, iron cylinder and cover, lie apart, and with them certificates to the genuineness of the relic. There is the original letter of warning to Lord Mounteagle not to go to the House at the opening of Parliament, “since God and man have conspired to punish the wickedness of the times.” “Parliament shall receive a terrible blow and yet shall not see who hurt them,” is the sentence that led to the search in the cellar and the capture of Fawkes.

Queen Elizabeth’s fruit-plates are upon exhibition here. They are very like the little wooden plaques we now paint for card-receivers and hang about our rooms. The edges are carved and painted, and in the centre of each are four lines of rhyme, usually a caustic fling at matrimony and married people.

The wealth of the Bodleian Library consists in its collection of valuable old books and MSS. In the number and rarity of the latter it disputes the palm with the British Museum. I should not know where to stop were I to begin the enumeration of treasures over which we hung in breathless delight, each one brought forward seeming more wonderful than the last. The illuminated volumes,—written and painted upon such parchment as one must see to believe in, so fine is its texture and so clear the page,—are enough to make a bibliomaniac of the soberest book-lover. A thousand years have not sufficed to dim tints and gilding. Queen Elizabeth, as Princess, “did” Solomon’s Proverbs upon vellum in letters of various styles, all daintily neat. In looking at her Latin exercises and counting up Lady Jane Grey’s acquirements, we cease to boast of the superior educational advantages of the girl of the period. It is experiences such as were ours that morning in the Bodleian Library and during our three days in Oxford that are pin-pricks to the balloon of national and intellectual conceit, not the survey of foreign governments and the study of foreign laws and manner. If the patient and candid sight-seer do not come home a humbler and a wiser man, he had best never stir again beyond the corporate limits of his own little Utica, and pursue contentedly the rÔle of the marble in a peck-measure.

Before seeing the “Martyrs’ Monument,” we went to St. Mary’s Church in which Cranmer recanted his recantation. The places of pulpit and reading-desk have been changed since the Archbishop was brought forth from prison and bidden by Dr. Cole, an eminent Oxford divine, make public confession of his faith before the waiting congregation. The church was packed with soldiers, ecclesiastics and the populace. All had heard that the deposed prelate had been persuaded by argument and soothing wiles and the cruel bondage of the fear of death to return to the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Cole had said mass and preached the sermon.

“Dr. Cranmer will now read his confession,” he said and sat down.

“I will make profession of my faith,” said Cranmer, “and with a good will, too!”

We saw the site of the old pulpit in which he arose in saying this; the walls that had given back the tones of a voice that trembled no longer as he proclaimed his late recantation null and void, “inasmuch as he had been wrought upon by the fear of burning to sign them. He believed in the Bible and all the doctrines taught therein which he had wickedly renounced. As for the Pope, he did refuse him and denounce him as the enemy of Heaven.”

“Smite him upon the mouth; and take him away!” roared Cole.

We would presently see where he was chained to the stake and helped tear off his upper garments, as fearing he might again grow cowardly before the burning began. From a different motive,—namely, the dread that his bald head and silvery beard might move the people to rescue, the Lord Overseer of the butchery ordered the firemen to make haste. “The unworthy hand” was burned first. His heart was left whole in the ashes.

“That was the Oxford spirit, three hundred and twenty years ago!” mused Caput, aloud. “Within fifty years, John Henry Newman,—now a Cardinal—was incumbent of St Mary’s.”

“Yes, sir,” responded the pew-opener (with a bonnet on,) who showed the church. “He was one of the first Puseyites.”

“I know!” turning again toward the site of the old pulpit.

A small square of marble, no bigger than a tile, let into the chancel floor, records that in a vault beneath lies “Amy Robsart, first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.” Her remains were brought hither from Cumnor Hall, which was but three miles from Oxford, and decently interred in a brick grave under the church. Other monument than this insignificant morsel of stone she has none.

The Martyrs’ Memorial is a handsome Gothic structure of magnesian limestone, hexagonal and three-storied, rising into a pinnacle surmounted by a cross. It is in a conspicuous quarter of the city, in the centre of an open square. In arched niches, facing different ways, are Cranmer, in his prelatical robes, Ridley, and Latimer.

“This place hath long groaned for me!” said Latimer, passing through Smithfield, on his way to the tower after his arrest.

But they brought him to Oxford to die.

We checked the carriage and alighted opposite Balliol College. The street is closely built up on both sides, and in the middle, upon one of the paving-stones, is cut a deep cross. This is the true Martyrs’ Memorial. There, Ridley and Latimer “lighted such a candle by the grace of God as shall never be put out.” The much-abused phrase, “baptism of fire,” grows sublime when we read that Latimer was “seen to make motions with his hands as if washing them in the flames, and to stroke his aged face with them.”

Said an American clergyman—and inferentially, a defender of the Faith—“I have no sympathy with those old martyrs. The most charitable of us must confess that they were frightfully and disgustingly obstinate!”

We may forgive them for failing to win the approbation of latter-day sentimentalists when we reflect that but for this, their unamiable idiosyncrasy, neither Protestant England nor Protestant America would to-day exist, even in name. Not very long since, excavations under the sidewalk nearest to the cross-mark in this street revealed the existence here—as a similar accident had in front of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, in London—of a thick stratum of ashes. “Human ashes mixed with wood,” says the report of the discovery printed by an Antiquarian Society—“establishing beyond question that this was where the public burnings were held.” The inhumanity of sweeping such ashes into a heap by the wayside, as one might pile the refuse of a smelting-furnace, is almost as revolting to most people as the disgusting obstinacy of the consumed heretics. We saw another official record, of an earlier date, relative to this locality,—the bills sent by the Sheriff of Oxford to the Queen, after two “public burnings.” One headed—“To burn Latimer and Ridley” has seven items, including “wood-fagots, furze-fagots, chains, and staples,” accumulating into a total of £1, 5s. 9d. “To burn Cranmer” was a cheaper operation. “Furze and wood-fagots,” the carriage of these, and “2 laborers,” cost but “12s. 8d.” Ridley and Latimer suffered for their obstinacy, October 16, 1555; Cranmer in March of the next year.

The walks and drives in and about Oxford are exceedingly beautiful. The “Broad Walk,” in Christ Church Meadows, deserves the eulogiums lavished upon it by tongue and pen. The interlacing tracery of the elms, arched above the smooth, wide avenue; the glimpses to right and left of “sweet fields in living green;” clumps of superb oaks and pretty “pleasances;” the dark-gray towers, domes and spires of the city, and the ivied walls of private and public gardens; the Isis winding beneath willows and between meadows, and dotted, although it was the long vacation, with gliding boats,—all this, viewed in the clear, tender light of the “Queen’s weather” that still followed us on our journeyings, made up a picture we shall carry with us while memory holds dear and pleasant things.

When we go abroad again—(how often and easily the words slip from our lips!) we mean to give three weeks, instead of as many days, to Oxford.

“Honor bright, now!” said Caput, settling into his place, with the rest of us, in the railway carriage, after the last look from the windows upon the receding scene;—“when you say ‘Oxford’ do you think first of Alfred the Great; of Coeur de Lion, who was born there; of William the Conqueror, who had a tough battle to win it; of Cardinal Wolsey—or of Tom Brown?”

“That reminds me!” said Prima, serenely ignoring the query her elders laughingly declined to answer,—“we must get some sandwiches at Rugby. Everybody does.”

We did—all leaving the train to peep into the “Refreshment Room of Mugby Junction,” and quoting, sotto voce, from the sketch which, it is affirmed, has made this, in very truth, what Dickens wrote it down ironically—“the Model Establishment” of the line. “The Boy” has disappeared, or grown up. Mrs. Sniff,—“the one with the small waist buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which she puts on the edge of the counter and stands a-smoothing while the Public foams,”—has been supplanted by a tidy dame, cherry-cheeked and smiling. She filled our order with polite despatch, and, in her corps of willing assistants one searches uselessly for the “disdaineous females and ferocious old woman,” objurgated by the enraged foreigner; as vainly in the array of tempting edibles upon the counter for “stale pastry and sawdust sangwiches.” We had our railway carriage to ourselves, and, carrying our parcels thither, prepared to make merry.

“I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and formation of the British Refreshment Sangwich,” began Prima, who knows Dickens better than she does the Catechism.

The sandwich of Rugby,—as revised—is put up by the half-dozen in neat white boxes, tied with ribbons, like choice confections. The ingredients are sweet, white bread, and juicy tongue or ham. The pastry is fresh and flaky, the cakes delicate and toothsome. We kept our sandwich-boxes as souvenirs.

We did not catch a sight of Banbury Cross, or of the young woman with bells on her toes who cantered through our nursery rhyme to that mythical goal. But we did supplement our Mugby Lunch by Banbury cakes, an indigestible and palatable compound.