The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRowlandson's OxfordThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Rowlandson's OxfordAuthor: A. Hamilton GibbsIllustrator: Thomas RowlandsonRelease date: June 16, 2013 [eBook #42960]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROWLANDSON'S OXFORD ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Rowlandson's OxfordAuthor: A. Hamilton GibbsIllustrator: Thomas RowlandsonRelease date: June 16, 2013 [eBook #42960]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive.)
Title: Rowlandson's Oxford
Author: A. Hamilton GibbsIllustrator: Thomas Rowlandson
Author: A. Hamilton Gibbs
Illustrator: Thomas Rowlandson
Release date: June 16, 2013 [eBook #42960]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Chris Curnow and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROWLANDSON'S OXFORD ***
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Front View of Christ Church.
ROWLANDSON’S OXFORD
BYA. HAMILTON GIBBS(ST JOHN’S COLLEGE)
LONDONKEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.1911
The task of writing a book on Oxford University is by no means an easy one. If it be a novel there are countless pitfalls to entrap the author—points small and inconsequent to the reader who cannot proudly claim the City of Spires as his Alma Mater, but irritating beyond description to the man who knows and loves Oxford.
But if modern Oxford dealt with from the romantic and sentimental point of view as the background of a story contains such a network of difficulties, the Oxford of two hundred years ago, Rowlandson’s Oxford, contains them multiplied a hundred times, because it now becomes a question not of reproducing the vivid pictures of the hour and moment, but of recreating the atmosphere of a time that is silent in death.
It is, therefore, with great diffidence that I have attempted to resuscitate the life and moods of Oxford of the eighteenth century. Barely two years have elapsed since the days when I looked out from my windows into the quad of my college. All the work and play, the alarums and excursions which go to form the life of the average Undergraduate have not yet had time to fade into dim, half forgotten memories. Alma Mater still grasps me in her warm hand. So vivid indeed are all the impressions which I received from the friendly gargoyles and the peace-touched lawns, the beautiful colleges with their silent cloisters, the full-blooded twenty-firsters and bump-suppers, and the thousand and one everyday happenings, that I might be merely awaiting the passing of vacation to go up once more.
With all the Undergraduate interests still so strongly at heart, Ithink that it is natural that I should have studied the Rowlandson period with the mind of the Undergraduate and have carried out my task from the Undergraduate point of view. It is difficult to give any idea of the quaintness, delight, and amusement caused by going back two hundred years to a University so like and so unlike—like, in that the men, although so different outwardly, had practically the same ideas as we have and carried them out in the same colleges, even in the same rooms, in a precisely similar manner; unlike in that the Dons were a breed of men differing in every respect from those who look after us to-day.
Working, then, on the hypothesis that Oxford men in Rowlandson’s time were identical with ourselves, I have drawn analogies between every step in the lives of both. I have endeavoured to show that from the beginning of their fresherdom, when they felt self-conscious,gauche, and timid, down to the days when they took their degrees and knew Oxford blindfold in all her moods and tenses, they possessed the same outlook, had the same aspirations and ambitions, and were filled with the same admiration and love of Alma Mater as the men of to-day. For instance, as a freshman the Georgian Undergraduate curiously watched the seniors who were responsible for the tone of their college. Gradually he sloughed both his nervousness and his un-Oxford wardrobe and began to assert his own individuality. Little by little he discovered new sides of Oxford life, new haunts in which he began to feel at home. Daily he made new acquaintances who, as time went by, ripened into friends. Eventually, by the end of his first year, he had so absorbed Oxford into his personality that he in turn was able to condescend to the next year’s arrivals. During this time his attitude towards the Dons, the statutes, the schools—to everything, in short, outside the immediate Undergraduate side oflife—varied with the terms. At the beginning they were subjects only to be broached with awe and deliberation. But the more he came into contact with an ever increasing circle of friends, the sooner his respect changed into ridicule, disgust, and finally, when a senior, into amused toleration.
In précis form such was the development of the eighteenth-century Undergraduate. His metamorphosis into a “blood,” with all its amusing accompaniments and accomplishments—the former consisting of the latest fashions in clothes and theentréeto the innermost recesses of the Maudlin Groves in the company of the most celebrated Oxford damsel; the latter of a facility for dashing off a well thought out extempore series of oaths, being the handiest man at a tea-table, drinking more than any other buck of his acquaintance before finally succumbing, to follow in the natural sequence of events according to the temperament of the freshman. Had he a leaning towards becoming a “blood” not only was there nothing to stop him, but, on the contrary, all the existing conditions were such as to facilitate the execution of his desires.
In all these phrases the old-time Undergraduate can be compared with his modern brothers. In his dealings with the river-side barmaids, the local tradesmen, and the proctors he pursued much the same ingenuous methods which are used with equal success to-day. Just as we become members of unlimited numbers of year clubs and settle the affairs of the entire human species at the nightly meetings with ease and eloquence, they, too, formed societies and took themselves with a similar seriousness. They contributed literary morsels to the Undergraduate papers which satirised existing institutions in the same youthful manner in which we satirise them. They conducted “rags” with a thoroughness and disregard of results which ended in the samespeedy rustication of the ringleaders which inevitably overtakes the men who are still unwise enough to be found out.
In a word, my object has been not to compare the ethics of the university to-day with those of yesterday, but rather to set forth an analogy between Dons and Undergraduates of that period and this, and the business of their daily life, from the point of view of one upon whom the influence of Alma Mater has not yet been mellowed into an analytical remembrance by long contact with the world which lies beyond her spires.
Whether I have succeeded in proving my case remains to be seen. At least I venture to hope that the results of my work may form a frame for Rowlandson’s pictures which are here reproduced for the first time from Rowlandson’s original water-colour drawings.
Of these pictures many were engraved at the time in aquatint, but the engraver was as a rule so obsessed with the Georgian ideas of the beautiful in architecture that he practically reconstructed the majority of the buildings represented, in accordance with that idea, so that some of the most beautiful and characteristic buildings in Oxford and Cambridge, so delicately portrayed by Rowlandson’s pencil, are turned into rectangular monstrosities, the like of which was never seen in either university town.
The superiority of hand-engraving over modern processes is evident enough, when the engraving itself was made by the artist; but when the original drawing is so hopelessly misrepresented as is the case with many of the aquatints of Rowlandson’s drawings, the modern facsimile processes have their obvious advantages.
It is therefore claimed that Rowlandson’s drawings of Oxford are here reproduced for the first time, and it is believed that they will be a revelation to many who have hitherto looked upon Rowlandsonmerely as a somewhat gross caricaturist. The caricaturist, it is true, is still here depicting in the foregrounds characteristic scenes in the university life of the time, but here is also another Rowlandson with an appreciation of the beauties of Oxford rare indeed in his age, and one who is able to delineate them with accuracy and delicacy which have seldom been equalled in the portrayal of such subjects.
The author desires to express his gratitude to the Rev. Christopher Wordsworth for having very kindly granted him permission to make quotations from “Social Life in the English Universities”; and to Messrs Macmillan & Co., publishers of J. R. Green’s “Oxford Studies,” for allowing him to make two quotations from that book; and also to Mr R. S. Rait of the Oxford Historical Society for having permitted him to quote from Miss L. Quiller-Couch’s “Reminiscences of Oxford,” published by that society.
ROWLANDSON’S OXFORD
THE UNDERGRADUATE THEN AND NOW
Blissful ignorance—The real education—Empty schools—Manhood—Lonely freshers—The “pi” man—The newcomer’s metamorphosis—The Lownger’s day—Regrets at being down.
Blissful ignorance—The real education—Empty schools—Manhood—Lonely freshers—The “pi” man—The newcomer’s metamorphosis—The Lownger’s day—Regrets at being down.
How few of us there are to-day who ever devote even the slack hour between tea and “hotters” and Hall to finding out something at least about the Undergraduates who had our rooms two centuries ago. Yet to every man the word Oxford conjures up vast vague shadows from the past which make him as a freshman tread softly and with reverence through the quads and gardens, High Streets and by-streets of the City of Spires. Great names rise up into our minds and fill us with wonder, but the scout knocks at our door with half-cold food and our dreams dissolve into irritated reality. There may come a moment, perhaps, when, with feet at rest upon the mantel-shelf and a straight-grained pipe bubbling in quiet response between our teeth, we are deafening our ears to the call of bed, the slow-flowing conversation drifts by chance to a casual query as to what our predecessors did at the same hour two hundred years ago. Beyond a few more or less unimaginative surmises we remain in ignorance, blissful and uncaring, believing them to be strange-clothed beings of stilted language and curious habits, and at once the talk turns to present and more pleasant topics. We little think that to allintents and purposes we are almost exactly the same as our old-time-brethren.
To-day we row, play cricket, football, tennis, golf; we cut our lectures when we safely can and “binge” at every opportunity. Schools do occupy us, it is true, but as a mere secondary item in the university scheme of things—and rightly so. A degree, however good, does not, by itself, make men of us and teach us how to live. It is the social life of the university which is the real education and which sends us out into the world ready to face anything and everything. By developing our bodies we develop our minds, and in this programme of athletics and sociability we are a replica of our eighteenth-century brethren. They rose about nine, breakfasted at ten, and dallied away the morning with a flute or the latest French comedy. By way of strenuous exercise, necessitated by a climate which was just as evil then as now, they walked, rode, rowed, or skated, and in the evening figured at the Mitre or Tuns where they made merry into the small hours with beer, claret, or punch.
To them schools were much less a source of worry than they are to us, for, beyond attending occasional disputations and an odd lecture or so, when a Don could be persuaded to give one, they obtained their degree by the simple but expensive process of drinking the examiner—usually a hardened toper—under the table overnight. He was then led, in the morning, while still pleasantly fuddled, to the schools, and there, in consideration of a respectable douceur, he signed away the necessary papers with a beaming and self-satisfied smile. They knew nothing of the humours of white ties, dark suits, and a week’s terrible strain to get a First in Honour Mods—before the Finals are even thought of. The shivering crowds waiting in the Hall to be led to the slaughter did not exist in those days. ATrinity man named Skinner, who matriculated in 1790, flung himself at the subject in satirical verse:—
“Enter we next the Public SchoolsWhere now a death-like stillness rules;Yet these still walls in days of yoreBack to the streets returned the roar of hundreds....But since their champion AristotleHas been deserted for the bottleThe benches stand like Prebends’ stallsLone and deserted ’gainst the walls.”[1]
No sooner have we finished with our public school days, when we are known as boys, and have either scrambled over the “Smalls” hedge with some humility and relief, or else have secured the privilege of lording it in a scholar’s gown, than we instantly become men. We may be anything between eighteen and twenty, but if a sister, brother, or cousin be unwary enough to refer to us as a boy—woe unto him or her! We may pretend that we do not mind, but in our heart of hearts we rejoice in being Oxford “men,” and guard our title jealously. We are not, however, unique in this. It is a habit which has come down to us from the eighteenth century when they were just as jealous of such points of etiquette.
George Colman the younger tells us that he came upon two freshmen of that time who had had a quarrel. Six months before they blacked each other’s eyes at Westminster in the good old British way. Now, however, being Oxford men, they could not descend to such a childish level, but agreed to afford each other “gentlemanly satisfaction.” They may have lacked a certain sense of humour, but it was the right spirit, and it is safe to conclude that they both did well at their respective colleges.
The lonely freshman of to-day who has no friends already in residence wanders round just as nervously and makes the samefaux pasas did his predecessors. It takes him just as long to find his feet and settle down and make friends. Exactly in the same way also if he knows men already up he is welcomed by them, invited to heavy breakfasts and put right on matters of etiquette: such as never by any chance to wear square and gown unless absolutely compelled to—and all the other minutiæ which are of such importance. In the eighteenth century a freshman was taken by his senior friends to the Mitre and sat in front of a bowl of punch with brown toast bobbing in it. He heard sonnets recited to the eyelashes of Sylvia. He was taught to drink on his knees to Phyllis or Chloe, or some other fair female of the moment. He was taken to the barber’s and shown how to wear a wig instead of his own hair. In fact, his feet were set in the proper path then in just the same friendly spirit as now.
They had their clubs and societies at which, in the intervals of drinking, they indicted Latin poems or discussed some important political question where we, over mulled claret and other comestibles, read papers on “The Abolition of the Halfpenny Press,” or “The Glories of Tariff Reform.” They had big dinners, and tried to find their way home in the small hours. We have our fresher’s wines and bump suppers in which the whole college participates with the sole object of enjoying good wine and destroying good furniture, and we crawl home, if we are outside college, through the same streets. To-day we have the “pi” man who sternly refuses to countenance such evil things as fresher’s wines; who has signed the pledge and eschews tobacco. If he is compelled by an outraged band of senior men to lend his presence against his better judgment, and is led out from a room in a state of Doré-like chaos, he becomes uproarious on a glass of water and twobananas, and writes home to his mother that his bill for repairs is enormous owing to his bravery in being a martyr to his principles, and that drunkenness is on the increase among the Undergraduates. All the same he thoroughly enjoys himself, and in time wears off rough corners and learns how to keep his vows without any objectionable fanfare. At the end of the eighteenth century a man of this kidney named Crosse wrote to his mother: “Oxford is a perfect hell upon earth. What chance is there for an unfortunate lad just come from school with no one to watch and care for him—no guide? I often saw my tutor carried off perfectly intoxicated.” I can see the man crouching in a dark corner of the quad appalled at the sight of his fellows dancing round a bonfire, while his tutor rushes by on the arms of a festive crowd in full rejoicing at some college triumph. It would be interesting to ascertain Crosse’s views at the end of his university career. He remained, however, in the obscurity of mediocrity.
Our trousseau when we first appear at the university consists of modest socks and humble waistcoats, and ties which make no claim to originality or even to smartness. They are content to be merely useful and to fulfil their appointed functions. But does not every parent learn subsequently, with dreadful results to his peace of mind, how after our first month we make our way unerringly to the tailors and clothiers, and there with deadly earnestness absorb colour schemes which cry a loud challenge to Joseph’s coat? Our waistcoats are dreams,—sometimes nightmares; the blending of harmony between shirt, tie, and socks is as perfect as the rainbow. Our hair, which used to be parted carelessly down one side, now disdains partings and goes straight back in one beautiful Magdalen sweep. Our trousers are thrown at the scout’s head as a gift unless they be of unparalleled width and of exceptional crease.
This tendency to burst forth into strange and variegated garments in token of our emancipation from apron strings was just as strong in the old days. The sons of country farmers came trooping into Oxford, their clouted shoes thick with good red earth, in linsey wolsey coats, with greasy, uncombed heads of hair flapping in the wind. Their stockings were of coarse yarn, and they knew nothing better than to have long muslin neckcloths run with red at the ends. But they soon realised the contempt in which they were held for this dull chrysalis-like appearance. After a few weeks these shamefaced clodhoppers sneaked into the side door of the barbers’ shops to emerge proudly by the front entrance in a bob wig. Their clouted shoes were relegated to young brothers, and they wore new ones—Oxford cut. Their yarn stockings gave place to worsted, until, after a very short interval between their arrival and their settling down, they blushed out like butterflies in tye wigs and ruffles and silk gowns. The “blood” of that period, or, as the term then was, the “smart,” or the “buck of the first head,” was distinguished when he aired his person, Amhurst told us, “by a stiff silk gown which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flaxen tye wig, or sometimes a long natural one which reaches down below his rump; a broad bully cock’d hat, or a square cap of above twice the usual size; white stockings, thin Spanish leather shoes; his cloaths lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as at the wrists. Besides all which marks, he has a delicate jaunt in his gait, and smells philosophically of essence.”
How his direct descendant, the Bullingdon man, must envy him his magnificent opportunities of making a brave show! Not for him the silk gown, the bully cocked hat. The best he can do in imitation is the amazing dinner jacket which he sometimes sports at the theatre, under which one finds not the accepted form of dress shirt but a peculiarform of abortion which is neatly ruffled at “bosom and wrists.” In place of the Spanish leather shoes the last word to-day is apparently buckskin. The “delicate jaunt in the gait” has been retained—the result being caused now by a union of “Eton slouch” and “Oxford manner.” The head still smells of essence—honey and flowers at Hatt’s, brilliantine at Martyr’s. These great-minded people think alike not only in point of dress but of the manner of killing time. “The Lownger” summed up the process as carried out in the eighteenth century—
“I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,Blow a tune on my flute, or perhaps make a pen,Read a play till eleven or cock my lac’d hat,Then step to my neighbour’s, till dinner to chat.Dinner over to Tom’s or to James’s I go,The news of the town so impatient to know,While Low, Locke and Newton and all the rum raceThat talk of their Modes, their ellipses and space,The Seat of the Soul and new Systems on high,In Halls as abstruse as their mysteries lie.From the coffee-house then I to Tennis away,And at five I post back to my College to pray,I sup before eight and secure from all duns,Undauntedly march to the Mitre or Tuns,Where in Punch or good Claret my sorrows I drown,And toss off a bowl to the best in the town.At one in the morning I call what’s to pay?Then home to my College I stagger away.Thus I tope all the night as I trifle all day.”
Every one knows the various processes of slacking at the present time, so that there is no need for detail. But in essence the method is the same, and the result also. Our lunches at the Cherwell Hotel, at the riverside inns at Iffley and Abingdon; our “Grinds”; our slacking on the river in summer term—all these were done two centuries ago,and, just as some of the more energetic of us seek to immortalise these doings by contributing poems and articles to the ’varsity papers, so did the Undergraduates then send their sonnets and Latin verses toThe Student, theOxford Magazine, and Jackson’sOxford Journal. In place of the musical comedy lady, whose silvery laughter floats down wind to-day, the Oxford toast flaunted it right merrily in the old days. The gownsmen’s tobacco accounts then amounted to quite as much as ours do, and they wrote home for further supplies of pocket money in almost the identical terms which we use to-day. Yesterday’s and to-day’s Oxford men are one and the same. Oxford herself and her Dons are changed, but the Undergraduate goes on doing and thinking the same things in the same way, and when he goes down now he feels very much as felt the eighteenth-century poet who, also down, sang:—
“Could Ovid, deathless bard, forbear,Confin’d by Scythia’s frozen plains,Cease to desire his native airIn softest elegiac strains?Cursed with the town no more can IFor Oxford’s meadow cease to sigh....Can I, while mem’ry lasts, forgetOxford, thy silver rolling stream,Thy silent walks and cool retreatWhere first I sucked the love of fame?E’en now the thought inspires my breastAnd lulls my troubled soul to rest.”
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View of St.Mary’s Church & Radcliffe Library.
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRESHER
First arrival—Footpads and “easy pads”—Farewell to parents—A forlorn animal—Terrae Filius’s advice—Much prayers—“Hell has no fury like a woman scorned”—The disadvantages of a conscience.
First arrival—Footpads and “easy pads”—Farewell to parents—A forlorn animal—Terrae Filius’s advice—Much prayers—“Hell has no fury like a woman scorned”—The disadvantages of a conscience.
The beginning of our university career is marked, unless we be Stoics, by mixed feelings of elation and a sinking at the pit of the stomach which we afterwards learn to recognise as “needle.” The train journey may have seemed long, but at this first breathless moment when the porter receives our goods and chattels into his arms from the top of the moribund hansom, we could almost wish that we were back in the train again. A sense of isolation, and of having to stand or fall by ourselves, sweeps over like a tidal wave, leaving us momentarily chilled and nervous.
How different was the fresher’s arrival in the eighteenth century. He boarded a coach in the early morning in London. His baggage was placed in the boot, and the traveller, armed to the teeth with blunderbuss and pistols, took his seat. With a clattering of hoofs, yelling of ostlers and merry tooting on the horn, the coach dashed out of the yard and wound merrily along throughout the day by field, village, and town. If the journey were a lucky one, the travellers arrived at Oxford without let or hindrance about six o’clock in the evening, when they were able to catch a first glimpse of the top of Radcliffe’s Library. They then jolted in over Magdalen Bridge—in those days the new bridge—and so made their way to their respective colleges.
Wrapped up in thick coats and with ice-cold feet tapping the side of the coach to restore circulation, the excited fresher had ample time for cogitation. The lets and hindrances, over and above the ordinary accidents to horse or vehicle, such as casting a shoe or breaking a strap, were little excitements in the form of footpads and highwayman, who infested the district on the look-out for a fat and likely college bursar laden with fat and likely money-bags. At the first hint of the approach of one of these gentlemen of the road, blunderbusses were whipped out and fired in all directions, while the horses were lashed and the coach leaned and rocked and swayed in its efforts to get away. Afterwards, ensconced behind a tankard in the Tuns among his somewhat condescending senior friends, the newcomer warmed up under the influence of hot toddy and genial society, and described the awful onslaught made upon them by at least fifty mounted desperadoes.
Did he come from nearer places than London, then he made his entrance on a sedate horse, in the fashion of the gentleman-commoner who sent the following account to Terrae Filius:—
“Being of age to play the foolWith muckle glee I left our schoolAt Hoxton,And mounted on an easy padRode with my mother and my dadTo Oxon.”
This merry bard was not exempt from the pangs of loneliness. He, too, felt the wave of depression when his mother and dad kissed him and slowly disappeared down the street again on their easy pads. For, after an amusing description of purchasing gown and square, he burst into tears.
“I sallied forth to deck my backWith loads of Tuft and blackPrunello.My back equipt, it was not fairMy head should ’scape, and so as squareAs chessboardA cap I bought, my scull to screen,Of cloth without and all withinOf pasteboardWhen metamorphos’d in attireMore like a parson than a squireth’ had dressed meI took my leave with many a tearOf John our man, and parents dearWho blessed me....”[2]
and there he was, poor lad, probably no more than fifteen years old—of age to play the fool—left, lachrymose and solitary, to fight his own battles and win his M.A. spurs before coming to grips with the world.
George Colman the younger, who matriculated at the House in 1780, and who would most certainly have been instantly elected to the Bullingdon Club had he gone up to-day, wrote most feelingly on the question of the lonely fresher. “A Freshman, as a young academician is call’d on his admission at Oxford,” he said “is a forlorn animal. It is awkward for an old stager in life to be thrown into a large company of strangers, to make his way among them, as he can—but to the poor freshman everything is strange—not only College society, but any society at all—and he is solitary in the midst of a crowd. If, indeed, he should happen to come to the University (particularly to Christ Church) from one of the great publick schools, he finds some of his late school fellows, who, being in the same straggling situation withhimself, abridge the period of his fireside loneliness, and of their own, by forming a familiar intercourse—otherwise he may mope for many a week; at all events, it is generally some time before he establishes himself in a set of acquaintance.”[3]
To-day when we have conquered Smalls and our rooms have been assigned in college or in the house of some licensed landlady, it is customary for our “parents dear” to lead us gently by the buttonhole into the study, and there, with their coat tails spread wide to the blazing logs, to hold forth in rounded periods what is termed sound advice. When it is over they shake hands with us, both of us swallowing absurdly, and we go forth better friends than ever. In the first number of any one of the ’varsity “rags” for the new academic year it is safe to conclude that the “leader” will be a word of explanation, advice, friendship, or welcome to the newcomer. It is always facetious and invariably has a gentle dig at the fresher’s expense, though the writer, once a fresher himself, should know better. The following is a specimen of how these things were done in the old days:—