CHAPTER IVJACOBEAN OXFORD

Thegardens of Wadham College on a bright morning in early spring are a scene in which the memory of old Oxford pleasantly lingers, and is easily revived. The great cedars throw their secular shadow on the ancient turf, the chapel forms a beautiful background; the whole place is exactly what it was two hundred and sixty years ago. The stones of Oxford walls, when they do not turn black and drop off in flakes, assume tender tints of the palest gold, red, and orange. Along a wall, which looks so old that it may well have formed a defence of the ancient Augustinian priory, the stars of the yellow jasmine flower abundantly. The industrious hosts of the bees have left their cells, to labour in this first morning of spring; the doves coo, the thrushes are noisy in the trees. All breathes of the year renewal, and of the coming April; and all that gladdens us may have gladdened some indolent scholar in the time of King James.

In the reign of the first Stuart king of England, Oxford became the town that we know. Even in Elizabeth’s days, could we ascend the stream of centuries, we should find ourselves much at home in Oxford. The earliest trustworthy map, that of Agas (1578), is worth studying, if we wish to understand the Oxford that Elizabeth left, and that the architects of James embellished, giving us the most interesting examples of collegiate buildings, which are both stately and comfortable. Let us enter Oxford by the Iffley Road, in the year 1578. We behold, as Agas enthusiastically writes:

‘A citie seated, rich in everything,Girt with wood and water, meadow, corn, and hill.’

The way is not bordered, of course, by the long, straggling streets of rickety cottages, which now stretch from the bridge half-way to Cowley and Iffley. The church, called by ribalds ‘the boiled rabbit,’ from its peculiar shape, lies on the right; there is a gate in the city wall, on the place where the road now turns to Holywell. At this time the walls still existed, and ran from Magdalen past ‘St. Mary’s College, called Newe,’ through Exeter, through the site of Mr. Parker’s shop, and all along the south side of Broad Street to St. Michael’s, and Bocardo Gate. There the wall cut across to the castle. On the southern side of the city, it skirted Corpus and Merton Gardens, and was interrupted by Christ Church. Probably if it were possible for us to visit Elizabethan Oxford, the walls and the five castle towers would seem the most curious features in the place. Entering the East Gate, Magdalen and Magdalen Grammar School would be familiar objects. St. Edmund’s Hall would be in its present place, and Queen’s would present its ancient Gothic front. It is easy to imagine the change in the High Street which would be produced by a Queen’s not unlike Oriel, in the room of the highly classical edifice of Wren. All Souls would be less remarkable; at St. Mary’s we should note the absence of the ‘scandalous image’ of Our Lady over the door. At Merton the fellows’ quadrangle did not yet exist, and a great wood-yard bordered on Corpus. In front of Oriel was an open space with trees, and there were a few scattered buildings, such as Peckwater’s Inn (on the site of ‘Peck’), and Canterbury College. Tom Quad was stately but incomplete. Turning from St. Mary’s past B. N. C., we miss the attics in Brasenose front, we miss the imposing Radcliffe, we miss all the quadrangle of the Schools, except the Divinity school, and we miss the Theatre. If we go down South Street, past Ch. Ch. we find an open space where Pembroke stands. Where Wadham is now, the most uniform, complete, and unchanged of all the colleges, there are only the open pleasances, and perhaps a few ruins of the Augustinian priory. St. John’s lacks its inner quadrangle, and Balliol, in place of its new buildings, has its old delightful grove. As to the houses of the town, they are not unlike the tottering and picturesque old roofs and gables of King Street.

To the Oxford of Elizabeth’s reign, then, the founders and architects of her successor added, chiefly, the Schools’ quadrangle, with the great gate of the five orders, a building beautiful, as it were, in its own despite. They added a smaller curiosity of the same sort, at Merton; they added Wadham, perhaps their most successful achievement. Their taste was a medley of new and old: they made a not uninteresting effort to combine the exquisiteness of Gothic decoration with the proportions of Greek architecture. The tower of the five orders reminds the spectator, in a manner, of the style of Milton. It is rich and overloaded, yet its natural beauty is not abated by the relics out of the great treasures of Greece and Rome, which are built into the mass. The Ionic and Corinthian pillars are like the Latinisms of Milton, the double-gilding which once covered the figures and emblems of the upper part of the tower gave them the splendour of Miltonic ornament. ‘When King James came from Woodstock to see this quadrangular pile, he commanded the gilt figures to be whitened over,’ because they were so dazzling, or, as Wood expresses it, ‘so glorious and splendid that none, especially when the sun shone, could behold them.’ How characteristic of James is this anecdote! He was by no meansle roi soleil, as courtiers called LouisXIV., as divines called the pedantic Stuart. It is easy to fancy the King issuing from the Library of Bodley, where he has been turning over books of theology, prosing, and displaying his learning for hours. The rheumy, blinking eyes are dazzled in the sunlight, and he peevishly commands the gold work to be ‘whitened over.’ Certainly the translators of the Bible were but ill-advised when they compared his Majesty to the rising sun in all his glory.

James was rather fond of visiting Oxford and the royal residence at Woodstock. We shall see that his Court, the most dissolute, perhaps, that England ever tolerated, corrupted the manners of the students. On one of his Majesty’s earliest visits he had a chance of displaying the penetration of which he was so proud. James was always finding out something or somebody, till it almost seemed as if people had discovered that the best way to flatter him was to try to deceive him. In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic. This Haydock practised his profession during the day like other mortals, but varied from the kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching all night. It was Haydock’s contention that he preached unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a text with the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as were revealed to him in slumber, ‘his preaching coming by revelation.’ Though people went to hear Haydock, they were chiefly influenced by curiosity. ‘His auditory were willing to silence him by pulling, haling, and pinching him, yet would he pertinaciously persist to the end, and sleep still.’ The King was introduced into Haydock’s bedroom, heard him declaim, and next day cross-examined him in private. Awed by the royal acuteness, Haydock confessed that he was a humbug, and that he had taken to preaching all night by way of getting a little notoriety, and because he felt himself to be ‘a buried man in the University.’

New College Cloisters and Tower

That a man should hope to get reputation by preaching all night is itself a proof that the University, under James, was too theologically minded. When has it been otherwise? The religious strife of the reigns of HenryVIII., EdwardVI., and Mary, was not asleep; the troubles of Charles’s time were beginning to stir. Oxford was as usual an epitome of English opinion. We see the struggle of the wildest Puritanism, of Arminianism, of Pelagianism, of a dozen ‘isms,’ which are dead enough, but have left their pestilent progeny to disturb a place of religion, learning, and amusement. By whatever names the different sects were called, men’s ideas and tendencies were divided into two easily recognisable classes. Calvinism and Puritanism on one side, with the Puritanic haters of letters and art, were opposed to Catholicism in germ, to literature, and mundane studies. How difficult it is to take a side in this battle, where both parties had one foot on firm ground, the other in chaos, where freedom, or what was to become freedom of thought, was allied with narrow bigotry, where learning was chained to superstition!

As early as 1606, Mr. William Laud, B.D., of St. John’s College, began to disturb the University. The young man preached a sermon which was thought to look Romewards. Laud becamesuspect, it was thought a ‘scandalous’ thing to give him the usual courteous greetings in the street or in the college quadrangle. From this time the history of Oxford, for forty years, is mixed up with the history of Laud. The divisions of Roundhead and of Cavalier have begun. The majority of the undergraduates are on the side of Laud; and the Court, the citizens, and many of the elder members of the University, are with the Puritans.

The Court and the King, we have said, were fond of being entertained in the college halls. James went from libraries to academic disputations, thence to dinner, and from dinner to look on at comedies played by the students. The Cambridge men did not care to see so much royal favour bestowed on Oxford. When James visited the University in 1641, a Cambridge wit produced a remarkable epigram. For some mysterious reason the playful fancies of the sister University have never been greatly admired at Oxford, where the brisk air, men flatter themselves, breeds nimbler humours. Here is part of the Cantab’s epigram:

‘To Oxenford the King has gone,With all his mighty peers,That hath in peace maintained us,These five or six long years.’

The poem maunders on for half a dozen lines, and ‘loses itself in the sands,’ like the River Rhine, without coming to any particular point or conclusion. How much more lively is the Oxford couplet on the King, who, being bored by some amateur theatricals, twice or thrice made as if he would leave the hall, where men failed dismally to entertain him.

‘“The King himself did offer,”—“What, I pray?”“He offered twice or thrice—to go away!”’

As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to wear love-locks. In Elizabeth’s time, when men wore their hair ‘no longer than their ears,’ long locks had been a mark, says Wood, of ‘swaggerers.’ Drinking and gambling were now very fashionable, undergraduates were whipped for wearing boots, while ‘Puritans were many and troublesome,’ and Laud publicly declared (1614) that ‘Presbyterians were as bad as Papists.’ Did Laud, after all, think Papists so very bad? In 1617 he was President of his college, St. John’s, on which he set his mark. It is to Laud and to Inigo Jones that Oxford owes the beautiful garden-front, perhaps the most lovely thing in Oxford. From the gardens—where for so many summers the beauty of England has rested in the shadow of the chestnut-trees, amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy with the scent of the acacia flowers—from the gardens, Laud’s building looks rather like a country-house than a college.

If St. John’s men have lived in the University too much as if it were a large country-house, if they have imitated rather the Toryism than the learning of their great Archbishop, the blame is partly Laud’s. How much harm to study he and Waynflete have unwittingly done, and how much they have added to the romance of Oxford! It is easy to understand that men find it a weary task to read in sight of the beauty of the groves of Magdalen and of St. John’s. When Kubla Khan ‘a stately pleasure-dome decreed,’ he did not mean to settle students there, and to ask them for metaphysical essays, and for Greek and Latin prose compositions. Kubla Khan would have found a palace to his desire in the gardens of Laud, or where Cherwell, ‘meandering with a mazy motion,’ stirs the green weeds, and flashes from the mill-wheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows white and purple with fritillaries.

‘And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills,Where blossoms many an incense-bearing tree’;

but here is scarcely the proper training-ground of first-class men!

Oxford returned to her ancient uses in 1625. Soon after the accession of Charles I. the plague broke out in London, and Oxford entertained the Parliament, as six hundred years before she had received the Witan. There seemed something ominous in all that Charles did in his earlier years—the air, or men’s minds, was full of the presage of fate. It was observed that the House of Commons met in the Divinity School, and that the place seemed to have infected them with theological passion. After 1625 there was never a Parliament but had its committee to discuss religion, and to stray into the devious places of divinity. The plague pursued Charles to Oxford. In those days, and long afterwards, it was a common complaint that the citizens built rows of poor cottages within the walls, and that these cottages were crowded by dirty and indigent people. Plague was bred almost yearly at Oxford, and Charles really seems to have improved the sanitary arrangements of the city.

Laud, the President of St. John’s, became, by some intrigue, Chancellor of the University. He made Oxford many presents of Greek, Chinese, Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic MSS. There may have been—let us hope there were—quiet bookworms who enjoyed these gifts, while the town and University were bubbling over with religious feuds. People grumbled that ‘Popish darts were whet afresh on a Dutch grindstone.’ A series of anti-Romish and anti-Royal sermons and pamphlets, followed as a rule by a series of recantations, kept men’s minds in a ferment. The good that Laud did by his gifts—and he was a munificent patron of learning—he destroyed by his dogmatism. Scholars could not decipher Greek texts while they were torturing biblical ones into arguments for and against the opinions of the Chancellor. What is the true story about the gorgeous vestments which were found in a box in the house of the President of St. John’s, and which are now preserved in the library of that college? Did they belong to the last of the old Catholic presidents of what was Chichele’s College of St. Bernard before the Reformation? Were they, on the other hand, the property of Laud himself? It has been said that Laud would not have known how to wear them. Fancy sees him treasuring that bright ecclesiastical raiment, πέπλοι παμποίκιλοι, in some place of security. At night, perhaps, when candles were lit and curtains drawn, and he was alone, he may have arrayed himself in the gorgeous chasuble before the mirror, as Hetty wore her surreptitious finery. ‘There is a great deal of human nature in man.’ If Laud really strutted in solitude, draped rather at random in these vestments, the ecclesiastical gear is even more interesting than the thin ivory-headed staff which supported him on his way to the scaffold; more curious than the diary in which he recorded the events of night and day, of dreaming hours and waking. In the library at St. John’s they show his bust—a tarnished, gilded work of art. He has a neat little cocked-up moustache, not like a prelate’s; the face is that of a Bismarck without strength of character.

In speaking of Oxford before the civil war, let us not forget that true students and peaceable men found a welcome retreat beyond the din of theological fictions. Lord Falkland’s house was within ten miles of the town. ‘In this time,’ says Clarendon, in his immortal panegyric, ‘in this time he contracted familiarity and friendship with the most polished men of the University, who found such an immenseness of wit and such a solidity of judgment in him, so infinite a fancy, bound in by a most logical ratiocination, such a vast knowledge that he was not ignorant in anything, yet such an excessive humility as if he had known nothing, that they frequently resorted and dwelt with him, as in a college situated in a purer air; so that his house was a university in a less volume, whither they came not so much for repose as study; and to examine and refine those grosser propositions, which laziness and consent made current in vulgar conversation.’

The signs of the times grew darker. In 1636 the King and Queen visited Oxford, ‘with no applause.’ In 1640 Laud sent the University his last present of manuscripts. He was charged with many offences. He had repaired crucifixes; he had allowed the ‘scandalous image’ to be set up in the porch of St. Mary’s; and Alderman Nixon, the Puritan grocer, had seen a man bowing to the scandalous image—so he declared. In 1642 Charles asked for money from the colleges, for the prosecution of the war with the Parliament. The beautiful old college plate began its journey to the melting-pot. On August 9th the scholars armed themselves. There were two bands of musqueteers, one of pikemen, one of halberdiers. In the reign of HenryIII.the men had been on the other side. Magdalen bridge was blocked up with heaps of wood. Stones, for the primitive warfare of the time, were transported to the top of Magdalen tower. The stones were never thrown at any foemen. Royalists and Roundheads in turn occupied the place; and while grocer Nixon fled before the Cavaliers, he came back and interceded for All Souls College (which dealt with him for figs and sugar) when the Puritans wished to batter the graven images on the gate. On October 29th the King came, after Edgehill fight, the Court assembled, and Oxford was fortified. The place was made impregnable in those days of feeble artillery. The author of theGesta Stephanihad pointed out, many centuries before, that Oxford, if properly defended, could never be taken, thanks to the network of streams that surrounds her. Though the citizens worked grudgingly and slowly, the trenches were at last completed. The earthworks—a double line—ran in and out of the interlacing streams. A Parliamentary force on Headington Hill seems to have been unable to play on the city with artillery. Barbed arrows were served out to the scholars, who formed a regiment of more than six hundred men. The Queen held her little court in Merton, in the Warden’s lodgings. Clarendon gives rather a humorous account of the discontent of the fine ladies ‘The town was full of lords (besides those of the Council), and of persons of the best quality, with very many ladies, who, when not pleased themselves, kept others from being so.’ Oxford never was so busy and so crowded; letters, society, war, were all confused; there were excursions against Brown at Abingdon, and alarms from Fairfax on Headington Hill. The siege, from May 22nd to June 5th, was almost a farce. The Parliamentary generals ‘fought with perspective glasses.’ Neither Cromwell at Wytham, nor Brown at Wolvercot, pushed matters too hard. When two Puritan regiments advanced on Hinksey, Mr. Smyth blazed away at them from his house. As in Zululand, any building made a respectable fort, when cannon-balls had so little penetrative power, or when artillery was not at the front. Oxford was surrendered, with other places of arms, after Naseby, and—Presbyterians became heads of colleges!

InMerton Chapel a little mural tablet bears the crest, the name, and the dates of the birth and death, of Antony Wood. He has been our guide in these sketches of Oxford life, as he must be the guide of the gravest and most exact historians. No one who cares for the past of the University should think without pity and friendliness of this lonely scholar, who in his lifetime was unpitied and unbefriended. We have reached the period in which he lived and died, in the midst of changes of Church and State, and surrounded by more worldly scholars, whose letters remain to testify that, in the reign of the Second Charles, Oxford was modern Oxford. In the epistles of Humphrey Prideaux, student of Christ Church, we recognise the foibles of the modern University, the love of gossip, the internecine criticism, the greatness of little men whomrien ne peut plaire.

Antony Wood was a scholar of a different sort, of a sort that has never been very common in Oxford. He was a perfect dungeon of books; but he wrote as well as read, which has never been a usual practice in his University. Wood was born in 1632, in one of the old houses opposite Merton, perhaps in the curious ancient hall which has been called Beham, Bream, andBohemiæ Aula, by various corruptions of the original spelling. As a boy, Wood must have seen the siege of Oxford, which he describes not without humour. As a young man, he watched the religious revolution which introduced Presbyterian Heads of Houses, and sent Puritanical captains of horse, like Captain James Wadsworth, to hunt for ‘Papistical reliques’ and ‘massing stuffs’ among the property of the President of C. C. C. and the Dean of Ch. Ch. (1646–1648). In 1650 he saw the Chancellorship of Oliver Cromwell; in 1659 he welcomed the Restoration, and rejoiced that ‘the King had come to his own again.’ The tastes of an antiquary combined, with the natural reaction against Puritanism, to make Antony Wood a High Churchman, and not averse to Rome, while he had sufficient breadth of mind to admire Thomas Hobbes, the patriarch of English learning. But Wood had little room in his heart or mind for any learning save that connected with the University. Oxford, the city, and the colleges, the remains of the old religious art, the customs, the dresses—these things he adored with a loverlike devotion, which was utterly unrewarded. He owed no office to the University, and he was even expelled (1693) for having written sharply against Clarendon. This did not abate his zeal, nor prevent him from passing all his days, and much of his nights, in the study and compilation of University history.

The author of Wood’s biography has left a picture of his sombre and laborious old age. He rose at four o’clock every morning. He scarcely tasted food till supper-time. At the hour of the college dinner he visited the booksellers’ shops, where he was sure not to be disturbed by the gossip of dons, young and old. After supper he would smoke his pipe and drink his pot of ale in a tavern. It was while he took this modest refreshment, before old age came upon him, that Antony once fell in, and fell out, with Dick Peers. This Dick was one of the men employed by Dr. Fell, the Dean of Ch. Ch., to translate Wood’s History and Antiquities of the University of Oxford into Latin. The translation gave rise to a number of literary quarrels. As Dean of Ch. Ch., Dr. Fell yielded to the besetting sin of deans, and fancied himself the absolute master of the University, if not something superior to mortal kind. An autocrat of this sort had no scruples about changing Wood’s copy whenever he differed from Wood in political or religious opinion. Now Antony, as we said, had eyes to discern the greatness of Hobbes, whom the Dean considered no better than a Deist or an Atheist. The Dean therefore calmly altered all that Wood had written of the Philosopher of Malmesbury, and so maligned Hobbes that the old man, meeting the King in Pall Mall, begged leave to reply in his own defence. Charles allowed the dispute to go on, and Hobbes hit Fell rather hard. The Dean retorted with the famous expression aboutirritabile illud et vanissimum Malmesburiense animal. This controversy amused Oxford, but bred bad feeling between Antony Wood and Dick Peers, the translator of his work, and the tool of the Dean of Ch. Ch. Prideaux (Letters to John Ellis; Camden Society, 1875) describes the battles in city taverns between author and translator:

‘I suppose that you have heard of the continuall feuds, and often battles, between the author and the translator; they had a skirmish at Sol Hardeing [keeper of a tavern in All Saints’ parish], another at the printeing house [the Sheldonian theatre], and several other places.’

From the record of these combats, we learn that the recluse Antony was a man of his hands:

‘As Peers always cometh off with a bloody nose or a black eye, he was a long time afraid to goe annywhere where he might chance to meet his too powerful adversary, for fear of another drubbing, till he was pro-proctor, and now Woods (sic) is as much afraid to meet him, least he should exercise his authority upon him. And although he be a good bowzeing blad, yet it hath been observed that never since his adversary hath been in office hath he dared to be out after nine, least he should meet him and exact the rigor of the statute upon him.’

The statute required all scholars to be in their rooms before Tom had ceased ringing. It was, perhaps, too rash to say that the Oxford of the Restoration was already modern Oxford. The manners of the students were, so to speak, more accentuated. However much the lecturer in Idolology may dislike the method and person of the Reader in the Mandingo language, these two learned men do not box in taverns, nor take off their coats if they meet each other at the Clarendon Press. People are careful not to pitch into each other in that way, though the temper which confounds opponents for their theory of irregular verbs is not at all abated. As Wood grew in years he did not increase in honours. ‘He was a mere scholar,’ and consequently might expect from the greater number of men disrespect. When he was but sixty-four, he looked eighty at least. His dress was not elegant, ‘cleanliness being his chief object.’ He rarely left his rooms, that were papered with MSS., and where every table and chair had its load of books and yellow parchments from the College muniment rooms. When strangers came to Oxford with letters of recommendation, the recluse would leave his study, and gladly lead them about the town, through Logic Lane to Queen’s, which had not then the sublimely classical front, built by Hawksmoor, ‘but suggested by Sir Christopher Wren.’ It is worthy of his genius. Wood died in 1695, ‘forgiving every one.’ He could well afford to do so. In hisAthenæ Oxonienseshe had written the lives of all his enemies.

Wood, ‘being a mere scholar,’ could, of course, expect nothing but disrespect in a place like Oxford. His younger contemporary, Humphrey Prideaux, was, in the Oxford manner, a man of the world. He was the son of a Cornish squire, was educated at Westminster under Busby (that awful pedagogue, whose birch seems so near a memory), got a studentship at Christ Church in 1668, and took his B.A. degree in 1672. Here it may be observed that men went up quite as late in life then as they do now, for Prideaux was twenty-four years old when he took his degree. Fell was Dean of Christ Church, and was showing laudable zeal in working the University Press. What a pity it is that the University Press of to-day has become a trading concern, a shop for twopenny manuals and penny primers! It is scarcely proper that the University should at once organise examinations and sell the manuals which contain the answers to the questions most likely to be set. To return to Fell; he made Prideaux edit Lucius Florus, and publish theMarmora Oxoniensia, which came out 1676. We must not suppose, however, that Prideaux was an enthusiastic archæologist. He did theMarmorabecause the Dean commanded it, and because educated people were at that period not uninterested in Greek art. At the present hour one may live a lifetime in Oxford and only learn, by the accident of examining passmen in the Arundel Room, that the University possesses any marbles. In the walls of the Arundel Room (on the ground-floor in the Schools’ quadrangle) these touching remains of Hellas are interred. There are the funereal stelæ, with their quiet expression of sorrow, of hope, of resignation. The young man, on his tombstone, is represented in the act of rising and taking the hand of a friend. He is bound on his latest journey.

‘He goeth forth unto the unknown land,Where wife nor child may follow; thus far tellThe lingering clasp of hand in faithful hand,And that brief carven legend,Friend,farewell.O pregnant sign, profound simplicity!All passionate pain and fierce remonstratingBeing wholly purged, leave this mere memory,Deep but not harsh, a sad and sacred thing.’[120]

‘He goeth forth unto the unknown land,Where wife nor child may follow; thus far tellThe lingering clasp of hand in faithful hand,And that brief carven legend,Friend,farewell.

O pregnant sign, profound simplicity!All passionate pain and fierce remonstratingBeing wholly purged, leave this mere memory,Deep but not harsh, a sad and sacred thing.’[120]

The lady chooses from a coffer a trinket, or a ribbon. It is her last toilette she is making, with no fear and no regret. Again, the long-severed souls are meeting with delight in the home of the just made perfect.

Trinity College Gates, Parks’ Road

Even in the Schools these scraps of Greek lapidary’s work seem beautiful to us, in their sober and cheerful acceptance of life and death. We hope, in Oxford, that the study of ancient art, as well as of ancient literature, may soon be made possible. These tangible relics of the past bring us very near to the heart and the life of Greece, and waken a kindly enthusiasm in every one who approaches them. In Humphrey Prideaux’s letters there is not a trace of any such feeling. He does his business, but it is hack-work. In this he differs from the modern student, but in his caustic description of the rude and witless society of the place he is modern enough. In his letters to his friend, John Ellis, of the State Paper Office, it is plain that Prideaux wants to get preferment. His taste and his ambition alike made him detest the heavy, beer-drinking doctors, the fast ‘All Souls gentlemen,’ and the fossils of stupidity who are always plentifully imbedded in the soil of University life. Fellowships were then sold, at Magdalen and New, when they were not given by favour. Prideaux grumbles (July 28th, 1674) at the laxness of the Commissioners, who should have exposed this abuse: ‘In town, one of their inquirys is whether any of the scholars weare pantaloons or periwigues, or keep dogs.’ The great dispute about dogs, which raged at a later date in University College, had already begun to disturb dons and undergraduates. The choice language of Oxford contempt was even then extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison inDaniel Deronda, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not like as ‘brutes.’ ‘Pembroke—the fittest colledge in the town for brutes.’ The University did not encourage certain ‘players’ who had paid the place a visit, and the players, in revenge, had gone about the town at night and broken the windows.

When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is amusing to read of Prideaux’s miserable adventures, in the diligence, between a lady of easy manners, a ‘pitiful rogue,’ and two undergraduates who ‘sordidly affected debauchery.’

‘This ill company made me very miserable all the way. Only once I could not but heartily laugh to see Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by five or six carmen with whips and prong staves for provoking them with some of his extravagant frolics.’

The ‘violent affection to vice’ in the University, or in the country, was, of course, the reaction against the godliness of Puritan captains of horse. Another form of the reaction is discernible in the revived High Church sentiments of Prideaux, Wood, and most of the students of the time.

The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than those of the pot-house-haunting seniors. Dr. Good, the Master of Balliol, ‘a good old toast,’ had much trouble with his students.

‘There is, over against Balliol College, a dingy, horrid, scandalous ale-house, fit for none but draymen and tinkers, and such as, by going there, have made themselves equally scandalous. Here the Balliol men continually, and by perpetuall bubbing, add art to their natural stupidity, to make themselves perfect sots.’

The envy and jealousy of the inferior colleges, alas! have put about many things, in these latter days, to the discredit of the Balliol men, but not even Humphrey Prideaux would, out of all his stock of epithets, choose ‘sottish’ and ‘stupid.’ In these old times, however, Dr. Good had to call the men together, and—

‘Inform them of the mischiefs of that hellish liquor called ale; but one of them, not so tamely to be preached out of his beloved liquor, made answer that the Vice-Chancelour’s men drank ale at the “Split Crow,” and why should not they too?’

On this, old Dr. Good posted off to the Vice-Chancellor, who, ‘being a lover of old ale’ himself, returned a short answer to the head of Balliol. The old man went back to his college, and informed his fellows, ‘that he was assured there were no hurt in ale, so that now they may be sots by authority.’ Christ Church men were not more sober. David Whitford, who had been the tutor of Shirley the poet, was found lying dead in his bed: ‘he had been going to take a dram for refreshment, but death came between the cup and the lips, and this is the end of Davy.’ Prideaux records, in the same feeling style, that smallpox carried off many of the undergraduates, ‘besides my brother,’ a student at Corpus.

The University Press supplied Prideaux with gossip. They printed ‘a book against Hobs,’ written by Clarendon. Hobbes was the heresiarch of the time, and when an unhappy fellow of Merton hanged himself, the doctrines of Hobbes were said to have prompted him to the deed. To return to the Press. ‘Our Christmas book will be Cornelius Nepos . . . Our marbles are now printing.’ Prideaux, as has been said, took no interest in his own work.

‘I coat (quote) a multitude of authors; if people think the better of me for that, I will think the worse of them for their judgement. It beeing soe easyly a thinge to make this specious show, he must be a fool that cannot gain whatsoever repute is to be gotten by it. If people will admire him for this, they may; I shall admire such for nothing else but their good indexs. As long as books have these, on what subject may we not coat as many others as we please, and never have read one of them?’

It is not easy to gather from this confession whether Prideaux had or had not read the books he ‘coated.’ It is certain that Dean Aldrich (and here again we recognise the eternal criticism of modern Oxford) held a poor opinion of Humphrey Prideaux. Aldrich said Prideaux was ‘incorrect,’ ‘muddy-headed,’ ‘he would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes’; ‘as for MSS. he would not trouble himself about any, but rest wholly upon what had been done to his hands by former editors.’ This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the air. Oxford is a discouraging place. College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness. They have only the waste odds-and-ends of time for their own labours. They live in an atmosphere of criticism. They collect notes, they wait, they dream; their youth goes by, and the night comes when no man can work. The more praise to the tutors and lecturers who decipher the records of Assyria, or patiently collate the manuscripts of theIliad, who not only teach what is already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and advance the boundaries of scholarship and science.

One lesson may be learned from Prideaux’s cynical letters, which is still worth the attention of every young Oxford student who is conscious of ambition, of power, and of real interest in letters. He can best serve his University by coming out of her, by declining college work, and by devoting himself to original study in some less exhausted air, in some less critical society.

Among the aversions of Humphrey Prideaux were the ‘gentlemen of All Souls.’ They certainly showed extraordinary impudence when they secretly employed the University Press to print off copies of Marc Antonio’s engravings after Giulio Romano’s drawings. It chanced that Fell visited the press rather late one evening, and found ‘his press working at such an imployment. The prints and plates he hath seased, and threatened the owners of them with expulsion.’ ‘All Souls,’ adds Prideaux, ‘is a scandalous place.’ Yet All Souls was the college of young Mr. Guise, an Arabic scholar, ‘the greatest miracle in the knowledge of that I ever heard of.’ Guise died of smallpox while still very young.

Thus Prideaux prattles on, about Admiral Van Tromp, ‘a drunken greazy Dutchman,’ whom Speed, of St. John’s, conquered in boozing; of the disputes about races in Port Meadow; of the breaking into the Mermaid Tavern. ‘We Christ Church men bear the blame of it, our ticks, as the noise of the town will have it, amounting to £1,500.’ Thus Christ Church had little cause to throw the first stone at Balliol. Prideaux shows little interest in letters, little in the press, though he lived in palmy days of printing, in the time of the Elzevirs; none at all in the educational work of the place. He sneers at the Puritans, and at the controversy on ‘The Foundations of Hell Torments shaken and removed.’ He admits that Locke ‘is a man of very good converse,’ but is chiefly concerned to spy out the movements of the philosopher, suspected of sedition, and to report them to Ellis in town. About the new buildings, as of the beautiful western gateway, where Great Tom is hung, the work of Wren, Prideaux says little; St. Mary’s was suffering restoration, and ‘the old men,’ including Wood, we may believe, ‘exceedingly exclaim against it.’ That is the way of Oxford, a college is constantly rebuilding amid the protests of the rest of the University. There is no question more common, or less agreeable than this, ‘What are you doing to your tower?’ or ‘What are you doing to your hall, library, or chapel?’ No one ever knows; but we are always doing something, and working men for ever sit, and drink beer, on the venerable roofs.

Long intercourse with Prideaux’s letters, and mournful memories of Oxford new buildings, tempt a writer to imitate Prideaux’s spirit. Let us shut up his book, where he leaves Oxford, in 1686, to become rector of Saham-Toney, in Norfolk, and marry a wife, though, says he, ‘I little thought I should ever come to this.’

Thename of her late Majesty Queen Anne has for some little time been a kind of party watch-word. Many harmless people have an innocent loyalty to this lady, make themselves her knights (as Mary Antoinette has still her sworn champions in France and Mary Stuart in Scotland), buy the plate of her serene period, and imitate the dress. To many moral critics in the press, however, Queen Anne is a kind of abomination. I know not how it is, but the terms ‘Queen Anne furniture and blue china’ have become words of almost slanderous railing. Any didactic journalist who uses them is certain at once to fall heavily on the artistic reputation of Mr. Burne Jones, to rebuke the philosophy of Mr. Pater, and to hint that the entrance-hall of the Grosvenor Gallery is that ‘by-way’ with which Bunyan has made us familiar. In the changes of things our admiration of the Augustan age of our literature, the age of Addison and Steele, of Marlborough and Aldrich, has become a sort of reproach. It may be that our modern preachers know but little of that which they traduce. At all events, the Oxford of Queen Anne’s time was not what they call ‘un-English,’ but highly conservative, and as dull and beer-bemused as the most manly taste could wish it to be.

TheSpectatorof the ingenious Sir Richard Steele gives us many a glimpse of non-juring Oxford. The old fashion of Sanctity (Mr. Addison says, in theSpectator, No. 494) had passed away; nor were appearances of Mirth and Pleasure looked upon as the Marks of a Carnal Mind. Yet the Puritan Rule was not so far forgotten, but that Mr. Anthony Henley (a Gentleman of Property) could remember how he had stood for a Fellowship in a certain College whereof a great Independent Minister was Governor. As Oxford at this Moment is much vexed in her Mind about Examinations, wherein, indeed, her whole Force is presently expended, I make no scruple to repeat the account of Mr. Henley’s Adventure:

‘The Youth, according to Custom, waited on the Governor of his College, to be examined. He was received at the Door by a Servant, who was one of that gloomy Generation that were then in Fashion. He conducted him with great Silence and Seriousness to a long Gallery which was darkened at Noon-day, and had only a single Candle burning in it. After a short stay in this melancholy Apartment, he was led into a Chamber hung with black, where he entertained himself for some time by the glimmering of a Taper, till at length the Head of the College came out to him from an inner Room, with half a dozen Night Caps upon his Head, and a religious Horror in his Countenance. The Young Man trembled; but his Fears increased when, instead of being asked what progress he had made in Learning, he was ask’d “how he abounded in Grace?” HisLatinandGreekstood him in little stead. He was to give an account only of the state of his Soul—whether he was of the Number of the Elect; what was the Occasion of his Conversion; upon what Day of the Month and Hour of the Day it happened; how it was carried on, and when completed. The whole Examination was summed up in one short Question, namely,Whether he was prepared for Death? The Boy, who had been bred up by honest Parents, was frighted out of his wits by the solemnity of the Proceeding, and by the last dreadful Interrogatory, so that, upon making his Escape out of this House of Mourning, he could never be brought a second Time to the Examination, as not being able to go through the Terrors of it.’

By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund’s Hall, began to keep his diary, the ‘honest folk’—that is, the High Churchmen—had the better of the Independent Ministers. The Dissenters had some favour at Court, but in the University they were looked upon as utterly reprobate. From theReliquiæof Hearne (an antiquarian successor of Antony Wood, abibliophile, an archæologist, and as honest a man as Jacobitism could make him) let us quote an example of Heaven’s wrath against Dissenters:

‘Aug.6, 1706. We have an account from Whitchurch, in Shropshire, that the Dissenters there having prepared a great quantity of bricks to erect a spacious conventicle, a destroying angel came by night and spoiled them all, and confounded their Babel in the beginning, to their great mortification.’

Hearne’s common-place books are an amusing source of information about Oxford society in the years of Queen Anne, and of the Hanoverian usurper. Tom Hearne was a Master of Arts of St. Edmund’s Hall, and at one time Deputy-Librarian of the Bodleian. He lost this post because he would not take ‘the wicked oaths’ required of him, but he did not therefore leave Oxford. His working hours were passed in preparing editions of antiquarian books, to be printed in very limited number, on ordinary andLarge Paper. It was the joy of Tom’s existence to see his editions become first scarce, thenVery Scarce, while the price augmented in proportion to the rarity. When he was not reading in his rooms he was taking long walks in the country, tracing Roman walls and roads, and exploring Woodstock Park for the remains of ‘the labyrinth,’ as he calls the Maze of Fair Rosamund. In these strolls he was sometimes accompanied by undergraduates, even gentlemen of noble family, ‘which gave cause to some to envy our happiness.’ Hearne was a social creature, and had a heart, as he shows by the entry about the death of his ‘very dear friend, Mr. Thomas Cherry, A.M., to the great grief of all that knew him, being a gentleman of great beauty, singular modesty, of wonderful good nature, and most excellent principles.’

The friends of Hearne were chiefly, perhaps solely, what he calls ‘honest men,’ supporters of the Stuart family, and always ready to drink his Majesty’s (King James’) health. They would meet in ‘Antiquity Hall,’ an old house near Wadham, and smoke their honest pipes. They held certain of the opinions of ‘the Hebdomadal Meeting,’ satirised by Steele in theSpectator(No. 43). ‘We are much offended at the Act for importingFrenchwines. A bottle or two of good solid Edifying Port, at honestGeorge’s, made a Night cheerful, and threw off Reserve. But this plaguyFrenchClaret will not only cost us more Money but do us less good.’ Hearne had a poor opinion of ‘Captain Steele,’ and of ‘one Tickle: this Tickle is a pretender to poetry.’ He admits that, though ‘Queen’s people are angry at theSpectator, and the common-room say ’tis silly dull stuff, men that are indifferent commend it highly, as it deserves.’ Some other satirist had a plate etched, representing Antiquity Hall—a caricature of Tom’s antiquarian engravings. It may be seen in Skelton’s book.

Thanks to Hearne, it is easy to reproduce the common-room gossip, and the more treasonable talk of honest men at Antiquity Hall. The learned were much interested, as they usually are at Oxford, in theological discussion. Some one proved, by an ingenious syllogism, that all men are to be saved; but Hearne had the better of this Latitudinarian, easily demonstrating that the comfortable argument does not meet the case of madmen, and of deaf-mutes, whom Tom did not expect to meet in a future state. The ingenious, though depressing speculations of Mr. Dodwell were also discussed: ‘He makes the air the receptacle of all souls, good and bad, and that they are under the power of the D—l, he being prince of the air.’ ‘The less perfectly good’ hang out, if we may say so, ‘in the space between earth and the clouds,’ all which is subtle, and creditable to Mr. Dodwell’s invention, but not susceptible of exact demonstration. The whole controversy is an interesting specimen of Queen Anne philosophy, which, with all respect for the taste of the period, we need not wish to see revived. The Bishop of Worcester, for example, ‘expects the end of the world about nine years hence.’ While the theology of Oxford is being mentioned, the zeal of Dr. Miller, Regius Professor of Greek, must not be forgotten. The learned Professor endeavoured to convert, and even ‘writ a Letter to Mrs. Bracegirdle, giving her great encomiums (as having himself been often to see plays acted whilst they continued here) upon account of her excellent qualifications, and persuading her to give over this loose way of living, and betake herself to such a kind of life as was more innocent, and would gain her more credit.’ The Professor’s advice was wasted on ‘Bracegirdle the brown.’

Politics were naturally much discussed in these doubtful years, when the Stuarts, it was thought, had still a chance to win their own again. In 1706, Tom says, ‘The great health now is “The Cube of Three,” which is the number 27, i.e. the number of the protesting Lords.’ The University was most devoted, as far as drinking toasts constitutes loyalty. In Hearne’s common-place book is carefully copied out this ‘Scotch Health to K. J.’:

‘He’s o’er the seas and far awa’,He’s o’er the seas and far awa’;Altho’ his back be at the wa’We’ll drink his health that’s far awa’.’

The words live, and ring strangely out of that dusty past. The song survives the throne, and sounds pathetically, somehow, as one has heard it chanted, in days as dead as the year 1711, at suppers that seem as ancient almost as the festivities of Thomas Hearne. It is not unpleasant to remember that the people who sang could also fight, and spilt their blood as well as their ‘edifying port.’ If the Southern ‘honest men’ had possessed hearts for anything but tippling, the history of England would have been different.

When ‘the allyes and the French fought a bloudy battle near Mons’ (1709, ‘Malplaquet’), the Oxford honest men, like Colonel Henry Esmond, thought ‘there was not any the least reason of bragging.’ The young King of England, under the character of the Chevalier St. George, ‘shewed abundance of undaunted courage and resolution, led up his troups with unspeakable bravery, appeared in the utmost dangers, and at last was wounded.’ Marlborough’s victories were sneered at, his new palace of Blenheim was said to be not only ill-built, but haunted by signs of evil omen.

It was not always safe to say what one thought about politics at Oxford. One Mr. A. going to one Mr. Tonson, a barber, put the barber and his wife in a ferment (they being rascally Whigs) by maintaining that the hereditary right was in the P. of W. Tonson laid information against the gentleman; ‘which may be a warning to honest men not to enter into topicks of this nature with barbers.’ One would not willingly, even now, discuss the foreign policy of her Majesty’s Ministers with the person who shaves one. There are opportunities and temptations to which no decent person should be wantonly exposed. The bad effect of Whiggery on the temper was evident in this, that ‘the Mohocks are all of the Whiggish gang, and indeed all Whigs are looked upon as such Mohocks, their principles and doctrines leading thus to all manner of barbarity and inhumanity.’ So true is it that Conservatives are all lovers of peace and quiet, that (May 29th, 1715) ‘last night a good part of the Presbyterian meeting-house in Oxford was pulled down. The people ran up and down the streets, crying,King James the Third!The true king!No Usurper. In the evening they pulled a good part of the Quakers’ and Anabaptists’ meeting-houses down. The heads of houses have represented that it was begun by the Whiggs.’ Probably the heads of houses reasoned onà prioriprinciples when they arrived at this remarkable conclusion.

The Cottages, Trinity College

In consequence of the honesty, frankness, and consistency of his opinions, Mr. Hearne ran his head in danger when King George came to the throne, which has ever since been happily settled in the possession of the Hanoverian line. A Mr. Urry, a Non-juror, had to warn him, saying, ‘Do you not know that they have a mind to hang you if they can, and that you have many enemies who are very ready to do it?’ In spite of this, Hearne, in his diaries, still calls George I. the Duke of Brunswick, and the Whigs, ‘that fanatical crew.’ John, Duke of Marlborough, he styles ‘that villain the Duke.’ We have had enough, perhaps, of Oxford politics, which were not much more prejudiced in the days of the Duke than in those of Mr. Gladstone. Hearne’s allusions to the contemporary state of buildings and of college manners are often rather instructive. In All Souls the Whigs had a feast on the day of King Charles’s martyrdom. They had a dinner dressed of woodcock, ‘whose heads they cut off, in contempt of the memory of the blessed martyr.’ These men were ‘low Churchmen, more shame to them.’ The All Souls men had already given up the custom of wandering about the College on the night of January 14th, with sticks and poles, in quest of the mallard. That ‘swopping’ bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college of which he is the protector. But now all hope of recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the ‘swopping, swopping mallard.’

As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne’s reign—quite a different thing from the ‘Neo-paganism’ which now causes so much anxiety to the moral press-man—let us note the affecting instance of Geffery Ammon. ‘He was a merry companion, and his conversation was much courted.’ Geffery had but little sense of religion. He is now buried on the west side of Binsey churchyard, near St. Margaret’s well. Geffery selected Binsey for the place of his sepulchre, because he was partial to the spot, having often shot snipe there. In order to moisten his clay, he desired his friend Will Gardner, a boatman of Oxford, who was accustomed to row him down the river, to put now and then a bottle of ale by his grave when he came that way; an injunction which was punctually complied with.

Oxford lost in Hearne’s time many of her old buildings. It is said, with a dreadful appearance of truth, that Oxford is now to lose some of the few that are left. Corpus and Merton, if they are not belied, mean to pull down the old houses opposite Merton, halls and houses consecrated to the memory of Antony Wood, and to build lecture-roomsand houses for married donson the site. The topic, for one who is especially bound to pray for Merton (and who now does so with unusual fervour), is most painful. A view of the ‘proposed new buildings,’ in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy (1879), depresses the soul. In the same spirit Hearne says (March 28th, 1671), ‘It always grieves me when I go through Queen’s College, to see the ruins of the old chapell next to High Street, the area of which now lies open (the building being most of it pulled down) and trampled upon by dogs, etc., as if the ground had never been consecrated. Nor do the Queen’s Coll. people take any care, but rather laught at it when ’tis mentioned.’ In 1722 ‘the famous postern-gate called theTurlGate’ (a corruption forThoroldGate) was ‘pulled down by one Dr. Walker, who lived by it, and pretended that it was a detriment to his house. As long ago as 1705, they had pulled down the building of Peckwater quadrangle, in Ch. Ch.’ Queen’s also ‘pulled down the old refectory, which was on the west side of the old quadrangle, and was a fine old structure that I used to admire much.’ It appears that the College was also anxious to pull down the chamber of King Henry V. This is a strange craze for destruction, that some time ago endangered the beautiful library of Merton, a place where one can fancy that Chaucer or Wyclif may have studied. Oxford will soon have little left of the beauty and antiquity ofPatey’s Quadin Merton, as represented in our illustration. What the next generation will think of the multitudinous new buildings, it is not hard to conjecture. Imitative experiments, without style or fancy in structure or decoration, and often more than medievally uncomfortable, they will seem but evidences of Oxford’s love of destruction. People of Hearne’s way of thinking, people who respect antiquity, protest in vain, and, like Hearne, must be content sadly to enjoy what is left of grace and dignity. He died before Oxford had quite become the Oxford of Gibbon’s autobiography.

Oxfordhas usually been described either by her lovers or her malcontents. She has suffered the extremes of filial ingratitude and affection. There is something in the place that makes all her children either adore or detest her; and it is difficult, indeed, to pick out the truth concerning her past social condition from the satires and the encomiums. Nor is it easy to say what qualities in Oxford, and what answering characteristics in any of her sons, will beget the favourable or the unfavourable verdict. Gibbon, one might have thought, saw the sunny, and Johnson the shady, side of the University. With youth, and wealth, and liberty, with a set of three beautiful rooms in that ‘stately pile, the new building of Magdalen College,’ Gibbon found nothing in Oxford to please him—nothing to admire, nothing to love. From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gate-tower the hypochondriac Johnson—rugged, anxious, and conscious of his great unemployed power—looked down on a much more pleasant Oxford, on a city and on schools that he never ceased to regard with affection. This contrast is found in the opinions of our contemporaries. One man will pass his time in sneering at his tutors and his companions, in turning listlessly from study to study, in following false tendencies, and picking up scraps of knowledge which he despises, and in later life he will detest his University. There are wiser and more successful students, who yet bear away a grudge against the stately mother of us all, that so easily can disregard our petty spleens and ungrateful rancour. Mr. Lowe’s most bitter congratulatory addresses to the ‘happy Civil Engineers,’ and his unkindest cuts at ancient history, and at the old philosophies which ‘on Argive heights divinely sung,’ move her not at all. Meanwhile, the majority of men are more kindly compact, and have more natural affections, and on them the memory of their earliest friendships, and of that beautiful environment which Oxford gave to their years of youth, is not wholly wasted.

There are more Johnsons, happily, in this matter, than Gibbons. There is little need to repeat the familiar story of Johnson’s life at Pembroke. He went up in the October term of 1728, being then nineteen years of age, and already full of that wide and miscellaneous classical reading which the Oxford course, then as now, somewhat discouraged. ‘His figure and manner appeared strange’ to the company in which he found himself; and when he broke silence it was with a quotation from Macrobius. To his tutor’s lectures, as a later poet says, ‘with freshman zeal he went’; but his zeal did not last out the discovery that the tutor was ‘a heavy man,’ and the fact that there was ‘sliding on Christ Church Meadow.’ Have any of the artists who repeat, with perseverance, the most famous scenes in the Doctor’s life—drawn him sliding on Christ Church meadows, sliding in these worn and clouted shoes of his, and with that figure which even the exercise of skating could not have made ‘swan-like,’ to quote the young lady in ‘Pickwick’? Johnson was ‘sconced’ in the sum of twopence for cutting lecture; and it is rather curious that the amount of the fine was the same four hundred years earlier, when Master Stoke, of Catte Hall (whose career we touched on in the second of these sketches), deserted his lessons. It was when he was thus sconced that Johnson made that reply which Boswell preserves ‘as a specimen of the antithetical character of his wit’—‘Sir, you have sconced me twopence for non-attendance on a lecture not worth a penny.’

Sconcing seems to have been the penalty for offences very various in degree. ‘A young fellow of Balliol College having, upon some discontent, cut his throat very dangerously, the master of his College sent his servitor to the buttery-book to sconce him five shillings; and,’ says the Doctor, ‘tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I’ll sconce him ten!’ This prosaic punishment might perhaps deter some Werthers from playing with edged tools.

From Boswell’s meagre account of Johnson’s Oxford career we gather some facts which supplement the description of Gibbon. The future historian went into residence twenty-three years after Johnson departed without taking his degree. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner, and was permitted by the easy discipline of Magdalen to behave just as he pleased. He ‘eloped,’ as he says, from Oxford, as often as he chose, and went up to town, where he was by no means the ideal of ‘the Manly Oxonian in London.’ The fellows of Magdalen, possessing a revenue which private avarice might easily have raised to £30,000, took no interest in their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor read a few Latin plays with his pupil, in a style of dry and literal translation. The other fellows, less conscientious, passed their lives in tippling and tattling, discussing the ‘Oxford Toasts,’ and drinking other toasts to the king over the water. ‘Some duties,’ says Gibbon, ‘may possibly have been imposed on the poor scholars,’ but ‘the velvet cap was the cap of liberty,’ and the gentleman commoner consulted only his own pleasure. Johnson was a poor scholar, and on him duties were imposed. He was requested to write an ode on the Gunpowder Plot, and Boswell thinks ‘his vivacity and imagination must have produced something fine.’ He neglected, however, with his usual indolence, this opportunity of producing something fine. Another exercise imposed on the poor was the translation of Mr. Pope’s ‘Messiah,’ in which the young Pembroke man succeeded so well that, by Mr. Pope’s own generous confession, future ages would doubt whether the English or the Latin piece was the original. Johnson complained that no man could be properly inspired by the Pembroke ‘coll,’ or college beer, which was then commonly drunk by undergraduates, still guiltless of Rhine wines, and of collecting Chinese monsters.

Carmina vis nostri scribant meliora poetæIngenium jubeas purior baustus alat.

In spite of the muddy beer, the poverty, and the ‘bitterness mistaken for frolic,’ with which Johnson entertained the other undergraduates round Pembroke gate, he never ceased to respect his college. ‘His love and regard for Pembroke he entertained to the last,’ while of his old tutor he said, ‘a man who becomes Jorden’s pupil becomes his son.’ Gibbon’s sneer is a foil to Johnson’s kindliness. ‘I applaud the filial piety which it is impossible for me to imitate . . . To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligations, and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother.’

Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to judge by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the eighteenth century was excessively rough. Manners were rather primitive: a big fire burned in the centre of Balliol Hall, and round this fire, one night in every year, it is said that all the world was welcome to a feast of ale and bread and cheese. Every guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling a story; and one can fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality. ‘What learning can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil behaviour?’ says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746) Southey has made some extracts. The diarist was a Puritan of the old leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson’s period, and who speaks of ‘a power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly prevailing in that place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God . . . In this wicked place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and unruly rabble, and most mischievous.’ But this strange and unfriendly critic was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen showed their piety by wrecking chapels and ‘rabbling’ ministers. In our days only the Davenport Brothers and similar professors of strange creeds suffer from the manly piety of the undergraduates.

Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish assailants ofAlma Mater, the author ofTerræ Filiuswas the most persistent. The first little volume which contains the numbers of this bi-weekly periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom’s Coffee-house, in Russell Street, Covent Garden,MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and is well worth a desultory reading. What strikes one most inTerræ Filiusis the religious discontent of the bilious author. One thinks, foolishly of course, of even Georgian Whigs as orthodox men, at least in their undergraduate days. The mere aspect of Mr. Leslie Stephen’s work on the philosophers of the eighteenth century is enough to banish this pleasing delusion. The Deists and Freethinkers had their followers in Johnson’s day among the undergraduates, though scepticism, like Whiggery, was unpopular, and might be punished. Johnson says, that when he was a boy he was a laxtalker, rather than a laxthinker, against religion; ‘but lax talking against religion at Oxford would not be suffered.’ The author ofTerræ Filius, however, never omits a chance of sneering at our faith, and at the Church of England as by law established. In his description of the exercises of the Club of Wits, only one respectably clever epigram is quoted, beginning,—

‘Since in religion all men disagree,And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.’

This production ‘was voted heretical,’ and burned by the hands of the small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled. In the author’s advice to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary creatures. The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University sermon, ‘never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly’; but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up in what he conceived to be gorgeous attire. ‘I observe, in the first place, that you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword.’ As soon as they arrived in Oxford, these youths were hospitably received ‘amongst a parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in honour and common civility, to make youdamnable drunk, and carry you, as they call it, aCORPSEto bed.’ When this period of jollity is ended, the freshman must declare his views. He must see that he is in the fashion; ‘and let your declarations be, that you areChurchmen, and that you believe as theChurchbelieves. For instance, you have subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses; so many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and notrue Churchmanin that which the words bear, and in that which they were written.’

This is pretty plain speaking, andTerræ Filiusenforces, by an historical example, the dangers of even political freethought. In 1714 the Constitution Club kept King George’s birthday. The Constitutional Party was then the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though, thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon the same. The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club, sallying forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as seen in our illustration), where the ‘silly statue,’ as Hearne calls it, was about that time erected. The Whigs took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted the gates, and an Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman of Brasenose. The Tories, ‘under terror of this dangerous and unexpected resistance, retreated from Oriel.’ Yet such was the academic strength of the Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a ‘Constitutioner,’ could scarcely take his degree.

Terræ Filius, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed, dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan’s report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair.Terræ Filiusthus describes a ‘smart,’ as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery:

‘He is one of those who come in their academical undress, every morning between ten and eleven, to Lyne’s Coffee-house; after which he takes a turn or two upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst the dullregularsare at dinner in their hall, according to statute; about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled chicken or some pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour at least to dress in, to make his afternoon’s appearance at Lyne’s; from whence he adjourns to Hamilton’s about five; from whence (after strutting about the room for a while, and drinking a dram of citron), he goes to chapel, to show how genteelly he dresses, and how well he can chaunt. After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast, and then waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and back again. He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but novels and romances.’

The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets more gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating men.

‘He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his waist]; a broad bully-cock’d hat, or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes. His clothes lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as at the wrists.’

These ‘smarts’ cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings, flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-cloths run with red at the bottom.

Magdalen College and Bridge from the Cherwell

After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the contemporary account-book of a Proctor. In 1752 Gilbert White of Selborne was Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen, who little thought that Oxford boasted an official who was to become an English classic. White paid some attention to dress, and got a feather-topp’d, grizzled wig from London; cost him £2, 5s. He bought ‘mountain wine, very old and good,’ and had his crest engraved on his teaspoons, that everything might be handsome about him. When he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall they ate a hundred pounds weight of biscuits—not, we trust, without marmalade. ‘A bowl of rum-punch from Horsman’s’ cost half a crown. Fancy a jolly Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in April! Eggs cost a penny each, and ‘three oranges and a mouse-trap’ ninepence.

White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor ‘seven pounds of double-refined white sugar.’ I like to fancy my learned friend, the Proctor, going to the present Vice-Chancellor’s with a donation of white sugar! Manners have certainly changed in the direction of severity. ‘Share of the expense for Mr. Butcher’s release’ came to ten and sixpence. What had Mr. Butcher been doing? The Proctor went ‘to Blenheim with Nan,’ and it cost him fifteen and sixpence. Perhaps she was one of the ‘Oxford Toasts’ of a contemporary satire. Strawberries were fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on November 6, White lost one shilling ‘at cards, in common room.’ He went from Selborne to Oxford, ‘in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke’; and he gave Jenny a ‘round Chinaturene.’ Tea cost eight shillings a pound in 1752, while rum-punch was but half a crown a bowl. White’s highest terminal battels were but £12, though he was a hospitable man, and would readily treat the other Proctor to a bowl of punch. It is well to remember White and Johnson when the Gibbon of that or any other day bewails the intellectual poverty of Oxford.

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