Oxford..................................................................................................................................................................1

These papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history of Oxford. They are merely records of the

impressions made by this or that aspect of the life of the University as it has been in different ages. Oxford is

not an easy place to design in black and white, with the pen or the etcher's needle. On a wild winter or late

autumn day (such as Father Faber has made permanent in a beautiful poem) the sunshine fleets along the

plain, revealing towers, and floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery light, and leaving them once more in

shadow. The melancholy mist creeps over the city, the damp soaks into the heart of everything, and such

suicidal weather ensues as has been described, once for all, by the author of JohnaDreams. How different

Oxford looks when the road to Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat seems almost tropical, and by

the drowsy banks of the Cherwell you might almost expect some shy southern waterbeast to come crashing

through the reeds! And such a day, again, is unlike the bright weather of late September, when all the gold

and scarlet of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves that cover the walls of Magdalen with an imperial

Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of Indolence, vary no less than do the shifting

aspects of her scenery. Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with days of gloom

and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as

the landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the colourless drizzling weather. Oxford, that

once seemed a pleasant porch and entrance into life, may become a dingy anteroom, where we kick our

heels with other weary, waiting people. At last, if men linger there too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is

the final condition of the loiterer to take "this for a hermitage." It is well to leave the enchantress betimes, and

to carry away few but kind recollections. If there be any who think and speak ungently of their Alma Mater, it

is because they have outstayed their natural "welcome while," or because they have resisted her genial

Most old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been scrawled over again and again by their

successive owners. Oxford, though not one of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more legibly than the

rest, the handwriting, as it were, of many generations. The convenient site among the interlacing waters of the

Isis and the Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after another. Each generation has used it for

its own purpose: for war, for trade, for learning, for religion; and war, trade, religion, and learning have left

on Oxford their peculiar marks. No set of its occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very eager to

deface or destroy the buildings of its predecessors. Old things were turned to new uses, or altered to suit new

tastes; they were not overthrown and carted away. Thus, in walking through Oxford, you see everywhere, in

colleges, chapels, and churches, doors and windows which have been builded up; or again, openings which

have been cut where none originally existed. The upper part of the round Norman arches in the Cathedral has

been preserved, and converted into the circular bull'seye lights which the last century liked. It is the same

everywhere, except where modern restorers have had their way. Thus the life of England, for some eight

centuries, may be traced in the buildings of Oxford. Nay, if we are convinced by some antiquaries, the eastern

end of the High Street contains even earlier scratches on this palimpsest of Oxford; the rude marks of savages

who scooped out their damp nests, and raised their low walls in the gravel, on the spot where the new schools

are to stand. Here half naked men may have trapped the beaver in the Cherwell, and hither they may have

brought home the boars which they slew in the trackless woods of Headington and Bagley. It is with the life

of historical Oxford, however, and not with these fancies, that we are concerned, though these papers have no

pretension to be a history of Oxford. A series of pictures of men's life here is all they try to sketch.

It is hard, though not impossible, to form a picture in the mind of Oxford as she was when she is first spoken

of by history. What she may have been when legend only knows her; when St. Frideswyde built a home for

religious maidens; when she fled from King Algar and hid among the swine, and after a whole fairy tale of

adventures died in great sanctity, we cannot even guess. This legend of St. Frideswyde, and of her

foundation, the germ of the Cathedral and of Christ Church, is not, indeed, without its value and significance

for those who care for Oxford. This home of religion and of learning was a home of religion from the

beginning, and her later life is but a return, after centuries of war and trade, to her earliest purpose. What

manner of village of wooden houses may have surrounded the earliest rude chapels and places of prayer, we

cannot readily guess, but imagination may look back on Oxford as she was when the English Chronicle first

mentions her. Even then it is not unnatural to think Oxford might well have been a city of peace. She lies in

the very centre of England, and the Northmen, as they marched inland, burning church and cloister, must

have wandered long before they came to Oxford. On the other hand, the military importance of the site must

have made it a town that would be eagerly contended for. Any places of strength in Oxford would command

the roads leading to the north and west, and the secure, raised paths that ran through the flooded fens to the

ford or bridge, if bridge there then was, between Godstowe and the later Norman grand pont, where Folly

Bridge now spans the Isis. Somewhere near Oxford, the roads that ran towards Banbury and the north, or

towards Bristol and the west, would be obliged to cross the river. The waterway, too, and the paths by the

Thames' side, were commanded by Oxford. The Danes, as they followed up the course of the Thames from

London, would be drawn thither, sooner or later, and would covet a place which is surrounded by half a

dozen deep natural moats. Lastly, Oxford lay in the centre of England indeed, but on the very marches of

Mercia and Wessex. A border town of natural strength and of commanding situation, she can have been no

mean or poor collection of villages in the days when she is first spoken of, when Eadward the Elder

"incorporated with his own kingdom the whole Mercian lands on both sides of Watling Street" (Freeman's

Norman Conquest, vol. i. p. 57), and took possession of London and of Oxford as the two most important

parts of a scientific frontier. If any man had stood, in the days of Eadward, on the hill that was not yet

"Shotover," and had looked along the plain to the place where the grey spires of Oxford are clustered now, as

it were in a purple cup of the low hills, he would have seen little but "the smoke floating up through the

The low hills were not yet cleared, nor the fens and the wolds trimmed and enclosed. Centuries later, when

the early students came, they had to ride "through the thick forest and across the moor, to the East Gate of the

city" (Munimenta Academica, Oxon., vol. i. p. 60). In the midst of a country still wild, Oxford was already no

mean city; but the place where the hostile races of the land met to settle their differences, to feast together and

forget their wrongs over the mead and ale, or to devise treacherous murder, and close the banquet with fire

Again and again, after Eadward the Elder took Mercia, the Danes went about burning and wasting England.

The wooden towns were flaming through the night, and sending up a thick smoke through the day, from

Thamesmouth to Cambridge. "And next was there no headman that force would gather, and each fled as swift

as he might, and soon was there no shire that would help another." When the first fury of the plundering

invaders was over, when the Northmen had begun to wish to settle and till the land and have some measure of

peace, the early meetings between them and the English rulers were held in the border town, in Oxford.

Thus Sigeferth and Morkere, sons of Earngrim, came to see Eadric in Oxford, and there were slain at a

banquet, while their followers perished in the attempt to avenge them. "Into the tower of St. Frideswyde they

were driven, and as men could not drive them thence, the tower was fired, and they perished in the burning."

So says William of Malmesbury, who, so many years later, read the story, as he says, in the records of the

Church of St. Frideswyde. There is another version of the story in the Codex Diplomaticus (DCCIX.).

Aethelred is made to say, in a deed of grant of lands to St. Frideswyde's Church ("mine own minster"), that

the Danes were slain in the massacre of St. Brice. On that day Aethelred, "by the advice of his satraps,

determined to destroy the tares among the wheat, the Danes in England." Certain of these fled into the

minster, as into a fortress, and therefore it was burned and the books and monuments destroyed. For this

cause Aethelred gives lands to the minster, "fro Charwell brigge andlong the streame, fro Merewell to

Rugslawe, fro the lawe to the foule putte," and so forth. It is pleasant to see how old are the familiar names

"Cherwell," "Hedington," "Couelee" or Cowley, where the college cricketgrounds are. Three years passed,

and the headmen of the English and of the Danes met at Oxford again, and more peacefully, and agreed to

live together, obedient to the laws of Eadgar; to the law, that is, as it was administered in older days, that

seem happier and better ruled to men looking back on them from an age of confusion and bloodshed. At

Oxford, too, met the peaceful gathering of 1035, when Danish and English claims were in some sort

reconciled, and at Oxford Harold Harefoot, the son of Cnut, died in March 1040. The place indeed was fatal

to kings, for St. Frideswyde, in her anger against King Algar, left her curse on it. Just as the old Irish kings

were forbidden by their customs to do this or that, to cross a certain moor on May morning, or to listen to the

winnowing of the nightfowl's wings in the dusk above the lake of Tara; so the kings of England shunned to

enter Oxford, and to come within the walls of Frideswyde the maiden. Harold died there, as we have seen, but

there he was not buried. His body was laid at Westminster, where it could not rest, for his enemies dug it up,

and cast it forth upon the fens, or threw it into the river. Many years later, when Henry III. entered Oxford,

not without fear, the curse of Frideswyde lighted also upon him. He came in 1263, with Edward the prince,

and misfortune fell upon him, so that his barons defeated and took him prisoner at the battle of Lewes. The

chronicler of Oseney Abbey mentions his contempt of superstitions, and how he alone of English kings

entered the city: "Quod nullus rex attemptavit a tempore Regis Algari," an error, for Harold attemptavit, and

died. When Edward I. was king, he was less audacious than his father, and in 1275 he rode up to the East

Gate and turned his horse's head about, and sought a lodging outside the town, reflexis habenis equitans extra

moenia aulam regiain in suburbio positam introivit. In 1280, however, he seems to have plucked up courage

The last of the meetings between North and South was held at Oxford in October 1065. "In urle quae famoso

nomine Oxnaford nuncupatur," to quote a document of Cnut's. (Cod. Dipl. DCCXLVI. in 1042.) There the

Northumbrian rebels met Harold in the last days of Edward the Confessor. With this meeting we leave that

Oxford before the Conquest, of which possibly not one stone, or one rafter, remains. We look back through

eight hundred years on a city, rich enough, it seems, and powerful, and we see the narrow streets full of

armed bands of menmen that wear the cognisance of the horse or of the raven, that carry short swords, and

are quick to draw them; men that dress in short kirtles of a bright colour, scarlet or blue; that wear axes slung

on their backs, and adorn their bare necks and arms with collars and bracelets of gold. We see them meeting

to discuss laws and frontiers, and feasting late when business is done, and chaffering for knives with ivory

handles, for arrows, and saddles, and wadmal, in the booths of the citizens. Through the mist of time this

picture of ancient Oxford may be distinguished. We are tempted to think of a low, grey twilight above that

wet land suddenly lit up with fire; of the tall towers of St. Frideswyde's Minster flaring like a torch athwart

the night; of poplars waving in the same wind that drives the vapour and smoke of the holy place down on the

Danes who have taken refuge there, and there stand at bay against the English and the people of the town.

The material Oxford of our times is not more unlike the Oxford of low wooden booths and houses, and of

wooden spires and towers, than the life led in its streets was unlike the academic life of today. The Conquest

brought no more quiet times, but the whole city was wrecked, stormed, and devastated, before the second

period of its history began, before it was the seat of a Norman stronghold, and one of the links of the chain by

which England was bound. "Four hundred and seventyeight houses were so ruined as to be unable to pay

taxes," while, "within the town or without the wall, there were but two hundred and fortythree houses which

With the buildings of Robert D'Oily, a follower of the Conqueror's, and the husband of an English wife, the

heiress of Wigod of Wallingford, the new Oxford begins. Robert's work may be divided roughly into two

classes. First, there are the strong places he erected to secure his possessions, and, second, the sacred places

he erected to secure the pardon of Heaven for his robberies. Of the castle, and its "shining coronal of towers,"

only one tower remains. From the vast strength of this picturesque edifice, with the natural moat flowing at

its feet, we may guess what the castle must have been in the early days of the Conquest, and during the wars

of Stephen and Matilda. We may guess, too, that the burghers of Oxford, and the rustics of the

neighbourhood, had no easy life in those days, when, as we have seen, the town was ruined, and when, as the

extraordinary thickness of the walls of its remaining tower demonstrates, the castle was built by new lords

who did not spare the forced labour of the vanquished. The strength of the position of the castle is best

estimated after viewing the surrounding country from the top of the tower. Through the more modern

embrasures, or over the low wall round the summit, you look up and down the valley of the Thames, and gaze

deep into the folds of the hills. The prospect is pleasant enough, on an autumn morning, with the domes and

spires of modern Oxford breaking, like islands, through the sea of mist that sweeps above the roofs of the

good town. In the old times, no movement of the people who had their fastnesses in the fens, no approach of

an army from any direction could have evaded the watchman. The towers guarded the fords and the bridge

and were themselves almost impregnable, except when a hard winter made the Thames, the Cherwell, and the

many deep and treacherous streams passable, as happened when Matilda was beleaguered in Oxford. This

natural strength of the site is demonstrated by the vast mound within the castle walls, which tradition calls the

Jews' Mound, but which is probably earlier than the Norman buildings. Some other race had chosen the castle

site for its fortress in times of which we know nothing. Meanwhile, some of the practical citizens of Oxford

wish to level the Jews' Mound, and to "utilise" the gravel of which it is largely composed. There is nothing to

be said against this economic project which could interest or affect the persons who entertain it. M.

BrunetDebaines' illustration shows the mill on a site which must be as old as the tower. Did the citizens

Though Robert was bent on works of war, he had a nature inclined to piety, and, his piety beginning at home,

he founded the church of St. George within the castle. The crypt of the church still remains, and is not

without interest for persons who like to trace the changing fortunes of old buildings. The site of Robert's

Castle is at present occupied by the County Gaol. When you have inspected the tower (which does not do

service as a dungeon) you are taken, by the courtesy of the Governor, to the crypt, and satisfy your

archaeological curiosity. The place is much lower, and worse lighted, than the contemporary crypt of St.

Peter'sintheEast, but not, perhaps, less interesting. The squareheaded capitals have not been touched,

like some of those in St. Peter's, by a later chisel. The place is dank and earthy, but otherwise much as Robert

D'Oily left it. There is an oddlooking arrangement of planks on the floor. It is THE NEW DROP, which is

found to work very well, and gives satisfaction to the persons who have to employ it. Sinister the Norman

castle was in its beginning, "it was from the castle that men did wrong to the poor around them; it was from

the castle that they bade defiance to the king, who, stranger and tyrant as he might be, was still a protector

against smaller tyrants." Sinister the castle remains; you enter it through ironed and bolted doors, you note the

prisoners at their dreary exercises, and, when you have seen the engines of the law lying in the old crypt you

pass out into the place of execution. Here, in a corner made by Robert's tower and by the wall of the prison, is

a dank little quadrangle. The ground is of the yellow clay and gravel which floors most Oxford quadrangles.

A few letters are scratched on the soft stone of the wallthe letters "H. R." are the freshest. These are the

initials of the last man who suffered death in this cornera young rustic who had murdered his sweetheart.

"H. R." on the prison wall is all his record, and his body lies under your feet, and the feet of the men who are

to die here in after days pass over his tomb. It is thus that malefactors are buried, "within the walls of the

One is glad enough to leave the remains of Robert's place of armsas glad as Matilda may have been when

"they let her down at night from the tower with ropes, and she stole out, and went on foot to Wallingford."

Robert seems at first to have made the natural use of his strength. "Rich he was, and spared not rich or poor,

to take their livelihood away, and to lay up treasures for himself." He stole the lands of the monks of

Abingdon, but of what service were moats, and walls, and dungeons, and instruments of torture, against the

The Chronicle of Abingdon has a very diverting account of Robert's punishment and conversion. "He filched

a certain field without the walls of Oxford that of right belonged to the monastery, and gave it over to the

soldiers in the castle. For which loss the brethren were greatly grievedthe brethren of Abingdon. Therefore,

they gathered in a body before the altar of St. Michaelthe very altar that St. Dunstan the archbishop

dedicatedand cast themselves weeping on the ground, accusing Robert D'Oily, and praying that his

robbery of the monastery might be avenged, or that he might be led to make atonement." So, in a dream,

Robert saw himself taken before Our Lady by two brethren of Abingdon, and thence carried into the very

meadow he had coveted, where "most nasty little boys," turpissimi pueri, worked their will on him. Thereon

Robert was terrified and cried out, and wakened his wife, who took advantage of his fears, and compelled

After this vision, Robert gave himself up to pampering the monastery and performing other good works. He it

was who built a bridge over the Isis, and he restored the many ruined parish churches in Oxford churches

which, perhaps, he and his men had helped to ruin. The tower of St. Michael's, in "the Corn," is said to be of

his building; perhaps he only "restored" it, for it is in the true primitive style gaunt, unadorned, with

roundheaded windows, good for shooting from with the bow. St. Michael's was not only a church, but a

watchtower of the city wall; and here the old northgate, called Bocardo, spanned the street. The rooms above

the gate were used till within quite recent times, and the poor inmates used to let down a greasy old hat from

as a famous Paris student, Francois Villon, would have called them. Of Bocardo no trace remains, but St.

Michael's is likely to last as long as any edifice in Oxford. Our illustrations represent it as it was in the last

century. The houses huddle up to the church, and hide the lines of the tower. Now it stands out clear, less

picturesque than it was in the time of Bocardo prison. Within the last two years the windows have been

cleared, and the curious and most archaic pillars, shaped like balustrades, may be examined. It is worth while

to climb the tower and remember the times when arrows were sent like hail from the narrow windows on the

foes who approached Oxford from the north, while prayers for their confusion were read in the church below.

That old Oxford of war was also a trading town. Nothing more than the fact that it was a favourite seat of the

Jews is needed to prove its commercial prosperity. The Jews, however, demand a longer notice in connection

with the still unborn University. Meanwhile, it may be remarked that Oxford trade made good use of the

river. The Abingdon Chronicle (ii. 129) tells us that "from each barque of Oxford city, which makes the

passage by the river Thames past Abingdon, a hundred herrings must yearly be paid to the cellarer. The

citizens had much litigation about land and houses with the abbey, and one Roger Maledoctus (perhaps a very

early sample of the passman) gave Abingdon tenements within the city." Thus we leave the preAcademic

Oxford a flourishing town, with merchants and moneylenders. As for the religious, the brethren of St.

Frideswyde had lived but loosely (pro libito viverunt), says William of Malmesbury, and were to be

superseded by regular canons, under the headship of one Guimond, and the patronage of the Bishop of

Salisbury. Whoever goes into Christ Church new buildings from the riverside, will see, in the old edifice

facing him, a certain bulging in the wall. That is the mark of the pulpit, whence a brother used to read aloud

to the brethren in the refectory of St. Frideswyde. The new leaven of learning was soon to ferment in an easy

Oxford, where men lived pro libito, under good lords, the D'Oilys, who loved the English, and built, not

churches and bridges only, but the great and famous Oseney Abbey, beyond the church of St. Thomas, and

not very far from the modern station of the Great Western Railway. Yet even after public teaching in Oxford

certainly began, after Master Robert Puleyn lectured in divinity there (1133; cf. Oseney Chronicle), the tower

Oxford, some one says, "is bitterly historical." It is difficult to escape the fanaticism of Antony Wood, and of

"our antiquary," Bryan Twyne, when one deals with the obscure past of the University. Indeed, it is

impossible to understand the strange blending of new and old at Oxfordthe old names with the new

meaningsif we avert our eyes from what is "bitterly historical." For example, there is in most, perhaps in

all, colleges a custom called "collections." On the last days of term undergraduates are called into the Hall,

where the Master and the Dean of the Chapel sit in solemn state. Examination papers are set, but no one

heeds them very much. The real ordeal is the awful interview with the Master and the Dean. The former

regards you with the eyes of a judge, while the Dean says, "Master, I am pleased to say that Mr. Brown's

PAPERS are very fair, very fair. But in the matters of CHAPELS and of CATECHETICS, Mr. Brown

setsfor a SCHOLARa very bad example to the other undergraduates. He has only once attended divine

service on Sunday morning, and on that occasion, Master, his dress consisted exclusively of a long greatcoat

and a pair of boots." After this accusation the Master will turn to the culprit and observe, with emphasis ill

represented by italics, "Mr. Brown, the COLLEGE cannot hear with pleasure of such behaviour on the part of

a SCHOLAR. You are GATED, Mr. Brown, for the first fortnight of next term." Now why should this

tribunal of the Master and the Dean, and this dread examination, be called collections? Because (Munimenta

Academica, Oxon., i. 129) in 1331 a statute was passed to the effect that "every scholar shall pay at least

twelve pence ayear for lectures in logic, and for physics eighteenpence ayear," and that "all Masters of

Arts except persons of royal or noble family, shall be obliged to COLLECT their salary from the scholars."

This collection would be made at the end of term; and the name survives, attached to the solemn day of doom

we have described, though the college dues are now collected by the bursar at the beginning of each term.

By this trivial example the perversions of old customs at Oxford are illustrated. To appreciate the life of the

place, then, we must glance for a moment at the growth of the University. As to its origin, we know

absolutely nothing. That Master Puleyn began to lecture there in 1133 we have seen, and it is not likely that

he would have chosen Oxford if Oxford had possessed no schools. About these schools, however, we have no

information. They may have grown up out of the seminary which, perhaps, was connected with St.

Frideswyde's, just as Paris University may have had some connection with "the School of the Palace."

Certainly to Paris University the academic corporation of Oxford, the Universitas, owed many of her

regulations; while, again, the founder of the college system, Walter de Merton (who visited Paris in company

with Henry III.), may have compared ideas with Robert de Sorbonne, the founder of the college of that name.

In the early Oxford, however, of the twelfth and most of the thirteenth centuries, colleges with their statutes

were unknown. The University was the only corporation of the learned, and she struggled into existence after

hard fights with the town, the Jews, the Friars, the Papal courts. The history of the University begins with the

thirteenth century. She may be said to have come into being as soon as she possessed common funds and

rents, as soon as fines were assigned, or benefactions contributed to the maintenance of scholars. Now the

first recorded fine is the payment of fiftytwo shillings by the townsmen of Oxford as part of the

compensation for the hanging of certain clerks. In the year 1214 the Papal Legate, in a letter to his "beloved

sons in Christ, the burgesses of Oxford," bade them excuse the "scholars studying in Oxford" half the rent of

their halls, or hospitia, for the space of ten years. The burghers were also to do penance, and to feast the

poorer students once a year; but the important point is, that they had to pay that large yearly fine "propter

suspendium clericorum"all for the hanging of the clerks. Twentysix years after this decision of the

Legate, Robert Grossteste, the great Bishop of Lincoln, organised the payment and distribution of the fine,

and founded the first of the CHESTS, the chest of St. Frideswyde. These chests were a kind of Mont de Piete,

and to found them was at first the favourite form of benefaction. Money was left in this or that chest, from

which students and masters would borrow, on the security of pledges, which were generally books, cups,

Now, in this affair of 1214 we have a strange passage of history, which happily illustrates the growth of the

University. The beginning of the whole affair was the quarrel with the town, which, in 1209, had hanged two

clerks, "in contempt of clerical liberty." The matter was taken up by the Legatein those bad years of King

John the Pope's viceroy in Englandand out of the humiliation of the town the University gained money,

privileges, and halls at low rental. These were precisely the things that the University wanted. About these

matters there was a constant strife, in which the Kings, as a rule, took part with the University. The

University possessed the legal knowledge, which the monarchs liked to have on their side, and was therefore

favoured by them. Thus, in 1231 (Wood, Annals, i. 205), "the King sent out his Breve to the Mayor and

Burghers commanding them not to overrate their houses"; and thus gradually the University got the command

of the police, obtained privileges which enslaved the city, and became masters where they had once been

despised, starveling scholars. The process was always the same. On the feast of St. Scholastica, for example,

in 1354, Walter de Springheuse, Roger de Chesterfield, and other clerks, swaggered into the Swyndlestock

tavern in Carfax, began to speak ill of John de Croydon's wine, and ended by pitching the tankard at the head

of that vintner. In ten minutes the town bell at St. Martin's was rung, and the most terrible of all

TownandGown rows began. The Chancellor could do no less than bid St. Mary's bell reply to St. Martin's,

and shooting commenced. The Gown held their own very well at first, and "defended themselves till

Vespertide," when the citizens called in their neighbours, the rustics of Cowley, Headington, and Hincksey.

Which is as much as to say, "The townsfolk call for help to their neighbours, the yokels, that were more

numerous than they, and better men in battle . . . so when the sun turned to the time of the loosing of oxen the

Town drave in the ranks of the Gown, and won the victory." They were strong, the townsmen, but not

merciful. "The crowns of some chaplains, viz. all the skin so far as the tonsure went, these diabolical imps

flayed off in scorn of their clergy," and "some poor innocents these confounded sons of Satan knocked down,

beat, and most cruelly wounded." The result, in the long run, was that the University received from Edward

III. "a most large charter, containing many liberties, some that they had before, and OTHERS THAT HE

HAD TAKEN AWAY FROM THE TOWN." Thus Edward granted to the University "the custody of the

assize of bread, wine, and ale," the supervising of measures and weights, the sole power of clearing the streets

of the town and suburbs. Moreover, the Mayor and the chief Burghers were condemned yearly to a sort of

public penance and humiliation on St. Scholastica's Day. Thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the

Though the University owed its success to its clerkly character, and though the Legate backed it with all the

power of Rome, yet the scholars were Englishmen and Liberals first, Catholics next. Thus they had all

English sympathy with them when they quarrelled with the Legate in 1238, and shot his cook (who, indeed,

had thrown hot broth at them); and thus, in later days, the undergraduates were with Simon de Montfort

against King Henry, and aided the barons with a useful body of archers. The University, too, constantly

withstood the Friars, who had settled in Oxford on pretence of wishing to convert the Jews, and had

attempted to get education into their hands. "The Preaching Friars, who had lately obtained from the Pope

divers privileges, particularly an exemption, as they pretended, from being subject to the jurisdiction of the

University, began to behave themselves very insolent against the Chancellors and Masters." (Wood, Annals,

i. 399.) The conduct of the Friars caused endless appeals to Rome, and in this matter, too, Oxford was stoutly

national, and resisted the Pope, as it had, on occasions, defied the King. The King's Jews, too, the University

kept in pretty good order, and when, in 1268, a certain Hebrew snatched the crucifix from the hand of the

Chancellor and trod it under foot, his tribesmen were compelled to raise "a fair and stately cross of marble,

The growth in power and importance of academic corporations having now been sketched, let us try to see

what the outer aspect of the town was like in these rude times, and what manner of life the undergraduates

led. For this purpose we may be allowed to draw a rude, but not unfaithful, picture of a day in a student's life.

No incident will be introduced for which there is not authority, in Wood, or in Mr. Anstey's invaluable

documents, the Munimenta Academica, published in the collection of the Master of the Rolls. Some latitude

as to dates must be allowed, it is true, and we are not of course to suppose that any one day of life was ever so

The time is the end of the fourteenth century. The forest and the moor stretch to the east gate of the city.

Magdalen bridge is not yet built, nor of course the tower of Magdalen, which M. Brunet Debaines has

sketched from Christ Church walks. Not till about 1473 was the tower built, and years would pass after that

before choristers saluted with their fresh voices from its battlements the dawn of the first of May, or sermons

were preached from the beautiful stone pulpit in the open air. When our undergraduate, Walter de Stoke, or,

more briefly, Stoke, was at Oxford, the spires of the city were few. Where Magdalen stands now, the old

Hospital of St. John then stooda foundation of Henry III.but the Jews were no longer allowed to bury

their dead in the close, which is now the "Physic Garden." "In 1289," as Wood says, "the Jews were banished

from England for various enormities and crimes committed by them." The Great and Little Jewriesthose

dim, populous streets behind the modern Post Officehad been sacked and gutted. No clerk would ever

again risk his soul for a fair Jewess's sake, nor lose his life for his love at the hands of that eminent

theologian, Fulke de Breaute. The beautiful tower of Merton was still almost fresh, and the spires of St.

Mary's, of old All Saints, of St. Frideswyde, and the strong tower of New College on the city wall, were the

most prominent features in a bird'seye view of the town. But though part of Merton, certainly the chapel

tower as we have seen, the odd muniment room with the steep stone roof, and, perhaps, the Library, existed;

though New was built; and though Balliol and University owned some halls, on, or near, the site of the

present colleges, Oxford was still an university of poor scholars, who lived in town'speople's dwellings.

Thus, in the great quarrel with the Legate in 1238, John Currey, of Scotland, boarded with Will Maynard,

while Hugh le Verner abode in the house of Osmund the Miller, with Raynold the Irishman and seven of his

fellows. John Mortimer and Rob Norensis lodged with Augustine Gosse, and Adam de Wolton lodged in Cat

Street, where you can still see the curious arched doorway of Catte's, or St. Catherine's Hall. By the time of

my hero, Walter Stoke, the King had not yet decreed that all scholars of years of discretion should live in the

house of some sufficient principal (1421); so let him lodge at Catte Hall, at the corner of the street that leads

to New College out of the modern Broad Street, which was then the City Ditch. It is six o'clock on a summer

morning, and the bells waken Stoke, who is sleeping on a flock bed, in his little camera. His room, though he

is not one of the luxurious clerks whom the University scolds in various statutes, is pretty well furnished. His

bed alone is worth not less than fifteenpence; he has a "cofer" valued at twopence (we have plenty of those

old valuations), and in his cofer are his black coat, which no one would think dear at fourpence, his tunic,

cheap at tenpence, "a roll of the seven Psalms," and twelve books only "at his beddes heed." Stoke has not

like Chaucer's Undergraduate, who must have been a bibliophile. There are not many records of "as many as

twenty bookes" in the old valuations. The great ornament of the room is a neat trophy of buckler, bow,

arrows, and two daggers, all hanging conveniently on the wall. Stoke opens his eyes, yawns, looks round for

his clothes, and sees, with no surprise, that his laundress has not sent home his clean linen. No; Christina, of

the parish of St. Martin, who used to be Stoke's lotrix, has been detected at last. "Under pretence of washing

for scholars, multa mala perpetrata fuerunt," she has committed all manner of crimes, and is now in the

Spinning House, carcerata fuit. Stoke wastes a malediction on the laundress, and, dressing as well as he may,

runs down to Parson's Pleasure, I hope, and has a swim, for I find no tub in his room, or, indeed, in the

camera of any other scholar. It is now time to go, not to chapel for Catte's has no chapelbut to parish

Church, and Stoke goes very devoutly to St. Peter's, where we shall find him again, later in the day, in

another mood. About eight o'clock he "commonises" with a Paris man, Henricus de Bourges, who has an

admirable mode of cooking omelettes, which makes his company much sought after at breakfast time. The

University, in old times, was full of French students, as Paris was thronged by Englishmen. Lectures begin at

nine, and first there is lecture in the hall by the principal of Catte's. That scholar receives his pupils in a bare

room, where it is very doubtful whether the students are allowed to sit down. From the curious old seal of the

University of St. Andrews, however, it appears that the luxury of forms was permitted, in Scotland, to all but

the servitors, who held the lecturer's candles. The principal of Catte's is in academic dress, and wears a black

cape, boots, and a hood. The undergraduates have no distinguishing costume. After an hour or two of viva

voce exercises in the grammar of Priscian, preparatory lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the

"schools," a set of lowroofed buildings between St. Mary's and Brasenose. There he will find the Divinity

"school" or lectureroom in the place of honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the

lecture rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy, for metaphysics,

ethics, and "the tongues," stretching down School Street on either side. Here the Praelectors are holding forth,

and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their subject regere scholas, whether they like it or

not. Our friend, Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine of twopence for

omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his nation (he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch,

Welsh, and Irish) in the parish Church. He stops in the Flower Market and at a barber's shop on his way to St.

Peter's, and comes forth a wonderful pagan figure with a Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance, with

horns protruding through a wig of tow, with vineleaves twisted in and out of the horns, and roses stuck

wherever there is room for roses. Henricus de Bourges, and half a dozen Picardy men, with some merry souls

from the Southern side of the Thames, are jigging down the High, playing bagpipes and guitars. To these

Stoke joins himself, and they waltz joyously into the church, and in and out of the gateways of the different

"Mihi est propositum in taberna mori, Vinum sit appositum morientis ori, Ut dicant, quum venerint,

The students of the Northern nations mock, of course, at these revellers, thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged,

and we shall see what comes of the quarrel. But the hall bells chime halfpast noon; it is dinnertime in

Oxford, and Stoke, as he throws off his mask (larva) and vineleaves, mutters to himself the equivalent for

"there WILL be a row about this." There will, indeed, for the penalty is not "crossing at the buttery," nor

"gating," butexcommunication! (Munim. Academ., i. 18.) Dinner is not a very quiet affair, for the Catte's

men have had to fight for their beer in the public streets with some Canterbury College fellows who were set

on by their Warden, of all people, to commit this violence (ut vi et violentia raperent cerevisiam aliorum

scholarum in vico): however, Catte's has had the best of it, and there is beer in plenty. It is possible, however,

that fish is scarce, for certain "forestallers" (regratarii) have been buying up salmon and soles, and refusing to

sell them at less than double the proper price. On the whole, however, there a rude abundance of meat and

bread; indeed, Stoke may have fared better in Catte's than the modern undergraduate does in the hall of the

college protected by St. Catherine. After dinner there would be lecture in Lent, but we are not in Lent. A

young man's fancy lightly turns to the Beaumont, north of the modern Beaumont Street, where there are wide

playingfields, and space for archery, football, stoolball, and other sports. Stoke rushes out of hall, and

runs upstairs into the camera of Roger de Freshfield, a reading man, but a good fellow. He knocks and enters,

and finds Freshfield over his favourite work, the Posterior Analytics, and a pottle of strawberries. "Come

down to the Beaumont, old man," he says, "and play pyked staffe." Roger is disinclined to move, he MUST

finish the Posterior Analytics. Stoke lounges about, in the eternal fashion of undergraduates after luncheon,

and picking up the Philobiblon of Richard de Bury (then quite a new book), clinches his argument in favour

of pyke and staffe with a quotation: "You will perhaps see a stiffnecked youth lounging sluggishly in his

study . . . He is not ashamed to eat fruit and cheese over an open book, and to transfer his cup from side to

side upon it." Thus addressed, Roger lays aside his Analytics, and the pair walk down by Balliol, to the

Beaumont, where pyked staffe, or sword and buckler, is played. At the Beaumont they find two men who say

that "sword and buckler can be played sofft and ffayre," that is, without hard hitting, and with one of these

Stoke begins to fence. Alas! a dispute arose about a stroke, the bystanders interfered, and Stoke's opponent

drew his hanger (extraxit cultellum vocatum hangere), and hit one John Felerd over the sconce. On this the

Proctors come up, and the assailant is put in Bocardo, while Stoke goes off to a "passsupper" given by an

inceptor, who has just taken his degree. These suppers were not voluntary entertainments, but enforced by

law. At supper the talk ranges over University gossip, they tell of the scholar who lately tried to raise the

devil in Grope Lane, and was pleased by the gentlemanly manner of the foul fiend. They speak of the Queen's

man, who has just been plucked for maintaining that Ego currit, or ego est currens, is as good Latin as ego

curro. Then the party breaks up, and Stoke goes towards Merton, with some undergraduates of that college,

Bridlington, Alderberk, and Lymby. At the corner of Grope Lane, out come many men of the Northern

nations, armed with shields, and bows and arrows. Stoke and his friends run into Merton for weapons, and

"standing in a window of that hall, shot divers arrows, and one that Bridlington shot hit Henry de l'Isle, and

David Kirkby unmercifully perished, for after John de Benton had given him a dangerous wound in the head

with his faulchion, came Will de la Hyde and wounded him in the knee with his sword."

These were rough times, and it is not improbable that Stoke had a brush with the Town before he got safely

back to Catte's Hall. The old rudeness gave way gradually, as the colleges swallowed up the irregular halls,

and as the scholars unattached, infando nomine ChamberDekyns, ceased to exist. Learning, however,

dwindled, as colleges increased, under the clerical and reactionary rule of the House of Lancaster.

We have now arrived at a period in the history of Oxford which is confused and unhappy, but for us full of

interest, and perhaps of instruction. The hundred years that passed by between the age of Chaucer and the age

of Erasmus were, in Southern Europe, years of the most eager life. We hear very oftentoo often,

perhapsof what is called the Renaissance. The energy of delight with which Italy welcomed the new birth

of art, of literature, of human freedom, has been made familiar to every reader. It is not with Italy, but with

England and with Oxford, that we are concerned. How did the University and the colleges prosper in that

strenuous time when the world ran after loveliness of form and colour, as, in other ages, it has run after

warlike renown, or the faroff rewards of the saintly life? What was Oxford doing when Florence, Venice,

It must be said that "the spring came slowly up this way." The University merely reflected the very practical

character of the people. In contemplating the events of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in their influence

on English civilisation, we are reminded once more of the futility of certain modern aspirations. No amount

of University Commissions, nor of wellmeant reforms, will change the nature of Englishmen. It is

impossible, by distributions of University prizes and professorships, to attract into the career of letters that

proportion of industry and ingenuity which, in Germany for example, is devoted to the scholastic life.

Politics, trade, law, sport, religion, will claim their own in England, just as they did at the Revival of Letters.

The illustrious century which Italy employed in unburying, appropriating, and enjoying the treasures of

Greek literature and art, our fathers gave, in England, to dynastic and constitutional squabbles, and to

religious broils. The Renaissance in England, and chiefly in Oxford, was like a bitter and changeful spring.

There was an hour of genial warmth, there breathed a wind from the south, in the lifetime of Chaucer; then

came frosts and storms; again the brief sunshine of court favour shone on literature for a while, when Henry

VIII. encouraged study, and Wolsey and Fox founded Christ Church and Corpus Christi College; once more

the bad days of religious strife returned, and the promise of learning was destroyed. Thus the chief result of

the awakening thought of the fourteenth century in England was not a lively delight in literature, but the

appearance of the Lollards. The intensely practical genius of our race turned not to letters, but to questions

about the soul and its future, about property and its distribution. The Lollards were put down in Oxford; "the

tares were weeded out" by the House of Lancaster, and in the process the germs of free thought, of

originality, and of a rational education, were destroyed. "Wyclevism did domineer among us," says Wood;

and, in fact, the intellect of the University was absorbed, like the intellect of France during the heat of the

Jansenist controversy, in defending or assailing "267 damned conclusions," drawn from the books of Wyclif.

The University "lost many of her children through the profession of Wyclevism." Those who remained were

often "beneficed clerks." The Friars lifted up their heads again, and Oxford was becoming a large

ecclesiastical school. As the University declared to Archbishop Chichele (1438), "Our noble mother, that was

blessed in so goodly an offspring, is all but utterly destroyed and desolate." Presently the foreign wars and the

wars of the Roses drained the University of the youth of England. The country was overrun with hostile

forces, or infested by disbanded soldiers. Plague and war, war and plague, and confusion, alternate in the

annals. Sickly as Oxford is today by climate and situation, she is a city of health compared to what she was

in the middle ages. In 1448 "a pestilence broke out, occasioned by the overflowing of waters, . . . also by the

lying of many scholars in one room or dormitory in almost every Hall, which occasioned nasty air and smells,

and consequently diseases." In the general dulness and squalor two things were remarkable: one, the last

splendour of the feudal time; the other, the first dawn of the new learning from Italy. In 1452, George Neville

of Balliol, brother of the Kingmaker, gave the most prodigious passsupper that was ever served in Oxford.

On the first day there were 600 messes of meat, divided into three courses. The second course is worthy of

Against this prodigious gormandising we must set that noble gift, the Library presented to Oxford by Duke

Humfrey of Gloucester. In the Catalogue, drawn up in 1439, we mark many books of the utmost value to the

impoverished students. Here are the works of Plato, and the Ethics and Politics of Aristotle, translated by

Leonard the Aretine. Here, among the numerous writings of the Fathers, are Tully and Seneca, Averroes and

Avicenna, Bellum Trojae cum secretis secretorum, Apuleius, Aulus Gellius, Livy, Boccaccio, Petrarch. Here,

with Ovid's verses, is the Commentary on Dante, and his Divine Comedy. Here, rarest of all, is a Greek

The most hopeful fact in the University annals, after the gift of those manuscripts (to which the very beauty

of their illuminations proved ruinous in Puritan times), was the establishment of a printingpress at Oxford,

and the arrival of certain Italians, "to propagate and settle the studies of true and genuine humanity among

us." The exact date of the introduction of printing let us leave to be determined by the learned writer who is

now at work on the history of Oxford. The advent of the Italians is dated by Wood in 1488. Polydore Virgil

had lectured in New College. "He first of all taught literature in Oxford. Cyprianus and Nicholaus, Italici,

also arrived and dined with the VicePresident of Magdalen on Christmas Day. Lily and Colet, too, one of

them the founder, the other the first Head Master, of St. Paul's School, were about this time studying in Italy,

under the great Politian and Hermolaus Barbarus. Oxford, which had so long been in hostile communication

with Italy as represented by the Papal Courts, at last touched, and was thrilled by the electric current of Italian

civilisation. At this conjuncture of affairs, who but is reminded of the youth and the education of Gargantua?

Till the very end of the fifteenth century Oxford had been that "huge barbarian pupil," and had revelled in

vast Rabelaisian suppers: "of fat beeves he had killed three hundred sixty seven thousand and fourteen, that in

the entering in of spring he might have plenty of powdered beef." The bill of fare of George Neville's feast is

like one of the catalogues dear to the Cure of Meudon. For Oxford, as for Gargantua, "they appointed a great

sophisterdoctor, that read him Donatus, Theodoletus, and Alanus, in parabolis." Oxford spent far more than

Gargantua's eighteen years and eleven months over "the book de Modis significandis, with the commentaries

of Berlinguandus and a rabble of others." Now, under Colet, and Erasmus (1497), Oxford was put, like

Gargantua, under new masters, and learned that the old scholarship "had been but brutishness, and the old

wisdom but blunt, foppish toys serving only to bastardise noble spirits, and to corrupt all the flower of

The prospects of classical learning at Oxford (and, whatever may be the case today, on classical learning

depended, in the fifteenth century, the fortunes of European literature) now seemed fair enough. People from

the very source of knowledge were lecturing in Oxford. Wolsey was Bursar of Magdalen. The colleges, to

which B. N. C. was added in 1509, and C. C. C. in 1516, were competing with each other for success in the

New Learning. Fox, the founder of C. C. C., established in his college two chairs of Greek and Latin, "to

extirpate barbarism." Meanwhile, Cambridge had to hire an Italian to write public speeches at twenty pence

each! Henry VIII. in his youth was, like Francis I., the patron of literature, as literature was understood in

Italy. He saw in learning a new splendour to adorn his court, a new source of intellectual luxury, though even

Henry had an eye on the theological aspect of letters. Between 1500 and 1530 Oxford was noisy with the

clink of masons' hammers and chisels. Brasenose, Corpus, and the magnificent kitchen of Christ Church,

were being erected. (The beautiful staircase, which M. BrunetDebaines has sketched, was not finished till

1640. The world owes it to Dr. Fell. The Oriel niches, designed in the illustration, are of rather later date.)

The streets were crowded with carts, dragging in from all the neighbouring quarries stones for the future

homes of the fair humanities. Erasmus found in Oxford a kind of substitute for the Platonic Society of

Florence. "He would hardly care much about going to Italy at all, except for the sake of having been there.

When I listen to Colet, it seems to me like listening to Plato himself"; and he praises the judgment and

In spite of all this promise, the Renaissance in England was rotten at the root. Theology killed it, or, at the

least, breathed on it a deadly blight. Our academic forefathers "drove at practice," and saw everything with

the eyes of party men, and of men who recognised no interest save that of religion. It is Mr. Seebohm (Oxford

Reformers, 1867), I think, who detects, in Colet's concern with the religious side of literature, the influence of

Savonarola. When in Italy "he gave himself entirely to the study of the Holy Scriptures." He brought to

England from Italy, not the early spirit of Pico of Mirandola, the delightful freedom of his youth, but his later

austerity, his later concern with the harmony of scripture and philosophy. The book which the dying Petrarch

held wistfully in his hands, revering its very material shape, though he could not spell its contents, was the

Iliad of Homer. The book which the young Renaissance held in its hands in England, with reverence and

eagerness as strong and tender, contained the Epistles of St. Paul. It was on the Epistles that Colet lectured in

149697, when doctors and abbots flocked to hear him, with their notebooks in their hands. Thus Oxford

differed from Florence, England from Italy: the former all intent on what it believed to be the very Truth, the

We cannot afford to regret the choice that England and Oxford made. The search for Truth was as certain to

bring "not peace but a sword" as the search for Beauty was to bring the decadence of Italy, the corruption of

manners, the slavery of two hundred years. Still, our practical earnestness did rob Oxford of the better side of

the Renaissance. It is not possible here to tell the story of religious and social changes, which followed so

hard upon each other, in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward VI., Mary, and Elizabeth. A few moments in these

That Oxford was rather "Trojan" than "Greek," that men were more concerned about their dinners and their

souls than their prosody and philosophy, in 1531, is proved by the success of Grynaeus. He visited the

University and carried off quantities of MSS., chiefly Neoplatonic, on which no man set any value. Yet, in

1535, Layton, a Commissioner, wrote to Cromwell that he and his companions had established the New

Learning in the University. A Lecture in Greek was founded in Magdalen, two chairs of Greek and Latin in

New, two in All Souls, and two already existed, as we have seen, in C. C. C. This Layton is he that took a

Rabelaisian and unquotable revenge on that old tyrant of the Schools, Duns Scotus. "We have set Dunce in

Bocardo, and utterly banished him from Oxford for ever, with all his blind glosses . . . And the second time

we came to New College we found all the great quadrant full of the leaves of Dunce, the wind blowing them

into every corner. And there we found a certain Mr. Greenfield, a gentleman of Buckinghamshire, gathering

up part of the same books' leaves, as he said, therewith to make him sewers or blanshers, to keep the deer

within his wood, thereby to have the better cry with his hounds." Ah! if the University Commissioners would

only set Aristotle, and Messrs. Ritter and Preller, "in Bocardo," many a young gentleman out of

Buckinghamshire and other counties would joyously help in the good work, and use the pages, if not for

"Habent sua fata libelli," as Terentianus Maurus says, in a frequently quoted verse. If Cromwell's

Commissioners were hard on Duns, the Visitors of Edward VI. were ruthless in their condemnation of

everything that smacked of Popery or of magic. Evangelical religion in England has never been very

favourable to learning. Thus, in 1550 "the ancient libraries were by their appointment rifled. Many

manuscripts, guilty of no other superstition than red letters in the front or titles, were condemned to the fire . .

. Such books wherein appeared angles were thought sufficient to be destroyed, because accounted Papish or

diabolical, or both." A cart load of MSS., lucubrations of the Fellows of Merton, chiefly in controversial

divinity, was taken away; but, by the good services of one Herks, a Dutchman, many books were preserved,

and, later, entered the Bodleian Library. The world can spare the controversial manuscripts of the Fellows of

Merton, but who knows what invaluable scrolls may have perished in the Puritan bonfire! Persons, the

librarian of Balliol, sold old books to buy Protestant ones. Two noble libraries were sold for forty shillings,

for waste paper. Thus the reign of Edward VI. gave free play to that ascetic and intolerable hatred of letters

which had now and again made its voice heard under Henry VIII. Oxford was almost empty. The schools

were used by laundresses, as a place wherein clothes might conveniently be dried. The citizens encroached on

academic property. Some schools were quite destroyed, and the sites converted into gardens. Few men took

degrees. The college plate and the jewels left by pious benefactors were stolen, and went to the meltingpot.

The reign of Mary was scarcely more favourable to letters. No one knew what to be at in religion. In

Magdalen no one could be found to say Mass, the fellows were turned out, the undergraduates were

whippedboyish martyrsand crossed at the buttery. What most pleases, in this tragic reign, is the

anecdote of Edward Anne of Corpus. Anne, with the conceit of youth, had written a Latin satire on the Mass.

He was therefore sentenced to be publicly flogged in the hall of his college, and to receive one lash for each

line in his satire. Never, surely, was a poet so sharply taught the merit of brevity. How Edward Anne must

have regretted that he had not knocked off an epigram, a biting couplet, or a smart quatrain with the sting of

Oxford still retains a memory of the hideous crime of this reign. In Broad Street, under the windows of

Balliol, there is a small stone cross in the pavement. This marks the place where, some years ago, a great

heap of wooden ashes was found. These ashes were the remains of the fire of October 16th, 1555the day

when Ridley and Latimer were burned. "They were brought," says Wood, "to a place over against Balliol

College, where now stands a row of poor cottages, a little before which, under the town wall, ran so clear a

stream that it gave the name of Canditch, candida fossa, to the way leading by it." To recover the memory of

that event, let the reader fancy himself on the top of the tower of St. Michael's, that is, immediately above the

city wall. No houses interfere between him and the open country, in which Balliol stands; not with its present

frontage, but much farther back. A clear stream runs through the place where is now Broad Street, and the

road above is dark with a swaying crowd, out of which rises the vapour of smoke from the martyrs' pile. At

your feet, on the top of Bocardo prison (which spanned the street at the North Gate), Cranmer stands

manacled, watching the fiery death which is soon to purge away the memory of his own faults and crimes.

He, too, joined that "noble army of martyrs" who fought all, though they knew it not, for one causethe

It was in a nightbattle that they fell, and "confused was the cry of the paean," but they won the victory, and

we have entered into the land for which they contended. When we think of these martyrdoms, can we wonder

that the Fellows of Lincoln did not spare to ring a merry peal on their gaudyday, the day of St. Hugh, even

It would be pleasant to have to say that learning returned to Oxford on the rising of "that bright Occidental

star, Queen Elizabeth." On the other hand, the University recovered slowly, after being "much troubled," as

Wood says, "AND HURRIED UP AND DOWN by the changes of religion." We get a glimpse, from Wood,

of the Fellows of Merton singing the psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins round a fire in the College Hall. We

see the subwarden snatching the book out of the hands of a junior fellow, and declaring "that he would

never dance after that pipe." We find Oxford so illiterate, that she could not even provide an University

preacher! A country gentleman, Richard Taverner of Woodeaton, would stroll into St. Mary's, with his sword

and damask gown, and give the Academicians, destitute of academical advice, a sermon beginning with these

In spite of these evil symptoms, a Greek oration and plenty of Latin plays were ready for Queen Elizabeth

when she visited Oxford in 1566. The religious refugees, who had "eaten mice at Zurich" in Mary's time, had

returned, and their influence was hostile to learning. A man who had lived on mice for his faith was above

Greek. The court which contained Sydney, and which welcomed Bruno, was strong enough to make the

classics popular. That famed Polish Count, Alasco, was "received with Latin orations and disputes (1583) in

the best manner," and only a scoffing Italian, like Bruno, ventured to call the Heads of Houses THE

DROWSY HEADSdormitantes. Bruno was a man whom nothing could teach to speak well of people in

authority. Oxford enjoyed the religious peace (not extended to "Seminarists") of Elizabeth's and James's

reigns, and did not foresee that she was about to become the home of the Court and a place of arms.

The gardens 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

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.

The way is not bordered, of course, by the long, straggling streets of rickety cottages, which now stretch from

the bridge halfway 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 woodyard 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

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 doublegilding 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 means le roi soleil, as courtiers called Louis XIV., 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 illadvised

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 crossexamined 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

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 Henry

VIII., Edward VI., 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,

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 became SUSPECT, 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:

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

"The King himself did offer,""What, I pray?" "He offered twice or thriceto go away!"

As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to wear lovelocks. 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 gardenfront, perhaps

the most lovely thing in Oxford. From the gardenswhere for so many summers the beauty of England has

rested in the shadow of the chestnuttrees, amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy with the scent of

the acacia flowersfrom the gardens, Laud's building looks rather like a countryhouse than a college.

If St. John's men have lived in the University too much as if it were a large countryhouse, 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 pleasuredome 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 millwheel, and flows to the Isis through meadows

"And here are gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossoms many an incensebearing tree";

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 yearsthe 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

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 beenlet us hope there

werequiet 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

antiRomish and antiRoyal 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 giftsand he was a munificent patron of

learninghe 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, [Greek text which cannot be reproduced], 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 ivoryheaded 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 busta tarnished, gilded work of art. He has a

neat little cockedup moustache, not like a prelate's; the face is that of a Bismarck without strength of

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 imageso 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 meltingpot. On August 9th the scholars armed

themselves. There were two bands of musqueteers, one of pikemen, one of halberdiers. In the reign of Henry

III. 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 the Gesta Stephani had 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 earthworksa double

lineran 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,

In Merton 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 whom rien ne peut

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, and Bohemiae 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. (16461648). 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 dressesthese 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 suppertime. 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

about irritabile 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

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

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 sixtyfour, 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 his Athenae Oxonienses he had

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 twentyfour 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 today 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 the Marmora Oxoniensia, which came out 1676.

We must not suppose, however, that Prideaux was an enthusiastic archaeologist. He did the Marmora because

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

groundfloor in the Schools' quadrangle) these touching remains of Hellas are interred. There are the funereal

stelae, 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 tell The lingering clasp of

O pregnant sign, profound simplicity! All passionate pain and fierce remonstrating Being wholly purged,

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 longsevered souls are meeting with delight in the home of the just made perfect.

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 hackwork. 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, beerdrinking 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 in Daniel Deronda, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not like as "brutes." "Pembrokethe

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

"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

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

The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than those of the pothousehaunting 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 alehouse, 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 ViceChancelour's men drank ale at the "Split Crow," and

On this, old Dr. Good posted off to the ViceChancellor, 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

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

"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

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," "muddyheaded," "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

oddsandends 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 the Iliad,

who not only teach what is already known, but add to the stock of knowledge, and advance the boundaries of

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

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

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 pounds." 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

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

SahamToney, in Norfolk, and marry a wife, though, says he, "I little thought I should ever come to this."

The name of her late Majesty Queen Anne has for some little time been a kind of party watchword. 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 entrancehall of the Grosvenor

Gallery is that "byway" 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

The Spectator of the ingenious Sir Richard Steele gives us many a glimpse of nonjuring Oxford. The old

fashion of Sanctity (Mr. Addison says, in the Spectator, 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

By the year 1705, when Tom Hearne, of St. Edmund's Hall, began to keep his diary, the "honest folk"that

is, the High Churchmenhad 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 the Reliquiae of Hearne (an

antiquarian successor of Antony Wood, a bibliophile, an archaeologist, and as honest a man as Jacobitism

"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 commonplace 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 DeputyLibrarian 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 and LARGE PAPER. It was the joy of

Tom's existence to see his editions become first scarce, then VERY 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

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 the Spectator (No. 43). "We are much offended at the Act for

importing French wines. A bottle or two of good solid Edifying Port, at honest George's, made a Night

cheerful, and threw off Reserve. But this plaguy French Claret 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 the Spectator, and the commonroom 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

Thanks to Hearne, it is easy to reproduce the commonroom 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 deafmutes, 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 Dl, 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."

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 commonplace book is carefully copied out this "Scotch Health to K.

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

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 meetinghouse 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' meetinghouses down. The heads of houses have represented that it was begun by

the Whiggs." Probably the heads of houses reasoned on a priori principles when they arrived at this

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 Nonjuror, 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

W., "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

As an example of the paganism of Queen Anne's reignquite a different thing from the "Neopaganism"

which now causes so much anxiety to the moral pressmanlet 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

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 lecturerooms AND HOUSES FOR MARRIED DONS on 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

posterngate called the Turl Gate" (a corruption for Thorold Gate) 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 of Patey's Quad in

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

Oxford has 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 himnothing to admire, nothing to love. From his poor and lofty rooms in Pembroke Gatetower

the hypochondriac Johnsonrugged, anxious, and conscious of his great unemployed powerlooked 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

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 lifedrawn 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 "swanlike," 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

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 butterybook 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

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 twentythree 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 pounds, 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.

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

Of all the carping, crossgrained, scandalloving, Whiggish assailants of Alma Mater, the author of Terrae

Filius was the most persistent. The first little volume which contains the numbers of this biweekly

periodical (printed for R. Franklin, under Tom's Coffeehouse, in Russell Street, Covent Garden,

MDCCXXVI.) is not at all rare, and is well worth a desultory reading. What strikes one most in Terrae Filius

is 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 lax TALKER, rather than

a lax THINKER, against religion; "but lax talking against religion at Oxford would not be suffered." The

author of Terrae 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

"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 smallbeer 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 schoolfellows by a new drugget, a pair of prim

ruffles, a new bobwig, and a brazenhilted 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 you DAMNABLE DRUNK, and carry you, as they call it, a CORPSE to 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 are CHURCHMEN, and that you believe as the CHURCH

believes. For instance, you have subscribed the Thirtynine 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 no TRUE CHURCHMAN in that which the words bear, and in that which

This is pretty plain speaking, and Terrae Filius enforces, 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.

Terrae 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. Terrae Filius thus describes a "smart," as these dandies

The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets more gay than do the brightcoloured

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, sunburnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings,

flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck cloths run with red at the bottom.

After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the contemporary accountbook 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 feathertopp'd, grizzled wig from London; cost him 2 pounds, 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 biscuitsnot, we

trust, without marmalade. "A bowl of rumpunch from Horsman's" cost half a crown. Fancy a jolly Proctor

sending out for bowls of rumpunch, and that in April! Eggs cost a penny each, and "three oranges and a

White, a generous man, gave the ViceChancellor "seven pounds of doublerefined white sugar." I like to

fancy my learned friend, the Proctor, going to the present ViceChancellor'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 postchaise with Jenny Croke"; and he

gave Jenny a "round Chinaturene." Tea cost eight shillings a pound in 1752, while rumpunch was but half a

crown a bowl. White's highest terminal battels were but 12 pounds, 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

At any given time a large number of poets may be found among the undergraduates at Oxford, and the

younger dons. It is not easy to say what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar

people while they remain in residence. The undergraduate poet is a not uninteresting study. He wears his hair

long, and divides it down the middle. His eye is wild and wandering, and his manner absent, especially when

he is called on to translate a piece of an ancient author in lecture. He does not "read" much, in the technical

sense of the term, but consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor poetry. His own verses

the poet may be heard declaiming aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known

to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper party,

without interfering with the divine afflatus. When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not,

he sends it to the Editor of the Nineteenth Century, and it returns to him after many days. At last it appears in

print, in College Rhymes, a collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or irregular intervals,

and was never seen except in the rooms of contributors. The poet also speaks at the Union, where his

sentiments are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on Magna Charta as the first step

on the path that leads to England's ruin. As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no mean between Mr.

Peter Taylor and King John. He has been known to found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards to swallow the

The life of the poet is, not unnaturally, one long warfare with his dons. He cannot conform himself to

pedantic rules, which demand his return to college before midnight. Though often the possessor of a sweet

vein of clerical and Kebleian verse, the poet does not willingly attend chapel; for indeed, as he sits up all

night, it is cruel to expect him to arise before noon. About the poet's late habits a story is told, which seems

authentic. A remarkable and famous contemporary singer was known to his fellowundergraduates only by

this circumstance, that his melodious voice was heard declaiming anapaests all through the ambrosial night.

When the voice of the singer was lulled, three sharp taps were heard in the silence. This noise was produced

by the bard's Scotch friend and critic in knocking the ashes out of his pipe. These feasts of reason are almost

incompatible with the early devotion which, strangely enough, Shelley found time and inclination to attend.

Now it is (or was) the belief of undergraduates that you might break the decalogue and the laws of man in

every direction with safety and the approval of the dons, if you only went regularly to chapel. As the poet

cannot do this (unless he is a "sleepless man"), his existence is a long struggle with the fellows and tutors of

his college. The manners of poets vary, of course, with the tastes of succeeding generations. I have heard of

two (Thyrsis and Corydon) "who lived in Oxford as if it were a large countryhouse."

Of other singers, the latest of the heavenly quire, it is invidiously said that they build shrines to Blue China

and other ceramic abominations of the Philistine, and worship the same in their rooms. Of this sort it is not

the moment to speak. Time has not proved them. But the old poets of ten years ago lived a militant life; they

rarely took good classes (though they competed industriously for the Newdigate, writing in the metre of

Dolores), and it not uncommonly happened that they left Oxford without degrees. They were often very

agreeable fellows, as long as one was in no way responsible for them; but it was almost impossiblehuman

nature being what it isthat they should be much appreciated by tutors, proctors, and heads of houses. How

could these worthy, learned, and often kind and courteous persons know when they were dealing with a lad of

These remarks are almost the necessary preface to a consideration of the existence of Shelley and Landor at

Oxfordthe Oxford of 1793 1810. Whatever the effects may be on Shelleyan commentators, it must be

said that, to the donnish eye, Percy Bysshe Shelley was nothing more or less than the ordinary Oxford poet,

of the quieter type. In Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier specimen of the

same class. People who have to do with hundreds of young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to

generalise. No don, that was a don, could have seen Shelley or Landor as they are described to us without

hastily classing them in the category of poets who would come to no good and do little credit to the college.

Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793. It was the dreadful year of the Terror, when good Englishmen

hated the cruel murderers of kings and queens. Landor was a good Englishman, of course, and he never

forgave the French the public assassination of Marie Antoinette. But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear

his own unpowdered hairthe Poet thus declaring himself at once in the regular recognised fashion. "For a

portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined

everything in the shape of competition." (Now competition is the essence of modern University study.)

"Though I wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the University," says Landor, "I

could never be persuaded by my tutor or friends to contend for any prize whatever." The pleasantest and most

profitable hours that Landor could remember at Oxford "were passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen

Walk, by the halfhidden Cherwell." Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and most profitable that any

of us pass at Oxford. The one duty which that University, by virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is

the assembling of young men together from all over England, and giving them three years of liberty of life, of

leisure, and of discussion, in scenes which are classical and peaceful. For these hours, the most fruitful of our

lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives; that is, as long as life and memory remain with

us. And, "if anything endure, if hope there be," our conscious existence in the afterworld would ask for no

Landor called himself "a Jacobin," though his own letters show that he was as far as the most insolent young

"tuft" from relishing doctrines of human equality. He had the reputation, however, of being not only a

Jacobin, but "a mad Jacobin"; too mad for Southey, who was then young, and a Liberal. "Landor was obliged

to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through a window," is the account which Southey

gave of Landor's rustication. Now fellows often put up with a great deal of horseplay. There is scarcely a

more touching story than that of the don who for the first time found himself "screwed up," and fastened

within his own oak. "What am I to do?" the victim asked his sympathising scout, who was on the other, the

free side of the oak. "Well, sir, Mr. Muff, sir, when 'e's screwed up 'e sends for the blacksmith," replied the

servant. What a position for a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of sending for the blacksmith!

Fellows have not very unfrequently been fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with sodawater bottles

full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol windows on the Martyrs' Memorial of our

illustration. In this case, too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a fellow, "to go for him with

a shot gun," as the repentant American said he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly

a strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline could allow even a poet to shoot thus

wildly. In truth, Landor's offence has been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the common. The

poet was giving "an afterdinner party" in his rooms. The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor

was intimate, he says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On the opposite side of the

quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls

"servitors and other raff of every description." The guests at the rival wine parties began to "row" each

other, Landor says, adding, "All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any

conversation with them, particularly out of a window. But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had

in a back closet some little shot. I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the

outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired." Mr.

Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted the worst possible line of defence, and

It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is

engaged with the subject of Shelley's expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the

Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him,

in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not

touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg's book

is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully

lifelike and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and

in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of

such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be

"the Atheist," that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities were civil, and left

him alone." Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley

"an Atheist." Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could

Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they likecertainly

much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain

that no OFFICIAL interference can be of real value? Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist

between tutors and pupils. There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal youth

of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation after generation of freshmen. This is

fortunate; but who can wonder that middleaged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each

other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their

own resources? One has occasionally heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors,

that their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to unpack. And it is true that

modern education, when it meets the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of

men. To put it shortly, clever students have to go through their age of Sturm und Drang, and they are

sometimes disappointed when older people, their tutors, for example, do not help them to weather the storm.

It is a tempest in which every one must steer for himself, after all; and Shelley "was borne darkly, fearfully

afar," into unplumbed seas of thought and experience. When Mr. Hogg complains that his friend was too

much left to himself to study and think as he pleased, let us remember that no one could have helped Shelley.

He was better at Oxford without his old Dr. Lind, "with whom he used to curse George III. after tea."

There are few chapters in literary history more fascinating than those which tell the story of Shelley at

Oxford. We see him entering the hall of University Collegea tall, shy stripling, bronzed with the

September sun, with long elflocks. He takes his seat by a stranger, and in a moment holds him spellbound,

while he talks of Plato, and Goethe, and Alfieri, of Italian poetry, and Greek philosophy. Mr. Hogg draws a

curious sketch of Shelley at work in his rooms, where sevenshilling pieces were being dissolved in acid in

the teacups, where there was a great hole in the floor that the poet had burned with his chemicals. The

oneeyed scout, "the Arimaspian," must have had a time of tribulation (being a conscientious and fatherly

man) with this odd master. How characteristic of Shelley it was to lend the glow of his fancy to science, to

declare that things, not thoughts, mineralogy, not literature, must occupy human minds for the future, and

then to leave a lecture on mineralogy in the middle, and admit that "stones are dull things after all!" Not less

Shelleyan was the adventure on Magdalen Bridge, the beautiful bridge of our illustration, from which Oxford,

with the sunset behind it, looks like a fairy city of the Arabian Nightsa town of palaces and princesses,

"One Sunday we had been reading Plato together so diligently, that the usual hour of exercise passed away

unperceived: we sallied forth hastily to take the air for halfanhour before dinner. In the middle of

Magdalen Bridge we met a woman with a child in her arms. Shelley was more attentive at that instant to our

conduct in a life that was past, or to come, than to a decorous regulation of the present, according to the

established usages of society, in that fleeting moment of eternal duration styled the nineteenth century. With

abrupt dexterity he caught hold of the child. The mother, who might well fear that it was about to be thrown

over the parapet of the bridge into the sedgy waters below, held it fast by its long train.

""Will your baby tell us anything about preexistence, Madam?" he asked, in a piercing voice, and with a

Shelley and Hogg seem almost to have lived in reality the life of the Scholar Gipsy. In Mr. Arnold's poem,

which has made permanent for all time the charm, the sentiment of Oxfordshire scenery, the poet seems to be

following the track of Shelley. In Mr. Hogg's memoirs we hear little of summer; it seems always to have been

in winter that the friends took their long rambles, in which Shelley set free, in talk, his inspiration. One thinks

"in winter, on the causeway chill, Where home through flooded fields foot travellers go,"

returning to the supper in Hogg's rooms, to the curious desultory meals, the talk, and the deep slumber by the

roaring fire, the small head lying perilously near the flames. One would not linger here over the absurd

injustice of his expulsion from the University. It is pleasant to know, on Mr. Hogg's testimony, that

"residence at Oxford was exceedingly delightful to Shelley, and on all accounts most beneficial." At Oxford,

at least, he seems to have been happy, he who so rarely knew happiness, and who, if he made another suffer,

himself suffered so much for others. The memory of Shelley has deeply entered into the sentiment of Oxford.

Thinking of him in his glorious youth, and of his residence here, may we not say, with the shepherd in

"Ah, would that in my days thou hadst been numbered with the living, how gladly on the hills would I have

herded thy pretty shegoats, and listened to thy voice, whilst thou, under oaks and pinetrees lying, didst

We have looked at Oxford life in so many different periods, that now, perhaps, we may regard it, like our

artist, as a whole, and take a bird'seye view of its present condition. We may ask St. Bernard's question,

WHITHER HAST THOU COME? a question to which there are so many answers readily given, from within

and without the University. It is not probable that the place will vary, in essential character, from that which

has all along been its own. We shall have considered Oxford to very little purpose, if it is not plain that the

University has been less a home of learning, on the whole, than a microcosm of English intellectual life. At

Oxford the men have been thinking what England was to think a few months later, and they have been

thinking with the passion and the energy of youth. The impulse to thought has not, perhaps, very often been

given by any mind or minds within the college walls; it has come from withoutfrom Italy, from France,

from London, from a country vicarage, perhaps, from the voice of a wandering preacher. Whencesoever the

leaven came, Oxford (being so small, and in a way so homogeneous) has always fermented readily, and

promptly distributed the new forces, religious or intellectual, throughout England.

It is characteristic of England that the exciting topics, the questions that move the people most, have always

been religious, or deeply tinctured with religion. Conservative as Oxford is, the home of "impossible causes,"

she has always given asylum to new doctrines, to all the thoughts which comfortable people call "dangerous."

We have seen her agitated by Lollardism, which never quite died, perhaps, till its eager protest against the

sacerdotal ideal was fused into the fire of the Reformation. Oxford was literally devastated by that movement,

and by the Catholic reaction, and then was disturbed for a century and a half by the war of Puritanism, and of

Tory Anglicanism. The latter had scarcely had time to win the victory, and to fall into a doze by her pipe of

port, when Evangelical religion came to vex all that was moderate, mature, and fond of repose. The

revolutionary enthusiasm of Shelley's time was comparatively feeble, because it had no connection with

religion; or, at least, no connection with the religion to which our countrymen were accustomed. Between the

era of the Revolution and our own day, two religious tempests and one secular storm of thought have swept

over Oxford, and the University is at present, if one may say so, like a ship in a heavy swell, the sea looking

The Tractarian movement was, of course, the first of the religious disturbances to which we refer, and much

It is curious to read about that movement in the Apologia, for example, of Cardinal Newman. On what

singular topics men's minds were bent! what queer survivals of the speculations of the Schools agitated them

as they walked round Christ Church meadows! They enlightened each other on things transcendental, yet

material, on matters unthinkable, and, properly speaking, unspeakable. It is as if they "spoke with tongues,"

which had a meaning then, and for them, but which to us, some forty years later, seem as meaningless as the

This was the shape, the Tractarian movement was the shape, in which the great Romantic reaction laid hold

on England and Oxford. The father of all the revival of old doctrines and old rituals in our Church, the

originator of that wistful return to things beautiful and long dead, wasWalter Scott. Without him, and his

wonderful wand which made the dry bones of history live, England and France would not have known this

picturesque reaction. The stir in these two countries was curiously characteristic of their genius. In France it

put on, in the first place, the shape of art, of poetry, painting, sculpture. Romanticism blossomed in 1830, and

bore fruit for ten years. The religious reaction was a punier thing; the great Abbe, who was the Newman of

France, was himself unable to remain within the fantastic church that he built out of medieval ruins. In

England, and especially in Oxford, the aesthetic admiration of the Past was promptly transmuted into

religion. Doctrines which men thought dead were resuscitated; and from Oxford came, not poetry or painting,

but the sermons of Newman, the Tracts, the whole religious force which has transformed and revivified the

Church of England. That force is still working, it need hardly be said, in the University of today, under

Probably the Anglican ideas ceased to be the most powerfully agitating of intellectual forces in Oxford about

1845. A new current came in from Rugby, and the influence of Dr. Arnold and the natural tide of reaction

began to run very strong. If we had the apologiae of the men who thought most, about the time when Clough

was an undergraduate, we should see that the influence of the Anglican divines had become a thing of

sentiment and curiosity. The life had not died out of it, but the people whom it could permanently affect were

now limited in number and easily recognisable. This form of religion might tempt and attract the strongest

men for a while, but it certainly would not retain them. It is by this time a matter of history, though we are

speaking of our contemporaries, that the abyss between the Lives of the English Saints, and the Nemesis of

Faith, was narrow, and easily crossed. There was in Oxford that enthusiasm for certain German ideas which

had previously been felt for medieval ideas. Liberalism in history, philosophy, and religion was the ruling

power; and people believed in Liberalism. What is, or used to be, called the Broad Church, was the birth of

some ten or fifteen years of Liberalism in religion at Oxford. The Essays and Reviews were what the Tracts

had been; and Homeric battles were fought over the income of the Regius Professor of Greek. When that

affair was settled Liberalism had had her innings, there was no longer a single dominant intellectual force;

but the old storms, slowly subsiding, left the ship of the University lurching and rolling in a heavy swell.

People believed in Liberalism! Their faith worked miracles; and the great University Commission performed

many wonderful works, bidding close fellowships be open, and giving all power into the hands of Examiners.

Their dispensation still survives; the large examining machine works night and day, in term time and

vacation, and yet we are not happy. The age in Oxford, as in the world at large, is the age of collapsed

opinions. Never men believed more fervidly in any revelation than the men of twenty years ago believed in

political economy, free trade, open competition, and the reign of Commonsense and of Mr. Cobden. Where

is that faith now? Many of the middleaged disciples of the Church of Commonsense are still in our midst.

They say the old sayings, they intone the old responses, but somehow it seems that scepticism is abroad; it

seems that the world is wider than their system. Not even open examinations for fellowships and

scholarships, not half a dozen new schools, and science, and the Museum, and the Slade Professorship of Art,

have made Oxford that ideal University which was expected to come down from Heaven like the New

We have glanced at the history of Oxford to little purpose if we have not learned that it is an eminently

discontented place. There is room in colleges and common rooms for both sorts of discontentthe ignoble,

which is the child of vanity and weakness; and the noble, which is the unassuaged thirst for perfection. The

present result of the last forty years in Oxford is a discontent which is constantly trying to improve the

working, and to widen the intellectual influence, of the University. There are more ways than one in which

this feeling gets vent. The simplest, and perhaps the most honest and worthy impulse, is that which makes the

best of the present arrangements. Great religious excitement and religious discussion being in abeyance, for

once, the energy of the place goes out in teaching. The last reforms have made Oxford a huge collection of

schools, in which physical science, history, philosophy, philology, scholarship, theology, and almost

everything in the world but archaeology, are being taught and learned with very great vigour. The hardest

worked of men is a conscientious college tutor; and almost all tutors are conscientious. The professors being

an ornamental, but (with few exceptions) MERELY ornamental, order of beings, the tutors have to do the

work of a University, which, for the moment, is a teachingmachine. They deliver I know not how many sets

of lectures a year, and each lecture demands a fresh and full acquaintance with the latest ideas of French,

German, and Italian scholars. No one can afford, or is willing, to lag behind; every one is "gladly learning,"

like Chaucer's clerk, as well as earnestly teaching. The knowledge and the industry of these gentlemen is a

perpetual marvel to the "bellelettristic trifler." New studies, like that of Celtic, and of the obscurer Oriental

tongues, have sprung up during recent years, have grown into strength and completeness. It is unnecessary to

say, perhaps, that these facts dispose of the popular idea about the luxury of the long vacation. During the

more part of the long vacation the conscientious teacher must be toiling after the great mundane movement in

learning. He must be acquiring the very freshest ideas about Sanscrit and Greek; about the Ogham characters

and the Cyprian syllabary; about early Greek inscriptions and the origins of Roman history, in addition to

What is the tangible result, and what the gain of all these labours? The answer is the secret of University

discontent. All this accumulated knowledge goes out in teaching, is scattered abroad in lectures, is caught up

in notebooks, and is poured out, with a difference, in examinations. There is not an amount of original

literary work produced by the University which bears any due proportion to the solid materials accumulated.

It is just the reverse of Falstaff's casebut one halfpennyworth of sack to an intolerable deal of bread; but a

drop of the spirit of learning to cartloads of painfully acquired knowledge. The time and energy of men is

occupied in amassing facts, in lecturing, and then in eternal examinations. Even if the results are satisfactory

on the whole, even if a hundred wellequipped young men are turned out of the examiningmachine every

year, these arrangements certainly curb individual ambition. If a resident in Oxford is to make an income that

seems adequate, he must lecture, examine, and write manuals and primers, till he is grey, and till the energy

that might have added something new and valuable to the acquisitions of the world has departed.

This state of things has produced the demand for the "Endowment of Research." It is not necessary to go into

that controversy. Englishmen, as a rule, believe that endowed cats catch no mice. They would rather endow a

theatre than a Gelehrter, if endow something they must. They have a British sympathy with these beautiful, if

useless beings, the heads of houses, whom it would be necessary to abolish if Researchers were to get the few

tens of thousands they require. Finally, it is asked whether the learned might not find great endowment in

economy; for it is a fact that a Frenchman, a German, or an Italian will "research" for life on no larger income

The great obstacle to this "plain living" is perhaps to be found in the traditional hospitality of Oxford. All her

doors are open, and every stranger is kindly entreated by her, and she is like the "discreet housewife" in

In some languages the same word serves for "stranger" and "enemy," but in the Oxford dialect "stranger" and

"guest" are synonymous. Such is the custom of the place, and it does not make plain living very easy. Some

critics will be anxious here to attack the "aesthetic" movement. One will be expected to say that, after the

ideas of Newman, after the ideas of Arnold, and of Jowett, came those of the wicked, the extravagant, the

effeminate, the immoral "Blue China School." Perhaps there is something in this, but sermons on the subject

are rather luxuries than necessaries in the present didactic mood of the Press. "They were friends of ours,

moreover," as Aristotle says, "who brought these ideas in"; so the subject may be left with this brief notice.

As a piece of practical advice, one may warn the young and ardent advocate of the Endowment of Research

that he will find it rather easier to curtail his expenses than to get a subsidy from the Commission.

The last important result of the "modern spirit" at Oxford, the last stroke of the sanguine Liberal genius, was

the removal of the celibate condition from certain fellowships. One can hardly take a bird'seye view of

Oxford without criticising the consequences of this innovation. The topic, however, is, for a dozen reasons,

very difficult to handle. One reason is, that the experiment has not been completely tried. It is easy enough to

marry on a fellowship, a tutorship, and a few small miscellaneous offices. But how will it be when you come

to forty years, or even fifty? No materials exist which can be used by the social philosopher who wants an

answer to this question. In the meantime, the common rooms are perhaps more dreary than of old, in many a

college, for lack of the presence of men now translated to another place. As to the "society" of Oxford, that is,

no doubt, very much more charming and vivacious than it used to be in the days when Tony Wood was the

Looking round the University, then, one finds in it an activity that would once have seemed almost feverish, a

highly conscientious industry, doing that which its hand finds to do, but not absolutely certain that it is not

neglecting nobler tasks. Perhaps Oxford has never been more busy with its own work, never less distracted by

religious politics. If we are to look for a less happy sign, we shall find it in the tendency to run up "new

buildings." The colleges are landowners: they must suffer with other owners of real property in the present

depression; they will soon need all their savings. That is one reason why they should be chary of building;

another is, that the fellows of a college at any given moment are not necessarily endowed with architectural

knowledge and taste. They should think twice, or even thrice, before leaving on Oxford for many centuries

A hundred pictures have been drawn of undergraduate life at Oxford, and a hundred caricatures. Novels

innumerable introduce some Oxford scenes. An author generally writes his first romance soon after taking his

degree; he writes about his own experience and his own memories; he mixes his ingredients at will and tints

according to fancy. This is one of the two reasons why pictures of Oxford, from the undergraduate side, are

generally false. They are either drawn by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises himself and his

friends, or they are designed by ladies who have read Verdant Green, and who, at some period, have paid a

flying visit to Cambridge. An exhaustive knowledge of Verdant Green, and a hasty view of the Fitzwilliam

Museum and "the backs of the Colleges" (which are to Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not

afford sufficient materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford. The picture daubed by the emancipated

undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as unrecognisable. He makes himself and his friends too large, too

noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious. They seem to stride down the High,

prodigious, disproportionate figures, like the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the crowd of

dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricketfield or riverside cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and

the acquaintances of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose as heroes of the Guy

Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with

wet towels bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense. Men who do these things do

There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of describing undergraduate life with truth. There are

very many varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying and amusing themselves. A

steady man that reads his five or six hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that his path

scarcely ever crosses that of him who belongs to the Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely dines in

hall. Then the "pale student," who is hard at work in his rooms or in the Bodleian all day, and who has only

two friends, outcollege men, with whom he takes walks and tea,he sees existence in a very different

aspect. The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his club, dividing the house on questions of

blottingpaper and quill pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place of Librarian, writing

rubbish in the suggestionbook, to him Oxford is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine

flower, the Union. He never encounters the undergraduate who haunts billiardrooms and shy taverns, who

buys jewelry for barmaids, and who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled a foxterrier into

college in a brownpaper parcel. There are many other species of undergraduate, scarcely more closely

resembling each other in manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student resembles the

metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief,

was vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a halfreclaimed savage, who disappeared on the warpath after

failing to scalp the Junior Proctor. When The Wet Blanket returned to his lodge in the land of Sitting Bull, he

doubtless described Oxford life in his own way to the other Braves, while the squaws hung upon his words

and the papooses played around. His account would vary, in many ways, from that of

And he, again, would not see Oxford life steadily, and see it whole, as a more cultivated and polished

undergraduate might. Thus there are countless pictures of the works and ways of undergraduates at the

University. The scene is ever the sameboatraces and football matches, scouts, schools, and proctors, are

common to all,but in other respects the sketches must always vary, must generally be one sided, and must

It appears that a certain romance is attached to the three years that are passed between the estate of the

freshman and that of the Bachelor of Arts. These years are spent in a kind of fairyland, neither quite within

nor quite outside of the world. College life is somewhat, as has so often been said, like the old Greek city life.

For three years men are in the possession of what the world does not enjoyleisure; and they are supposed

to be using that leisure for the purposes of perfection. They are making themselves and their characters. We

are all doing that, all the days of our lives; but at the Universities there is, or is expected to be, more

deliberate and conscious effort. Men are in a position to "try all things" before committing themselves to any.

Their newfound freedom does not merely consist in the right to poke their own fires, order their own

breakfasts, and use their own chequebooks. These things, which make so much impression on the mind at

first, are only the outward signs of freedom. The boy who has just left school, and the thoughtless life of

routine in work and play, finds himself in the midst of books, of thought, and discussion. He has time to look

at all the common problems of the hour, and yet he need not make up his mind hurriedly, nor pledge himself

to anything. He can flirt with young opinions, which come to him with candid faces, fresh as Queen

Entelechy in Rabelais, though, like her, they are as old as human thought. Here first he meets Metaphysics,

and perhaps falls in love with that enchantress, "who sifts time with a fine large blue silk sieve." There is

hardly a clever lad but fancies himself a metaphysician, and has designs on the Absolute. Most fall away very

early from this, their first love; and they follow Science down one of her many paths, or concern themselves

with politics, and take a side which, as a rule, is the opposite of that to which they afterwards adhere. Thus

your Christian Socialist becomes a Court preacher, and puts his trust in princes; the young Tory of the old

type will lapse into membership of a School Board. It is the time of liberty, and of intellectual attachments

Unluckily there are subjects more engrossing, and problems more attractive, than politics, and science, art,

and pure metaphysics. The years of undergraduate life are those in which, to many men, the enigmas of

religion present themselves. They bring their boyish faith into a place (if one may quote Pantagruel's voyage

once more) like the Isle of the Macraeones. On that mournful island were confusedly heaped the ruins of

altars, fanes, temples, shrines, sacred obelisks, barrows of the dead, pyramids, and tombs. Through the ruins

wandered, now and again, the halfarticulate words of the Oracle, telling how Pan was dead. Oxford, like the

Isle of the Macraeones, is a lumberroom of ruinous philosophies, decrepit religions, forlorn beliefs. The

modern system of study takes the pupil through all the philosophic and many of the religious systems of

belief, which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been fashioned by men, and have sheltered men for a

day. You are taught to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of thought on its

ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of

Time. This is not the place in which we can well discuss the merits of modern University education. But no

man can think of his own University days, or look with sympathetic eyes at those who fill the old halls and

rooms, and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into

the colleges. And it is fair to say that, for this, no set of teachers or tutors is responsible. It is the modern

historical spirit that must be blamed, that too clearsighted vision which we are all condemned to share of the

past of the race. We are compelled to look back on old philosophies, on India, Athens, Alexandria, and on the

schools of men who thought so hard within our own ancient walls. We are compelled to see that their systems

were only plausible, that their truths were but halftruths. It is the long vista of failure thus revealed which

suggests these doubts that weary, and torture, and embitter the naturally happy life of discussion, amusement,

friendship, sport, and study. These doubts, after all, dwell on the threshold of modern existence, and on the

The amusements of the University have been so often described that little need be said of them here.

Unhealthy as the site of Oxford is, the place is rather fortunately disposed for athletic purposes. The river is

the chief feature in the scenery, and in the life of amusement. From the first day of term, in October, it is

crowded with every sort of craft. The freshman admires the golden colouring of the woods and Magdalen

tower rising, silvery, through the blue autumnal haze. As soon as he appears on the river, his weight, strength,

and "form" are estimated. He soon finds himself pulling in a college "challenge four," under the severe eye of

a senior cox, and by the middle of December he has rowed his first race, and is regularly entered for a serious

vocation. The thoroughgoing boatingman is the creature of habit. Every day, at the same hour, after a

judicious luncheon, he is seen, in flannels, making for the barge. He goes out, in a skiff, or a pair, or a

fouroar, or to a steeplechase through the hedges when Oxford, as in our illustration, is under water. The

illustration represents Merton, and the writer recognises his old rooms, with the Venetian blinds which Mr.

Ruskin denounced. Chief of all the boatingman goes out in an eight, and rows down to Iffley, with the

beautiful old mill and Norman church, or accomplishes "the long course." He rows up again, lounges in the

barge, rows down again (if he has only pulled over the short course), and goes back to dinner in hall. The

table where men sit who are in training is a noisy table, and the athletes verge on "bearfighting" even in hall.

A statistician might compute how many steaks, chops, pots of beer, and of marmalade, an orthodox man will

consume in the course of three years. He will, perhaps, pretend to suffer from the monotony of boating shop,

boating society, and broadblown boating jokes. But this appears to be a harmless affectation. The old

breakfasts, wines, and suppers, the honest boating slang, will always have an attraction for him. The summer

term will lose its delight when the May races are over. Boatingmen are the salt of the University, so steady,

so well disciplined, so goodtempered are they. The sport has nothing selfish or personal in it; men row for

their college, or their University; not like runningmen, who run, as it were, each for his own hand.

Whatever may be his work in life, a boatingman will stick to it. His favourite sport is not expensive, and

nothing can possibly be less luxurious. He is often a reading man, though it may be doubted whether "he who

runs may read" as a rule. Running is, perhaps, a little overdone, and Strangers' cups are, or lately were, given

with injudicious generosity. To the artist's eye, however, few sights in modern life are more graceful than the

University quarterofamile race. Nowhere else, perhaps, do you see figures so full of a Hellenic grace and

The cream of University life is the first summer term. Debts, as yet, are not; the Schools are too far off to cast

their shadow over the unlimited enjoyment, which begins when lecture is over, at one o'clock. There are so

There are drags at every college gate to take college teams down to Cowley. There is the beautiful scenery of

the "stripling Thames" to explore; the haunts of the immortal "Scholar Gipsy," and of Shelley, and of

Further afield men seldom go in summer, there is so much to delight and amuse in Oxford. {2} What day can

be happier than that of which the morning is given (after a lively college breakfast, or a "commonising" with

a friend) to study, while cricket occupies the afternoon, till music and sunset fill the grassy stretches above

Iffley, and the college eights flash past among cheering and splashing? Then there is supper in the cool halls,

darkling, and halflit up; and after supper talk, till the birds twitter in the elms, and the roofs and the chapel

spire look unfamiliar in the blue of dawn. How long the days were then! almost like the days of childhood;

how distinct is the impression all experience used to make! In later seasons Care is apt to mount the college

staircase, and the "oak" which Shelley blessed cannot keep out this visitor. She comes in many a shapeas

debt, and doubt, and melancholy; and often she comes as bereavement. Life and her claims wax importunate;

to many men the Schools mean a cruel and wearing anxiety, out of all proportion to the real importance of

academic success. We cannot see things as they are, and estimate their value, in youth; and if pleasures are

more keen then, grief is more hopeless, doubt more desolate, uncertainty more gnawing, than in later years,

when we have known and survived a good deal of the worst of mortal experience. Often on men still in their

pupilage the weight of the first misfortunes falls heavily; the first touch of Dame Fortune's whip is the most

poignant. We cannot recover the first summer term; but it has passed into ourselves and our memories, into

which Oxford, with her beauty and her romance, must also quickly pass. He is not to be envied who has

known and does not love her. Where her children have quarrelled with her the fault is theirs, not hers. They

have chosen the accidental evils to brood on, in place of acquiescing in her grace and charm. These are

crowded and hustled out of modern life; the fever and the noise of our struggles fill all the land, leaving still,

If any word in these papers has been unkindly said, it has only been spoken, I hope, of the busybodies who

would make Oxford cease to be herself; who would rob her of her loveliness and her repose.

{2} A very pleasing account of the scenery near Oxford appeared in the Cornhill for September 1879.