The history of a college like New or Wadham is written clearly on its walls. It rose by one grand effort, from one grand conception, at the will of founder and architect. All its future uses were more or less plainly implied in the quadrangles, chapel, and hall, through which the opening procession marched with solemn music; they stood in need of little more than time and good fortune. Such a college was then in a sense mature, fully armed and equipped, before the founder’s decease.

But it was more characteristic of an Oxford college to be evolved irregularly, by strange and difficult ways, with much sudden expansion and decline, into its present state. Thus Lincoln and Oriel were, for a short time after their foundation, fallow, if not extinct. The latter, in spite of its renovation by a king, after whom it was at first inclined to be named, grew up around the humble, illustrious tenement of La Oriole, where its early scholars dwelt, and whence they gave their society its lasting name. That[Pg 438] cradling tenement has its parallel in many a college history.

In the thirteenth or fourteenth century some Oxford citizen would build a pair of cottages, where a carpenter and an innkeeper came to live. At the inrush of students to welcome a famous lecturer, the spare rooms of those cottages received their share. Some of the lodgers stayed on, liked the carpenter and his wife and family, with whom they lived on terms of social equality; and in a generation the tradition of entertaining scholars was established. A few years saw the formation of a colony of students from one countryside or great estate. As the custom was, they chose a superior from among their number. In those days, if an American had run upstairs to the head, he might have had a more satisfactory answer than he had yesterday to his command: “I’ve come to take rooms in your college!” for the hostel was, roughly speaking, an hotel. The members fought side by side in the battles of the nations (viz. Northerners, Southerners, etc.), and of town and gown. They bent over the same books. They sang the same songs. And together they came to love the place, the two cottages and those adjacent into which they had overflowed. Such a group fled from the ancient Brasenose Hall to Stamford, in one of the University migrations, in 1334; carried with them the knocker of their lodgings in the shape of a brazen nose, and fixed it to the door of their “Brasenose Hall in Stamford.” If they forgot to take it back on their return, it nevertheless “got perched upon the top of the pineal gland” of[Pg 439] the college brain; and with characteristic spirited piety the descendants of the old hall-men found it out in 1890, and hung it in a place of honour and safety.

In later life one of the carpenter’s tenants became a bishop, or a royal almoner. Either at the height of his fame and wealth, or on his deathbed, he would remember his old retreat, and its associations with law and Aristotle and

There his old friends or their successors still dwelt, and learned and taught and fought. So he gave money for the purchase of the cottages; a neighbouring garden plot, perhaps a strip of woodland outside the walls, and the rents of some home farms for the revenue; together with the advowson of a church—if possible the one which he remembered best in Oxford, or if not, then one within his diocese or influence. He sketched the statutes, which fixed the number of the scholars and the rules for electing new ones and a head. He himself chose the first head. The scholars were to remain unmarried and in residence; to study the Arts, or Theology, or Canon and Civil Law; and to pray for his soul.

The carpenter’s and innkeeper’s tenants found themselves suddenly powerful and rich. They had their own seal, and a new and more settled enthusiasm, and a diapason of duties and ceremonies, added to their life. They had their aisle in the church whose shadow reached them on summer evenings. If their estates were[Pg 440] large and well managed,—if the country was prosperous, and the head obeyed the statutes and the fellows the head,—their progress was swift. Perhaps a legal difficulty interposed delay, or their rents disappeared. Perhaps the fellows quarrelled with the head, or the discipline was such that the fellows climbed into college at late unstatutable hours and became a scandal in the University. But a descendant or neighbour of the founder, or a parishioner of the college living, came to their help. One gave a present, in order that he might be remembered in the college prayers: another sent books: a former fellow who was grateful or pitiful made a rich benefaction when he went to court. Already the little original tenements were tottering or too small. They must build and rebuild. Then a “second founder” adopted as his children that and all succeeding generations of scholars, who should praise him for a benefaction larger than the first.

They pull down the old buildings, all save a flanking wall with a gateway to their taste, and begin to build. The benefactor sends teams of oxen to carry wood and stone. They are quarrying at Eynsham and Headington, and in the benefactor’s own distant county. They are felling oaks at Cumnor or Nuneham, actually before the bronzed foliage has crisped to brown. All day the oxen come and go: on the river, the boats are carrying stone, slates, and wood, unless the frost binds the barges among the reeds and the foundation soil breaks the spade. The master mason has already roughly hewn a statue of the patron saint or the founder, or his[Pg 442][Pg 441]

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rebus and coat of arms. He has decided that the old doorway shall be the entrance to the college kitchen, lying far back in the main quadrangle, which will not only take in the site of the demolished buildings, but the neighbouring garden and a lane that could be spared. If he is unfortunate, he may have to stop when he has completed only the entrance, with the head’s lodgings vigilant above it, and a few sets of rooms adjacent on either side, already occupied. If all is well, in a few years, or perhaps at the end of the mason’s life, the shining whole is the admiration of Oxford. The bishop who is to consecrate the chapel comes informally to see it a few days beforehand, and is therefore able to restrain his wonder when he comes pompously with the chancellor and all the great names of the University. The chapel and hall face the entrance. All round are the dwelling rooms, on two storeys, if we count the long-untenanted attics. On one side alone there is twice the space of the old cottages; but the arrangement is the same—the rooms branching on the left and right from a staircase that rises from ground to attic. The library is on a first floor: on one side of it, the windows invite the earliest light,

on the other, they enable the late student, who cannot buy light, to read until the martins cast no shadow as they pass in June: and there they put the gorgeous Latin poets and missals, embroidered with colours like[Pg 446] the bank of a brook, and along with them the dull works of a benefactor, in that very corner where the spider loves them to-day. The fellow who loves sleep will not choose the eastward-facing, library side of the quad. But they have made it almost impossible for him to oversleep himself. For in a humbler truckle-bed a younger scholar sleeps near him. Some rooms contain three beds side by side. Leading out of this dormitory are little cupboards or studies, sometimes under lock and key, for solitary work. Most of the walls are ungarnished; a few are hung with coloured cloth or even frescoed. The furniture is simple and scanty. The hall itself has but a “green hanging of say,” a high table for the seniors, and two pairs of forms and tables on trestles for the juniors. The kitchen is more opulent, with its tall andirons, chopping-board, trivet, gridiron, spit, and great pot and chafer of brass, its pans, dishes, and platters; while in the buttery there are four barrels abroach. Now and then an old member or admirer of the society sends a group of silver vessels: the most honoured becomes the loving cup that circulates on gaudy days; and with it goes some significant toast, as the jus suum cuique at Magdalen accompanies the “Restoration cup,” on which the names of James II.’s ejected fellows are engraved. For while the college grows, and sends its just proportion of astute or learned men into the world, it flowers with customs and traditions—prayers in the chapel, festivals in the hall,—the Christmas boar’s head decorated with banners at Queen’s,—the ancestral vine at Lincoln. At dinner[Pg 448][Pg 447]

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the tables shine with flagons and tankards, and great “sprig salts” of silver plate, which were the main college investment, the pledges of affection, or, as at Wadham, the customary gift of those who were admitted to the dignity of the high table. The shining of most was put out for ever in Charles I.’s melting-pot at New Inn Hall; and only the lists survive, each tankard and ewer and candlestick described by its donor’s name.

Thus, by the fact of their coming from neighbour villages and towns, perhaps also from one school, to a home on which they depended for their learning and the necessities of life, the fellows and scholars became knit together, with noticeable characteristics and peculiarities—almost a family resemblance; and in religious or political difficulties they made a solid strength of opinion and influence. A little heresy might break out under Henry the Eighth or Mary. A great benefaction might encourage the building of another quadrangle or a new library, and the institution of more fellowships and scholarships. They contributed a handsome quantity of plate to the king, and an officer to his army; or, to a man, resisted the Puritan intrusion after his death. Such were the more conspicuous events of centuries. The conflicts in the University, according to some proverbial Latin verses, were in early times at least as important as the boat race to-day. They were a subtle measure of the state of parties and movements; and in these the college played its part. And when the days of fighting were over, there was the University lampoon: “These[Pg 452] paltry scholars,” says an old ballad, supposed to be addressed by an Oxford alderman to the Duke of Monmouth,—

The college was busy in sending out into the world of Church and State its more vigorous members—those who excelled in the age when examinations were disputations that sometimes became almost a form of athletic sport; and in keeping within its walls the quieter spirits, who were willing to spend a life among manuscripts, in perfecting the management of the college estates, or in the education and discipline of others. From a scholarship to a fellowship, and from a fellowship to a college living, were frequently made the very calmest windings to a happy decent age, though no doubt the last stage sometimes led to such a regret as this:—

It was a fine thing to sit day after day, in rooms sweetened, as in Burton’s day, with juniper, or in the college library, which was as a bay or river mouth leading into the very land of silence—to sit and write, or not write, as you pleased; and, in the days when[Pg 453] books were no longer shelved with their faces to the wall, look up at

printed in gold upon the glowing calf, and making mystical combinations as night came on. There, and in hall, chapel, study, and garden, men doomed to very diverse fates and stations went and still go, and found it possible to live a more enchanted life than anywhere else.

The refractory Headington stone crumbled, and while the classical buildings became yearly less handsome than when the masons left them, the Gothic gained by the rich inlay and delicate waste of weather and time. As if time and weather wrote the chronicles of the society, the walls came to have a singular influence upon each generation, and gave them, as it were, a common ancestry and blood—noble blood, for all. Even when they departed they had the irrefragable right of exiles to look back and salute.

And yet how different the life within those walls which some now living can remember! Sixty years ago, they lament, “no man was ever seen in the streets of Oxford after lunch without being dressed as he would have been in Pall Mall.” Charles Reade at Magdalen “created a panic even among the junior members” by wearing a green coat and brass buttons, as Dean of Arts. Sixty years before that, George Colman had matriculated in a grass-green coat, “with the furiously bepowdered pate of an ultra coxcomb.” And now, says the first-quoted authority, “shooting-[Pg 454]jackets of all patterns, in which it is not given to every man to look like a gentleman,” have taken the place of frock-coat, tall hat, and gloves, “in which every one looked well.” The change from knee-breeches to trousers early last century was made possible by the gross lenience of a proctor.

Without college or university games, the old Oxford day was very much unlike our own. Bonfires of celebration, almost alone among modern amusements, are of great antiquity, in street and quad. A hundred years ago the man who would now row or play cricket for his college, was hunting, or pole-jumping across the fields; or, if he was original, he took the long walks which were popular a few generations ago, but are now so exceptional that I know nobody who ever saw, and recognised, Matthew Arnold’s tree, though some are lazily inclined to believe that it is the one elm that dwells with the seven firs on Cumnor Hurst.

One of the few college games was confined to the fives courts, which lay within the walls and have long disappeared, and are inconceivable to-day, when competition and spectators on ground remote from the colleges are characteristic of Oxford sport. Earlier still, a form of college game was the “vile and horrid sport” of forcibly shaving those who were about to become Masters of Arts, and the “tucking” (i.e. scratching on the chin with the thumb nail) of freshmen, which the first Earl of Shaftesbury put down at Exeter. These customs cast but a feeble shadow to-day in the occasional solemnity of trimming a contemporar[Pg 455]y’s exuberant or ill-kept hair. A more appropriate form of celebrating the taking of degrees was an elaborate supper, which is now less often possible, when a man frequently takes his degree in solitude and leaves Oxford immediately. William Paston, in the fifteenth century, writes, that he was made bachelor on a Friday and had his feast on the Monday following. He was promised a gift of venison, and though disappointed, his guests “were pleased with such meat as they had.” Even William of Wykeham, who forbade every possible game to his scholars at New, and would not allow the post-prandial leisure to be spent on ordinary days around the fire in the middle of his great hall, provided that, after supper, “on festivals and other winter nights, on which, in honour of God, his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the fellows might indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and the wonders of the world.” Some of the college halls preserved their old central fireplaces, under a louvre, until early in the last century. While the fellows dined, a servitor stood there, and read aloud from the Bible, in the first days of the college; or, as at Trinity in 1792, recited a passage from Homer or Virgil or Milton. Southey records it as a rule, that every member of the University could go by right once a year to Balliol hall, and “be treated with bread and cheese and beer, and all on condition that, when called upon, he should either sing a song or tell a story.” Those who were unqualified doubtless stayed away. Yet there is little sign that the[Pg 456] temperate or secluded undergraduate suffered for his gifts. Whitefield himself, who cost his relatives £24 for his first three years, and wore “woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes,” says that the other men left him alone when “he became better than other people,” as a “singular odd fellow,” at Pembroke. There was, however, one custom which must have left such men with a sore memory. For the “fresh night” was long the common doom of men soon after entering the University. There were fires of charcoal in the hall on All Saints’ eve, All Saints’ day and night, and onwards to Christmas day and Candlemas day; and the freshmen were brought in before an assembly of their seniors among the undergraduates. Anthony À Wood describes the ordeal thus:—

“On Candlemas day, or before, every freshman had warning given him to provide his speech, to be spoken in the public hall before the undergraduates and servants on Shrove Tuesday night that followed, being always the time for the observation of that ceremony.

“Feb. 15, 164?, Shrove Tuesday, the fire being made in the common hall before five of the clock at night, the fellows would go to supper before six, and making an end sooner than at other times, they left the hall to the liberty of the undergraduates, but with an admonition from one of the fellows (who was then principal of the undergraduates and postmasters [at Merton]) that all things should be carried in good order. While they were at supper in the hall, the cook (Will Noble) was making the lesser of the brass pots full of cawdel at the[Pg 458][Pg 457]

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freshmen’s charge; which, after the hall was free from the fellows, was brought up and set before the fire in the said hall. Afterwards every freshman, according to seniority, was to pluck off his gown and band, and if possible make himself look like a scoundrel. This done, they were conducted each after the other to the high table, and there made to stand on a form placed thereon: from whence they were to speak their speech with an audible voice to the company; which if well done, the person that spoke it was to have a cup of caudle and no salted drink; if indifferently, some caudle and some salted drink; but if dull, nothing was given to him but salted drink, or salt put in college beer, with tucks to boot. Afterwards when they were to be admitted into the fraternity, the senior cook was to administer to them an oath over an old shoe. After which, spoken with gravity, the freshman kissed the shoe, put on his gown and band, and took his place among the seniors.”

Wood himself not only earned pure caudle, but sack as well, with an oration in this vein:—

“Most reverend Seniors,—May it please your Gravities to admit into your presence a kitten of the Muses, and a meer frog of Helicon to croak the cataracts of his plumbeous cerebrosity before your sagacious ingenuities. I am none of the University blood-hounds that seek for preferment, and whose noses are as acute as their ears, that lie perdue for places, and who, good saints! do groan till the Visitation comes. These are they that esteem a tavern as[Pg 462] bad as purgatory, and wine more superstitious than holy water; and therefore I hope this honourable convocation will not suffer one of that tribe to taste of the sack, lest they should be troubled with a vertigo and their heads turn round.”

Except at such a special season as that, the old Oxford day bore more resemblance than our own to the life elsewhere. The fashions in cards and dress were the same as in London; the outdoor amusements were those of other town or country gentlemen. There was horse-racing at Spurton Hill and Brackley, cock-fighting at Holywell. Edgeworth’s contemporaries attended the assizes, and interfered on behalf of justice, in spite of sheriff and judge. Anthony À Wood went to fish at Wheatley Bridge, and “nutted at Shotover by the way.” And early rising was a tradition in every college until last century. The undergraduate, who to-day lives on historical principles, is often later than his sixteenth-century original was to dine, when he sits at his breakfast of steak and XX in a fine old room. Chapel at six o’clock and a lecture at seven was a common doom. Shelley and Hogg, after their days spent in shooting at a mark, and making ducks and drakes and paper boats at a Shotover pond, sat up, indeed, until two, over their conversations on literature and chemistry, but rose at seven, because it was customary. While dinner was at ten or eleven, breakfast was an informal meal. Some attempted to do without it: hence a morning preacher swooned on the altar steps. Wood speaks of the juniors “at breakfast in hall” in[Pg 463] 1661. The majority took beer and bread from the buttery, and probably taking it in one another’s rooms, started the genial custom of breakfast parties, which was perfected early in the nineteenth century. “Let the tender swain,” says the well-spiced Oxford Sausage, a mid-eighteenth-century product of Oxford (and Cambridge) wits,—

The institution of breakfast, whatever happened to British worth, was certainly helped forward by the tea, rolls, and toast which slowly ousted ale. Lectures and disputations in private or in the Schools followed breakfast. The latter possibly encouraged inter-collegiate sports, since Exeter and Christ Church on one occasion resolved their disputation into a fight which attracted Masters of Arts. And well it might; for otherwise they were in danger of dining like fighting cocks and amusing themselves like doves: the sixteenth-century fellows of Corpus, for example, were permitted no games but ball in the college garden. Examinations are still a select and expensive form of amusement.[Pg 464] The stories told of celebrated men and their viva voce conflicts with examiners, and the like, have inspired more than one to go into the Schools in a mood of smiling irreverence. The fame resulting, it is true, has to be propagated by much anecdote from the lips of the hero himself. In the Middle Ages the humour was of a lustier kind. The parsley crown went, or should have gone, to the most brazen giver and taker of learned wit. In Anthony À Wood’s day, one William George, “cynical and hirsute in his behaviour,” was a noted sophister and disputant, and improved his purse by preparing the exercises of the dull or lazy for public recitation. The nature of these examinations, in their dull old age, has been recorded by one who took part:—

“Two boys, or men, as they call themselves, agree to do generals together. The first stage in this mighty work is to produce arguments. These are always handed down from generation to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist of foolish syllogisms on foolish subjects. The next step is to go for a liceat to one of the petty officers, called the Regent Master of the Schools, who subscribes his name to the questions, and receives sixpence as his fee. When the important day arrives, the two doubty disputants go into a large dusty room, full of dirt and cobwebs, with walls and wainscot decorated with the names of former disputants, who, to divert the tedious hours, cut out their names with their penknives or wrote verses with a pencil. Here they sit in mean desks, opposite to each other, from one till three. Not once in a hundred times does[Pg 465] any officer enter; and if he does, he hears one syllogism or two, and then makes a bow, and departs, as he came and remained, in solemn silence. The disputants then return to the amusement of cutting the desks, carving their names, or reading Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, or some other edifying novel.”

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century, “great progress is made towards the wished-for honour of a bachelor’s degree”; the goal might be reached, if the undergraduate knew a few “jolly young Masters of Arts,” by answering questions concerning the pedigree of a race-horse. Such was the lack of interest in the disputations that they were called “wall” lectures, after the name of their principal auditor.

A little poaching gave a very attractive substitute for cross-country running. But increasing college discipline and the heightening average of wealth and birth among students cut off the more violent sports of the Middle Ages. The unattached, poor Welsh and Irish students, who kept up the University name for rough and adventurous relaxations, disappeared before the Reformation; and after the Poor Law Act of 1531 had condemned begging scholars, who were not authorised under the seal of a university, to be treated as able-bodied beggars, there can have been few to poach at Shotover and Abingdon. The masked Mohock revels and Jacobite struttings of the Augustan age were a poor alternative. The blithe and fearless spirit of trespassing, so common among undergraduates, is the sole survival to-day, if we exclude the pious uprooting[Pg 466] of stakes and fences on fields supposed (by reference to Doomsday Book) to be common land. Before and after the Puritans, who preferred music in their rooms, there was free access to the acting of dramas in Latin and English, and earlier still, to the miracle plays of Herod and Noah and the like. Even during the Commonwealth private theatricals were popular; and Wood speaks of one John Glendall, a fellow of Brasenose, who was the witty terrÆ filius in 1658, when the Acts were kept in St. Mary’s Church, as “a great mimick, and acted well in several plays which the scholars acted by stealth in Kettle Hall, the refectory at Gloster Hall,” etc.

For centuries the ale-houses were full of university life. At one time there were three hundred in Oxford. They had excellent uses before a common room perfected the homeliness of the college; and even afterwards, in the eighteenth century, a poetical club met at “The Tuns” to display their wit. There the undergraduates freshened and shared their wit, before each had an ample sitting-room, and before the junior common room,—where now the newspaper rustles, and the debate roars or chirps, and the senior scholar, on rare occasions, speaks to a not wholly reverent college meeting from the time-honoured elevation of the mantelpiece. The men of Balliol continued the old-fashioned devotion to the “Split Crow” in Broad Street long after the coffee-house had become fashionable. The vice-chancellor, being president of the rival and neighbouring society of Trinity, scoffed at the Maste[Pg 468][Pg 467]r’s

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attempt to discourage them; “so now they may be sots by authority.” The disorder was winked at because it increased the “natural stupidity” of the Balliol men of the day. But the attitude of the University towards humour two centuries ago was a wily mixture of patronage and ferocity. The terrÆ filius was only not official in his reckless bombardment of order and authority at the annual University Act. It was as though a jackdaw should be invited to church. He and his companion (for they hunted in couples) were chosen, as regularly as proctors, by election; and to become terrÆ filius must have been the blue riband of the wilder sort of University wits. Year after year pairs of terrÆ filii fired their random shots at great and small, always with audacity, sometimes with the utmost scurrility; and year after year one or both of the pair suffered expulsion, or, like Addison’s father, public humiliation, for their scandalous and opprobrious words, which no doubt earned the gratitude of irresponsible juniors.

It was long a common recreation, a recreation only, to go on the river in a boat, and to row or be rowed to some place of meditation or festivity, or to go with music and wine upon the Isis to Godstow Bridge or Sandford—

And the mention of Sandford carries with it many memories for modern Oxford men, even if perch is[Pg 472] not always to be had—of winter afternoons when the mulled port was as sweet as a carnation, and a voice from a slowly-gliding barge was the sole sound in all the land. One joyous company long ago went, “like country fiddlers,” to Farringdon fair, with cithern, bass viol, and violin. The city itself offered other amusements than the theatre, music hall, billiard tables, and picture shows of to-day. Freaks, monstrosities, mountebanks, jugglers, were welcome not only to undergraduates of fifteen or sixteen. There was “a brazen head that could speak and answer” at the Fleur de Lace on one day; on another, strange beasts. On May-day a maypole stood near St. Peter’s-in-the-East and opposite the “Mitre.” A bear-baiting was always a possibility. There was a fencing school at hand. One who cared for none of these has left this account of his Oxford day in the seventeenth century:—

i.e., interprets Wood, in the morning he mended his stockings, studied Greek, took breakfast, studied St. Augustine, and dined; and in the afternoon, walked in Christ Church meadows, cracked nuts, took a drink, and had supper.

Above all, in and after the time of Cromwell the city provided coffee-houses,—the real, steaming, smoking, witty thing. The hospitality and spirit of careless intercourse between college and college which they fostered belong to the present day. They were first opened, too, at a time when much of mediÆval life was[Pg 474][Pg 473]

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departing, when Christmas sports were dying, and Latin conversation at dinner and supper was going out of use; and Anthony À Wood laments that scholar-like conversation (“viz. by quoting the fathers, producing an antient verse from the poets suitable to his discourse”) was accounted pedantic, and “nothing but news and the affairs of Christendom,” he says scornfully, “is discoursed of, and that generally at coffee-houses.” At some, perhaps at all of them, there was a light library, which apparently resembled the library of a modern college barge. A copy of Rabelais, with poems and plays, all chained in the old manner, embellished Short’s coffee-house. Later came the Tatlers and Spectators and Connoisseurs, for “such as have neglected or lost their Latin or Greek,” as Tom Warton said:—

“As there are here books suited to every Taste, so there are liquors adapted to every species of reading. Amorous tales may be perused over Arrack punch and jellies; insipid odes over orgeat or capilaire; politics over coffee; divinity over port; and defences of bad generals and bad ministers over whipt syllabubs. In a word, in these libraries instruction and pleasure go hand in hand; and we may pronounce, in a literal sense, that learning remains no longer a dry pursuit.” And in Gibbon’s day the dons changed their seats from chapel to hall, and from common room to coffee-house, in an indolent circle; and not only dons, but the infinite variety of University types in the distinguishing raiment of that day[Pg 478]—

There, or at an ale-house, which appears to have been less exposed to a proctorial raid, the sociable spent the Oxford evening, which grew longer as the nineteenth century approached. Sunday evenings were frequently devoted to the fair sex in Merton walks, which were always gay.

exclaims an eighteenth-century spark, with a hint that the kindly relations between town and gown sometimes reached the married state. Yet another writer with an eye for the amusing side of Oxford life drew the following picture, which a diligent seeker might, with difficulty, parallel to-day. Gainlove and Ape-all, two Oxford undergraduates, are talking:—

“Gainlove. What, bound for the Port of Wedlock, Sir?

“Ape-all. No, no, no, no, Sir; I only use her as a Pleasure boat to dabble about the stream with, purely for a Passo Tempo, or so. O Lord, Sir, I have been at London, and know more of the world than to make love to a woman I intend to marry—only it diverts the spleen to talk to a girl sometimes, you know—and ’tis such a comedy, when one gallants them to college, to[Pg 480][Pg 479]

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see all the young Fellows froze with envy, stand centinel in their niches, like the figures of the Kings round the Royal Exchange. And the old Dons who would take no more notice of one at another time than a bishop of a country curate, will come cringing, cap in hand, to offer to show the ladies the curiosities of the College—when the duce knows they only want to be nibbling.”

Those who liked not these things had at least as good an opportunity of quiet work as to-day. A separate set of rooms for each member of a college had gradually become almost universal in the eighteenth century; and the great outer door or “oak” shut off those who wished from the rest of the world. Shelley was so pleased with that impervious door that he exclaimed: the oak “is surely the tree of knowledge!” The simplicity of the quarters within, before much of undergraduate social life was passed in their rooms, would astonish modern eyes, if we may judge from contemporary cuts, that show a few chairs, a small table with central leg, a cap and gown on the wall, an inkhorn hanging by the window, a pair of bellows and tongs by the fire, and over the mantel-piece a picture or mirror. But there the undergraduate was safe from duns “with vocal heel thrice thundering at the gate,” and, let us hope, from dons, in colleges where they came round at nine in the evening, to see that he kept good hours. Dibdin tells us that, as he closed the Curiosities of Literature, he saw the Gothic battlements outside his window “streaked with the dapple light of morning.” Ten years later, in the first year[Pg 484] of the nineteenth century, Reginald Heber, then at Brasenose, looked out from his window and saw the fellows of All Souls’ thundering the “All Souls’ Mallard” song—

carrying torches and inspired with canary as they sang. No one appears to have heard the song again. And with that sound old Oxford life died away.[Pg 485]

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