The romance of the Oxford colleges

By Francis Henry Gribble

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Title: The romance of the Oxford colleges

Author: Francis Henry Gribble

Release date: November 15, 2025 [eBook #77240]

Language: English

Original publication: London: Mills & Boon, 1910

Credits: MWS and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ROMANCE OF THE OXFORD COLLEGES ***

THE ROMANCE OF THE OXFORD COLLEGES

[Illustration: _Merton College._

_Photo. Hills & Saunders_

_Allen & Co. (London) Ltd. Sc._]

THE ROMANCE
OF THE
OXFORD COLLEGES

BY
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF EXETER, AUTHOR OF “GEORGE
SAND AND HER LOVERS,” ETC.

WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 WHITCOMB STREET
LONDON W.C.

_Published 1910_

PREFACE

This work does not purport to be either a history or a guide book. Of
Oxford Guide Books, and of Histories of Oxford, there is already an
adequate provision, and there is no dearth of Oxford Reminiscences, or
of Studies of Oxford Life and Manners. But there may still be room for
a modest volume which, while unscrupulously omitting whatever seems
tedious, or of purely local interest, recalls the stories concerning
which experience shows the average stranger to be most curious, and
answers the questions which the average stranger, when visiting the
various colleges, is most apt to ask.

The book, indeed, is the outcome of an experience which revealed the
nature, and the limits, of that curiosity. It was lately the privilege
of the writer to act as guide to some ladies who were visiting Oxford
for the first time, and he made a mental note of the points on which
they showed themselves most avid of information. They did not, he found,
desire to burden their memories with dates, or to be entertained with
lists of the names of the Heads of Colleges and Halls, and they were
content to admire the architecture without entering into technical
details. On the other hand, stories of human interest—stories introducing
well-known names—stories of events in which the history of Oxford came
into close touch with the history of England—were constantly and eagerly
demanded.

Why was Shelley expelled from University? Why did Dr. Johnson throw
the boots out of his window at Pembroke? What is the truth about the
Brasenose Hellfire Club, and the ghost? What was the origin of town and
gown rows? Is it true that Froude’s book was publicly burnt at Exeter?
What was Oxford like at the time of the Civil War? What sort of people
were the Tractarians, the Wesleyans, the Æsthetes and the Positivists?
Why was Jowett so famous? Why are so many Jesus men called Jones? Which
was Gladstone’s college, and which was Lord Randolph Churchill’s? Why
do they have boar’s head for dinner on Christmas Day at Queen’s? Is it
true that Beau Nash was an Oxford man? Can you tell me any stories about
Charles Reade—or Sir Richard Burton—or Southey—or de Quincey—or Pater?

Such were a few of the questions asked. The book answers them, and
answers a good many other questions of the same sort. It proceeds on the
assumption that every college, at some period of its history, through
some notable name on its books, has been profoundly interesting, not only
to the University, but to the world, and it dwells on those interesting
moments and those interesting incidents as fully as space permits.

FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17

Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of
Durham—The Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord
Herbert of Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The
screwing up of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His
unpopularity with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship
with Hogg—His conversation with the Baby—His Religious
Opinions—His publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His
expulsion.

BALLIOL COLLEGE 36

The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His
introduction to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their dream
of Pantisocracy—College “Rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—Of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.

MERTON COLLEGE 55

Antiquity of Merton—The model of subsequent
foundations—Friction between the University and the town—The
great “town and gown row” of 1354—The scholars of Merton
save the University—The wardenship of Sir Henry Savile—The
visit of Queen Elizabeth—Oxford during the Civil War—Queen
Henrietta Maria at Merton—How Merton ceased to be a reading
college—Scandalous proceedings in the gardens—Mandell
Creighton and Lord Randolph Churchill.

EXETER COLLEGE 70

The West Country College—A Whig College—“Debauched by a
drunken Governor”—Eminent Alumni—“Parson Jack”—His bout
at fisticuffs—Garibaldi’s Englishman—His prowess on the
river—James Anthony Froude—His innate Protestantism—The burning
of his “Nemesis of Faith”—Burne Jones and William Morris.

ORIEL COLLEGE 86

Foundation by Adam de Brome—Butler and his
“Analogy”—Causes of the efficiency of Oriel—The
“Noetics”—Eveleigh—Coplestone—Whately—The Tractarians—Who
started the Tractarian Movement?—What did the Tractarians
want?—The logical weakness of their position—The attitude of
the bishops—The stampede to Rome—The honest doubters—Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough—Cecil Rhodes at Oriel.

QUEEN’S COLLEGE 106

What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his
criticism—The boar’s head and the Canticle—Another song on
the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black
Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford
Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy
Bentham—Walter Pater.

NEW COLLEGE 118

William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and
his elaborate Statutes—The College depressed by too much
founder’s kin—“Golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden
Masters”—Notable New College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry
Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden
Shuttleworth and others.

LINCOLN COLLEGE 129

A small college with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S.
Maccoll and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the _Sporting
Times_—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the
Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark
Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His
abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of
undergraduates.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE 145

Peculiarities of the Constitution—A College without
undergraduates—Court favourites jobbed into
fellowships—Fellowships bought and sold—All Souls Fellows,
a link between Oxford and the outside world—Sir William
Blackstone—Edward Young—The song of the All Souls Mallard and
the scandal connected therewith.

MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153

The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the æsthetic
movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE 171

The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has ever seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his philosophy of life.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192

The foundation by Bishop Foxe—Compulsory Greek—Strict
discipline in early times—The visitation by the Parliamentary
Commissioners—The ejection of the Fellows—Eminent _alumni_—The
judicious Hooker and his injudicious marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.

CHRIST CHURCH 209

Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of
Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The
Parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell,
and all the little Fellses—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like you, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.

TRINITY COLLEGE 226

Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of
Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long
hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil
War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter
Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The gentleman
adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.

SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE 241

Founded by Sir Thomas White—Raised to fame by Archbishop
Laud—Calvinistic opposition to Laud—He triumphs over it and
makes Oxford a High Church University—His disciplinarian
regulations—His magnificent entertainment of royalty—The
entertainment of Admiral Tromp—He gets drunk and is taken home
in a wheelbarrow—Dean Mansel—His pugnacious Bampton Lectures
and his excruciating puns.

JESUS COLLEGE 255

Statistics concerning the Joneses of Jesus—A Welsh
enclave—Rarity of great names at Jesus—Henry Vaughan the
“Silurist”—Sir Lewis Morris—Beau Nash—John Richard Green.

WADHAM COLLEGE 267

Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of
Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham
Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham
Positivists—“Three persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte,
Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford
Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE 278

Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable _alumni_—The
Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags
the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of
an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the
College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the
Methodists and his religious excitability.

WORCESTER COLLEGE 289

Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College
for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s
palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote
situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable
Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F.
W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.

HERTFORD COLLEGE 303

Hart Hall—The principalship of Dr. Richard Newton—Hart Hall
becomes Hertford College—Decline, fall, and dissolution of the
College—The buildings purchased for Magdalen Hall—Magdalen
Hall once more transformed into Hertford College—Famous
men at Hertford and Magdalen Hall—Charles James Fox—George
Selwyn—Robert Stephen Hawker.

KEBLE COLLEGE 316

“Keble College, near Rome”—A memorial of the author of the
“Christian Year”—The ideals of the College—How far they have
been realised—Diversified results of the experiment—The Bishop
of London and Mr. Herbert Trench.

EPILOGUE 321

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MERTON COLLEGE _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17

BALLIOL COLLEGE 36

EXETER COLLEGE: FELLOWS’ GARDEN 70

ORIEL COLLEGE 86

QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL 106

NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER 118

REREDOS, ALL SOULS CHAPEL 145

MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153

BRASENOSE KNOCKER 171

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192

TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH 209

TRINITY COLLEGE 226

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE 241

WADHAM COLLEGE 267

WORCESTER COLLEGE 289

KEBLE COLLEGE 316

_All the above are from photographs by Messrs. Hills & Saunders, Oxford._

The Romance of the Oxford Colleges

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of Durham—The
Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord Herbert of
Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The screwing up
of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His unpopularity
with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship with
Hogg—His conversation with the baby—His religious opinions—His
publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His expulsion.

It has often been asserted, but it has never been proved, that University
College was founded by Alfred the Great.

The principal evidence for the statement consists of a deed which is
known to have been forged and a quotation in Camden’s “Britannia” from
an alleged manuscript which cannot be found and probably never existed.
On the strength of that testimony the Court of King’s Bench ruled, in
1726, that Alfred was the founder; but the judgment seems to have been
based upon sentiment rather than evidence. “Religion,” it was argued by
the Fellows, “would receive a great scandal” if the Court decided that
“a succession of clergymen” had, for many generations, made the mistake
of thanking the wrong benefactor for their endowments. The Court was
moved by the plea and gave official sanction to the legend; but history,
as distinguished from legend, recognises the founder in William of
Durham, who, dying in 1249, bequeathed 310 marks to the University for
the benefit of Masters of Arts studying theology. A house was built for
the students to live in in 1253, and statutes for the governance of the
community were first drawn up in 1280.

[Illustration: UNIVERSITY COLLEGE.

[To face p. 17.]

Fifty shillings a year was the stipend of a student in those days, and
the bursar received a further five shillings a year for keeping the
College accounts. As rooms could then be rented for 6s. 8d. a year,
however, their condition was less penurious than the figures might
seem to indicate. It was provided that they should converse in Latin
and comport themselves “as becomes holy persons,” not interrupting one
another’s studies by “noise or clamour,” and resisting the temptations of
such light literature as “Ballads or Fables about Lovers”—with a good
deal more, on the same severe disciplinary lines, which one need not
trouble to recite.

The College, as Mr. Wells[1] states, “has been famous in the history of
Oxford rather for the careers of its sons than for any movements of which
it has been the centre”; and he might have added that the most notable
movement of which it has been the centre was a movement for the expulsion
of the most illustrious of its sons.

[1] “Oxford and its Colleges.” By J. Wells (Methuen).

Other interesting things, no doubt, have happened there. It was at
University that the junior members of the college resented the conversion
of their Master to Roman Catholicism by chanting, outside his door, the
impertinent refrain:

“Old Obadiah
Sang Ave Maria,
But so would not I—a.
If you ask me for why—a,
I’d as soon be a fool as a knave—a”—

a course of conduct which must have been very annoying to Obadiah Walker,
and very compromising to his dignity, if persisted in for long.

It was to University, again, that Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought a
bride in his second year of residence; “and now,” he writes in his
Autobiography, “I followed my book more close than ever.” But this
particular stimulus to diligence in study is one with which modern
undergraduates must, as a rule, dispense.

University, furthermore, was the scene of Lord Eldon’s memorable
examination in Hebrew. “What is the Hebrew for ‘the place of a skull’”?
the examiner asked him. “Golgotha,” he answered, and they let him
through, without even troubling him to translate “_Eloi, eloi, lama
sabacthani_” into English.

At University, to continue, the Senior Proctor—the “_Big_ Shaver” as men
called him to distinguish him from his brother, the Bishop of Liverpool,
who is of smaller stature—awoke one morning, some thirty years ago, to
find himself “screwed up.” He cut a noble figure as he descended by a
ladder into the High, amid the encouraging cheers of the populace; and
the authors of the outrage were not discovered until after the Master—the
late Dean Bradley, of Westminster—had sent the whole College down.

Every one of these stories has its merits, and some of them would be
worth relating at greater length if space allowed; but they all seem
trivial and local when set side by side with the story of the expulsion
of Shelley.

Shelley is not the only poet of whom the College boasts. Father Faber,
who believed too much to please his College, was, curiously enough, of
the same household as Shelley, who believed too little. So was Sir Edwin
Arnold, who is said to have found spiritual balm in Buddhism, and so is
Mr. Saint John Lucas, whose conformity to the golden mean in matters of
faith may perhaps be inferred from the fact that he was lately awarded a
prize for a poem on a sacred subject. But Shelley was, of course, by far
the greatest of the four, as well as the only one of them who set the
dons deliberately at defiance.

His defiance of the dons, indeed, assumed more forms than one, and the
publication of his notorious pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism,” was,
as it were, a last straw breaking the back of a patience which had long
been too severely tried. So, at all events, says Mr. Ridley, who was a
junior Fellow at the time, and so also says a Miss Grant, who happened to
be then on a visit to the Master.

“There were few, if any,” says Mr. Ridley, “who were not afraid of
Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks.”

“The ringleader,” says Miss Grant, “in every species of mischief
within our grave walls was Mr. Shelley. He was very insubordinate,
always breaking some rule, the breaking of which, he knew, could not
be overlooked.... He was slovenly in his dress. When spoken to about
these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such
extraordinary gestures, expressive of humility under reproof, as to
overset, first the gravity, and then the temper, of the lecturing tutor.”

The dons would have been more than human if they had liked an
undergraduate who received their admonitions in that style, and they
would have been in advance of their times if they had been conciliated
by Shelley’s predilections for scientific study. His science was of the
crude, experimental sort which has caused its devotees to be stigmatised
as “Stinks Men.” He charged the knob of his door with electricity for
the confusion of those who tried to open it, and he demonstrated his
knowledge of chemistry by spilling a corrosive acid on the carpet of a
tutor who reprimanded him. Naturally, therefore, authority was disposed
to seize the first handle that he might give, and the first handle given
was the perverse pamphlet above referred to.

* * * * *

The pamphlet was not, of course, Shelley’s maiden literary effort. While
still at Eton, he had written a “penny dreadful,” and found a publisher
willing to give him £40 for it; and he had cherished the naïve hope of
achieving fame at a bound by the simple device of bribing the reviewers.
Of the staff of the _British Review_ in particular he had written that
they were “venal villains” who might be relied upon, if well “pouched,”
to lavish the praise which he desired; and he seems to have thought that
£10, judiciously distributed, would suffice to corrupt the whole of Fleet
Street.

Moreover, his literary ambitions were smiled upon by a blameless and
unsuspecting father. Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., when he brought his
son to Oxford, took him to the shop of Messrs. Munday and Slatter,
booksellers, in the High Street, and introduced him to one of the
partners.

“My boy here,” he said, pointing proudly to the long-haired, wild-eyed
youth—“my boy here has a literary turn. He is already an author, and do
pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”

Only a few months later, in that very shop—— But we must not anticipate,
but must first present Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, also an undergraduate
of University.

* * * * *

Hogg was Shelley’s most intimate friend—and, indeed, practically his only
friend—at Oxford, and his “Life of Shelley” is our principal authority
for the incidents of Shelley’s Oxford career. Trelawny speaks of him as a
hard-headed man of the world who looked upon literature with contempt,
and he may have given that impression in later life, when he was a
Revising Barrister and a Municipal Corporation Commissioner, whatever
that may have been. Even then, however, he said that he regarded the
Greek language as “a prime necessary of life,” and in 1810 he would
have been remarked, not only as an ebullient but also as a romantic and
chivalrous young man.

He and Shelley made each other’s acquaintance by sitting next to each
other in hall, though Hogg assures us that “such familiarity was
unusual”—an interesting precedent for the alleged rule that one Oxford
man must not presume even to rescue another from drowning unless he has
been introduced to him. They fell into conversation on the comparative
value of German and Italian literature, and, after hall, they continued
the discussion in Hogg’s rooms, and sat up nearly all night over it.
On the following afternoon they met, by appointment, in Shelley’s
rooms—the typical rooms of a prehistoric “Stinks Man,” furnished with “an
electrical machine, an air-pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope,
and large glass jars and receivers,” and pervaded with “an unpleasant and
penetrating effluvium”; and after that they were inseparable.

Their Oxford, it must be remembered, was the early Oxford in which
no games were played. There was no “tubbing” in those days, and no
practising at the nets. Unless men haunted the prize ring and the rat
pit, their one way of amusing themselves was to walk and talk, and no
sporting “shop” could cast its monotonous shadow over their conversation.
The question whether the college was more likely to bump or to be bumped
did not arise, and no man burdened his brain with tables of “records”
or “averages.” The talk was about literature, about philosophy, and,
sometimes, about religion; and daring young thinkers hammered out for
themselves a good many subjects in which they were not called upon to be
examined.

Shelley, as we have seen, began with literature, but he soon got on to
philosophy. In particular he was fascinated by the Platonic doctrine of
the pre-existence of the soul—the doctrine popularised in Wordsworth’s
famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early
Childhood”; and he proceeded, as one would expect a chemist to do, to
try, as it were, to test the doctrine by experiment.

He snatched a baby, so Hogg tells us, out of its mother’s arms, on
Magdalen Bridge, and while the mother clung desperately to its swaddling
clothes, in an agony of terror lest it should be dropped into the
Cherwell, he gravely questioned her.

“Can your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in
a piercing voice and with a wistful look.

“He cannot speak, sir,” answered the mother stolidly.

“Surely he can speak if he will,” Shelley insisted, “for he is only a
few weeks old. He cannot have entirely forgotten the use of speech in so
short a time.”

But the mother was as firm as the poet.

“It is not for me to argue with college gentlemen,” she rejoined, “but
babies of that age never do speak as far as _I_ know”; and with that she
begged that her infant might be returned to her before harm befell it,
and so the incident terminated.

* * * * *

The bearing of the baby story on the subject before us is only indirect,
but there is a reason for telling it. It shows in what spirit Shelley, as
an undergraduate, approached the profoundest problems of philosophy, and
there is no reason to suppose that the spirit in which he approached the
profoundest problems of religion was widely different. Just as he had got
a “rise” out of the Oxford matron, so he proposed to get a “rise” out of
the Oxford dons; and the dons being clergymen, atheism was the obvious
card to play. A profession of atheism might fairly be expected to affect
clergymen as a red rag affects a bull.

That he was not actually an atheist at this time is as nearly
demonstrable as anything can ever be. The evidence is in his own
letters—not in one letter only, but in several.

“It is impossible,” he wrote, “not to believe in the Soul of the
Universe, the intelligent, and necessarily beneficent, actuating
principle.”

“Can we suppose,” he asked in another letter, “that our nature itself
could be without cause—‘First Cause’—a God?”

In these expressions, as they were not written for publication, we may
presume that we see the real Shelley. But, on the other hand—

1. Shelley, though not an atheist, fell short of the contemporary
standards of orthodoxy. He had been reading Hume, and felt that the
current answers to Hume were insufficient.

2. Shelley had been conducting a philosophical correspondence with his
cousin, Harriet Grove. The correspondence had been broken off because his
philosophical opinions were unsatisfactory; and he was embittered, being
in love with his cousin, and regarded himself as a persecuted martyr.

3. The temptation to exaggerate, and so “pull the legs” of grave and
reverend seniors, was irresistible.

He began by writing, under an assumed name, to strangers—the most grave
and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him—submitting
brief abstracts of Hume’s arguments, and appealing for assistance in
rebutting them. If the person to whom he wrote “took the bait,” says
Hogg, Shelley “would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.”
Once, it is said, by pretending to be a woman, he lured a bishop into
controversy, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle
the pompous from the beginning of the world. It was splendid fun, he
thought, but it would be still better fun if he could “get a rise” out of
the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professors, and the Heads
of colleges and halls. So, Hogg agreeing, he and Hogg put their heads
together, and “The Necessity of Atheism” was produced, and advertised in
the _Oxford Herald_ of February 9, 1811, and copies of it were posted to
several of the dons, “with the compliments of Mr. Jeremiah Stukeley.”

Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a
practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity,
was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a
bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s
shop—the very shop in which an indulgent parent had given out that his
“printing freaks” were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he
said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each; he wished them to be well
displayed on the counter and in the window; in order that the window
might be dressed properly, he proposed to dress it himself.

He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable
bookseller’s assistant. In a minute or two “The Necessity of Atheism” was
displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop, much as the first number
of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the
railway bookstalls to-day.

It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes; and then the Rev. John
Walker, a Fellow of New College, passed the shop, looked into the window
to see what new publications had arrived, read the title of Shelley’s
pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He
walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremptory
instructions:

“Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“We beg pardon, sir. We really didn’t know. We hadn’t examined the
publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn
to it——”

“Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter,
you will be good enough to remove all the copies of it that lie on your
counter and in your window, and to take them out into your back kitchen
and there burn them.”

Such was the dialogue, as one can reconstruct it from Mr. Slatter’s
recollections, contained in a letter addressed to Robert Montgomery, the
poet.

Mr. Walker, of course, had no legal right to give the instructions which
he gave. From the strictly legal point of view, he was ordering a man
over whom he had no jurisdiction to destroy property which did not belong
to him; he would never have presumed to give such orders in, say, Mr.
Hatchard’s shop in Piccadilly. At Oxford, however, his foot was firmly
planted on his native heath, and Messrs. Munday and Slatter knew it. He
might speak to the Vice-Chancellor; and the Vice-Chancellor might forbid
undergraduates to deal at their establishment. So they were all bows and
smiles and obsequious anxiety to oblige.

“By all means, Mr. Walker. An admirable idea, sir! Just what we were
ourselves on the point of suggesting. You may rely on us to carry out
your wishes.”

“You will be good enough to carry them out in my presence. I will
accompany you to your kitchen for that purpose.”

“That will be very good of you, Mr. Walker. It will be a great honour to
our kitchen. Will you please walk this way, sir?”

So the holocaust was effected; and Messrs. Munday and Slatter begged
Shelley to call on them, and told him what they had been obliged to do.

“We are really very sorry, Mr. Shelley. We really could not help
ourselves. Mr. Walker was so very firm in the matter; and even in your
own interest, you know——”

_Et cetera._ There was to be no further publicity for Shelley through the
instrumentality of the booksellers; and as no one was likely to trouble
about the authorship of an anonymous brochure which had been reduced to
ashes, that would have been the end of the matter if Shelley had not
circulated his pamphlet through the post. But then he _had_ so circulated
it, and the covering “compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley” were very
obviously in his hand-writing; and the recipients of the presentation
copies, who included every bishop on the bench, were saying that
something really ought to be done; and the dons were not only willing but
anxious, and not only anxious but eager, to lay hold of the handle which
Shelley had given them.

He was a “Stinks Man,” and he was a rowdy man; he made malodorous
chemical experiments, and he was impertinent when he was “ragged.” The
Senior Common-room was not going to stand atheism or any other nonsense
from such a man as that. So Shelley was sent for “with the Dean’s
compliments”—those compliments of evil omen—and the rest of the story may
best be told in the words of that Mr. Ridley already quoted, who is a
less prejudiced witness than Hogg.

“It was announced one morning at a breakfast party towards the end of
the Lent Term,” writes Mr. Ridley, “that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had
recently become a member of University College, was to be called before
a meeting of the common-room for being the supposed author of a pamphlet
called ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This anonymous work, consisting of
not many pages, had been studiously sent to most of the dignitaries of
the University and to others more or less connected with Oxford. The
meeting took place the same day, and it was understood that the pamphlet,
together with some notes sent with it, in which the supposed author’s
hand-writing appeared identified with that of P. B. S., was placed before
him. He was asked if he could or would deny the obnoxious production as
his. No direct reply was given either in the affirmative or negative.

“Shelley having quitted the room, T. J. Hogg immediately appeared,
voluntarily on his part, to state that, if Shelley had anything to do
with it, he (Hogg) was equally implicated, and desired his share of the
penalty, whatever was inflicted. It has always been supposed that Hogg
wrote the Preface.

“Towards the afternoon a large paper bearing the College seal, and signed
by the Master and Dean, was affixed to the hall door, declaring that the
two offenders were publicly expelled from the college _for contumacy in
refusing to answer certain questions put to them_. The aforesaid two had
made themselves as conspicuous as possible by great singularity of dress,
and by walking up and down the centre of the quadrangle, as if proud of
their anticipated fate,”—and, in modern times, they would doubtless have
driven to the station in triumph on the roofs of hansoms, escorted by a
long procession of uproarious admirers, though, as it was, they went away
quietly on the coach.

That is all; for the subsequent picture of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P.,
pursuing his peccant son to his London lodging, sending out for a
bottle of port, and reading aloud extracts from Paley’s “Evidences of
Christianity” while he drank it, belongs to Shelley’s Life, but not to
Oxford history.

* * * * *

Robert Montgomery, of Lincoln, who tried to compensate by the piety of
his sentiments for his lack of distinction as a poet, has recorded his
opinion that the offenders thoroughly deserved their punishment. “Strange
and unnatural as it may appear,” he writes, “there are many in Oxford
who think that a University, based on the immortal truths of the Gospel,
ought not to license or encourage blasphemy, however gilded by genius.”

No doubt there are many, not in Oxford only but elsewhere as well, who
agree that this limitation of the functions of Universities is desirable.
The general proposition, at any rate, shall not be disputed here. Jowett
himself, an advanced thinker if the Church of England ever included one,
appears to have endorsed it when circumstances brought him face to face
with an undergraduate who declined to attend chapel on the ground that
he did not believe in a God. “If you do not believe in a God by eight
o’clock to-morrow morning, you will be sent down,” the Master of Balliol
is said to have chirruped on that occasion; and it is difficult to
applaud his keen sense of the necessity of discipline and condemn that of
the Master of University.

It does not follow, however, that it is necessary to take the grave
Robert Montgomery’s solemn view of Shelley’s offence. His case was not
that of the conscientious and convinced blasphemer, but rather that
of a practical joker who over-reached himself and accepted martyrdom
rather than confess that he had been joking. And that, one concludes,
was the view of those later dignitaries of the college who permitted the
erection of a monument to Shelley within the college precincts—albeit in
a dark corner of those precincts, only to be reached by way of an obscure
passage which looks as if it led to a coal-hole wherein an unwary visitor
would run a serious risk of being arrested and charged with loitering
with intent to commit a felony.

BALLIOL COLLEGE

The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His introduction
to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their joint dream of
Pantisocracy—College “rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.

Balliol is the tangible and enduring product of one of the most
interesting of the abuses (as Protestants esteem them) of the Roman
Catholic religion.

The story begins on the day on which Robert of Balliol—a lord of many
lands in the North of England—“got drunk,” as the chronicler puts it,
“in a manner unbecoming his station in life,” and insulted the Bishop
of Durham. It is resumed on the day on which Robert apologised to the
Bishop, and consented to do penance. The Bishop then “birched him in the
presence of the populace on the steps of the cathedral,” and sent him
forth with a tingling cuticle and an injunction to make amends for his
fault by spending money on a benevolent undertaking. So he hired a house
for the accommodation of sixteen poor scholars of Oxford, and allowed
them eightpence a day each for their expenses. After his death, his
widow, the Lady Devorguilla of Balliol, bearing no malice against the
Bishop for his treatment of her husband—having reason to know, perhaps,
that it had done him good—supplemented the endowment by a further
substantial donation.

[Illustration: BALLIOL COLLEGE.

[To face p. 36.]

Such were the picturesque beginnings of the College in the reign of Henry
III. Other gifts and legacies enriched its chest from time to time.
The Snell Exhibitions connected it with the University of Glasgow. The
Blundell Endowment introduced a steady flow of scholars from Tiverton.
But the college remained unimportant. Its great period—a period which
began under the mastership of Dr. Parsons and culminated under the
mastership of Benjamin Jowett—belongs to the nineteenth century. Before
that time it has no history worth relating; and the few great men who, by
accident, went there to be educated, owed nothing to their tutors, but
were left to educate themselves as best they could.

Adam Smith, who was up from 1740 to 1746, was the greatest of them; and,
if Adam Smith’s ghost still haunts the Balliol quadrangles, we may be
quite sure that it is an ungrateful and a growling ghost.

He was one of the Snell Exhibitioners above-mentioned; and the Snell
Exhibitioners of the eighteenth century had a very uncomfortable time.
They came from Scotland; and the College took Dr. Johnson’s view of
Scotsmen, regarding them as pauper aliens, who ought to be repatriated,
and “smugs,” unfit to mix with civilised mankind. The worst rooms in the
college were invariably allotted to them by the dons; and their weird
accents and barbarous dress were the subject of the ribald mirth of
undergraduates.

Things got, indeed, to such a pass, at one time, that the Exhibitioners
sent a formal complaint to Glasgow, and Glasgow made formal
representations to the Master of the College; but the Master’s answer
was unsatisfactory and curt. He said that he did not particularly want
the Snell Exhibitioners at Balliol and would raise no objection if they
liked to transfer themselves to another college. He even went so far as
to suggest that perhaps they would feel more at home at Hertford; and as
the hint was not taken, his relations with them continued to be strained.

Such was the tone of the college when Adam Smith’s name was entered on
the books. The only friend whom he made there was Douglas, afterwards
Bishop of Salisbury, a Snell Exhibitioner like himself. We know little of
the circumstances of his career except that he habitually took tar-water
as a remedy for “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head”; that
undergraduates gibed at him for his poverty, exhorting him to gorge
himself in the hall on the ground that his long-delayed chance of eating
a full meal had come to him at last; and that a don reprimanded him for
reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” and confiscated the pernicious
book. It is not much; but it is enough to lead us to expect to find him
regarding his University with feelings of disgust and contempt; and there
is abundant evidence that he did so.

Adam Smith, indeed, is a far more convincing witness than Gibbon, who
was at Magdalen a few years after he had gone down, of the deplorable
state of learning at Oxford in the eighteenth century. He was older; he
was longer in residence; he was more anxious to learn. But he sought in
vain, he says, for “the proper means of being taught the sciences which
it is the proper business of these incorporated bodies to teach”; and his
generalisation about the college tutors is that “every man consented
that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were
allowed to neglect his own.” Moreover he passed one criticism on Oxford
which is a delightful variant on a more famous utterance of another
Balliol man of a later date.

Oxford, Matthew Arnold has told us, is the home of “lost causes” and
“impossible loyalties.” Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing,
but he said it very differently, speaking of the most venerable of our
seats of learning as “a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete
prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of
every corner of the world.” The sentiments are practically identical; and
there could be no more charming example of truth changing its aspect as
men change their point of view.

* * * * *

The only other name which counts in the annals of eighteenth century
Balliol is that of Southey, who was up in 1793.

He was by way of being a reading man; but though the dark ages were
almost over and the dawn of civilisation was near at hand, the College
did little, if anything, to direct his studies. “Mr. Southey,” said one
of his tutors in a burst of candour, “you won’t learn anything from my
lectures sir, so if you have any studies of your own, you had better
pursue them.”

He did so. He rose at five in order to do so, quickening his diligence
with “negus.” One suspects that he must have been drinking negus on the
morning of the day on which he went on the river “in a little skiff which
the least deviation from the balance would upset,” and “did not step
exactly in the middle,” with the result that “the boat tilted up” and
its occupant only saved himself from complete submersion by clinging to
the side of a barge. The incident does certainly seem to give colour to
his reflection that “temperance is much wanted at Oxford,” and that “the
waters of Helicon are too much polluted by the wine of Bacchus.”

Nor did the studies pursued under the cheering influence of matutinal
negus belong to the ordinary curriculum of the place. Southey neglected
his Aristotle. He preferred, he says, “the brilliant colours of fancy,
nature, and Rousseau” to “the positive dogmas of the Stagirite”; and
though the _Contrat Social_ may serve as a substitute for the “Politics,”
the presumption is strong that Southey preferred “_La nouvelle Héloise_”
which can by no means be regarded as a worthy alternative to the “Ethics.”

We may let that pass, however; and we may also let pass Southey’s
denunciation of the “waste of wigs and wisdom” which he discerned
among the dons and the “abandoned excess” which he detected among those
undergraduates who did not rise early to drink negus. The importance
of Southey’s Oxford career resides neither in these trifles nor even
in his refusal to have his hair powdered by the college barber before
sitting down to dinner. The most significant thing that happened to him
was that he made the acquaintance of a young man from a neighbouring
University—Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, who
was introduced to him by a bookseller.

The young Cantab. and the young Oxonian took to each other at once, and
proceeded to see visions and dream dreams in concert. Rousseau and the
Revolutionists, with their cry of “Back to Nature!” and their belief in
the “perfectibility of the human race,” appealed to their imagination
and inspired it. The world, they agreed, was weary of the past. Why not
escape from it? So they sat in Southey’s rooms at Balliol—no doubt with
steaming tumblers of negus on the table—and discussed the ways and means
of doing so.

America, of course, was to be the scene of the experiment. They would
cross the Atlantic, and settle on the banks of the Susquehanna—how could
they fail to be happy on the banks of a river with such a melodious
name? Land, they had been informed, was cheap there. An American land
agent had offered to sell them some, and had assured them that the danger
alike from buffaloes and from mosquitoes was much exaggerated. So they
would borrow money, and get married, and go there. They themselves would
till the soil, and their wives should “cook and perform all domestic
offices.” It would be delightful, Southey thought, “to go with all my
friends; to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable
employment; to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy
around me; my mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties
which have pursued her; my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.”

It came to nothing. The Pantisocracy, as it was to be called, was never
formed. Perhaps “the females of the party” did not take so kindly to
the idea of cooking and domestic offices—far away from bonnet-shops—as
had been expected; and there was, at any rate, the difficulty that the
capital required was not forthcoming. But the dream was a generous one
and sheds a golden glamour on the closing years of a dark age. Southey,
whether one cares about his poetry or not, is the most engaging figure in
eighteenth-century Balliol.

The darkness of the dark age at Balliol could be illustrated by many
anecdotes of many “rags.” On one occasion the Dean was ragged—though
it does not appear that he was put on the bonfire, as once happened,
in quite recent times, to the Dean of an adjacent college. On another
occasion some Balliol Jacobites celebrated the birthday of Cardinal York
by sallying forth into the streets and ragging every notable Hanoverian
whom they met, including a Canon of Windsor, and cheering for King James
III.—an offence for which, after the Master had let them off with a Latin
imposition, they were brought to trial in the Court of King’s Bench, and
sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

It was exploits of that order, and not any idle impulse to play upon
words, which first caused Balliol men to be spoken of as Men of Belial.
They were of frequent occurrence, and the bad name which they gave the
College was not redeemed by any intellectual distinction; but presently,
in 1798, Dr. Parsons became Master, and then a memorable change began.
Dr. Parsons organised the tutorial system, and cast his vote for throwing
Balliol fellowships open to outsiders. He also collaborated with the
Provost of Oriel and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of
the Honours Schools, in which firsts were presently taken by two very
remarkable Balliol men, Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and J. G.
Lockhart, the author of the Life of Scott. And then came Dr. Jenkyns.

* * * * *

Undoubtedly Jenkyns was a great man, as much greater than Parsons as
Jowett was to be greater than himself. Judging him by results, one is led
irresistibly to that conclusion. Yet how he managed to be so great, and
to accomplish such results, is a perplexing puzzle; for among all the
stories of him which have been preserved there is hardly one in which he
does not cut a grotesque and undignified figure.

There is the story, for example, of his encounter with Blaydes of
Balliol, who was afterwards to change his name to Calverley. Blaydes, it
is said, was taking ladies over the college, and wished to show them all
the lions. “That,” he said, pointing, “is the Master of Balliol’s study
window”; and he picked up a stone and threw it. The missile went crashing
through the glass, and an angry countenance became visible, glaring
through the aperture. “And that, I rather fancy,” Blaydes continued
calmly, “is the Master of Balliol himself.”

Then there is the story of Jenkyns’s passage of arms with Sir William
Hamilton. Sir William, it is related, coming hurriedly out of his room,
discovered Jenkyns listening at the keyhole. Furious at this prying
curiosity, he clutched the spy by his coat collar, lifted him over the
balustrade, and held him howling in mid-air. Then, having terrified him
sufficiently, he lifted him back again, and apologised: “Good gracious,
sir! I’m so sorry, but I had no idea that it would possibly be you!”

Finally, since there is no room for all the stories, one may recall, on
Jowett’s authority, the story of Jenkyns’s comic sermon. He gave out the
text, “The sin that doth so easily beset us”; and then he dropped into
bathos. “I mean,” he explained in severe and acid tones, “the habit of
contracting debts.” The undergraduates looked at each other and wondered.
Had the Master actually said this thing, or had he only seemed to say it?
They realised, at last, that he had actually said it; and then, for the
first and only time in its history, the walls of the College chapel shook
with the inextinguishable laughter of an insolvent congregation. It was
several minutes, Jowett tells us, before the preacher could proceed with
his discourse.

Decidedly it is not in anecdotes such as these that the greatness of
Jenkyns comes out. But he took his position as Head of a college very
seriously, at a time when most Heads of colleges preferred their wine,
their ease, or their theology; and he was an astoundingly good judge
alike of a competent tutor and of a clever undergraduate. Hence his
success. The Balliol tutors, in his time, were the best. They taught the
men, with rare exceptions, instead of worrying them about “movements”;
and the Balliol scholarship became, at this time, the blue riband for
which the chief public schools most eagerly competed. Presumably it is so
still; and it certainly was so when, after the colourless interlude of
Scott, Jowett succeeded to the Mastership in 1870.

* * * * *

Jowett’s is the one name of supreme and outstanding consequence
in Balliol annals. He was elected to a scholarship there from St.
Paul’s School in 1836; he was promoted to a fellowship while still
an undergraduate; he became a tutor of the College at the age of
twenty-five; he continued to be associated with its fortunes, without a
break, until his death in 1893. He not only did more than any other man
to make Balliol just what Balliol is; he also aspired, as he said, to
“inoculate England with Balliol.”

In that ambition he succeeded, for Balliol under Jowett was a nursery of
almost every kind of talent. Perhaps it was weak in divinity—it was a
Balliol man, according to the story, who told the examiner that Gamaliel
was “a hill at the foot of which Paul was brought up”—but it surpassed
all the other colleges in its “output” of statesmen, pro-consuls,
professors, and men of letters. Mr. Asquith, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord
Peel are Balliol men; so are Lord Milner and Lord Curzon. Balliol has
largely staffed the Universities of Scotland. At Jowett’s funeral seven
of the pall-bearers were Heads of Oxford houses who had been at Balliol,
and the list of Balliol representatives in recent and contemporary
literature includes the names of A. C. Swinburne, John Addington Symonds,
Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Mr. J. A. Godley, Canon Beeching, Mr.
Anthony Hope Hawkins, and the late G. W. Steevens—“the Balliol prodigy,”
as they called him—who became a journalist and succeeded in sounding a
new note on the brazen trumpet of the _Daily Mail_. One could easily
extend the list, but to what end? We have no need of further witnesses.

Jowett, as the table of results proves, was a great educator, and a great
organiser and director of education, but he was also something more than
that—a great personality, who fought a hard fight and won it, wearing
down opposition and smiling down detraction.

He was not a particularly great scholar. “Hullo! Another howler!” is
said to have been the refrain occasionally uttered automatically in
his presence by friends to whom he submitted the manuscript of his
translations of Plato and Thucydides; and it was maliciously said that
his appointment to the Regius Professorship of Greek was a case of the
“endowment of research”—a pecuniary inducement held out to him to learn
the language. Nor was he a great philosopher, or, in spite of “Essays and
Reviews” and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, a great
divine. But he was, nevertheless, emphatically a great man, who grew into
a great institution. One could not hear of Oxford without hearing of him;
one could not live at Oxford without feeling that his presence pervaded
it. He was, in the end, the very _genius loci_, and one would no more
have spoken disrespectfully of him than of the Equator.

It is said to have been Mrs. Grote who christened him “the cherub.” His
bust in the Bodleian certainly looks like the bust of a cherub, and the
sound of his voice was like a cherub’s chirp. It gave one the impression
of an innocent man who had never known anything of the passionate
temptations which distract the young, and for whom all the riddles of the
painful earth could be solved, without reference to such passions, by the
dry light of intellect alone. He seemed to come down to breakfast from a
higher plane of thought—an intellectual tribunal before which his guests
were summoned, and from which there was no appeal. He was criticism—as a
rule destructive criticism—incarnate. His praise was approbation from Sir
Hubert Stanley; his blame could make the cleverest man feel a fool.

It followed that he could not be widely popular. Criticism, especially if
it be unemotional, is not very popular as a literary art, and is still
less popular as a social accomplishment; and though, if we may believe
the biographers, the Master was not really unemotional, he generally
contrived to seem to be so, being, in fact, very shy, and very much
afraid of his emotions. One may think of him most justly, perhaps, as a
man full of the milk of human kindness, but profoundly conscious that
milk makes a mess when it boils over, and firmly resolved to prevent that
catastrophe by keeping it in a refrigerator. He gave generously out of
his later abundance, and with a positive shrinking from advertisement.
But he did not suffer fools gladly, and he could even snub the deserving,
if they gave him the opportunity, in the knock-down style of Dr. Johnson.

Nor was he an equally sound critic of all kinds of intellectual promise.
He divined, for instance, the potentialities of Mr. Asquith, but failed
to discern those of Mr. Andrew Lang. “Asquith is sure to succeed, he
is so direct,” was his verdict on the former; but to the latter, as Mr.
Lang has himself recorded, he tendered the advice: “Don’t write as if you
were writing for a penny paper.” And there is a story of a scholar of the
eighties, now an eminent teacher of youth, who shall be nameless here,
who suffered even more severely at his hands.

It was at breakfast, and the conversation flagged, as it was a little apt
to do when parties of undergraduates breakfasted with the Master. The
scholar tried to stimulate it by a literary remark which he hoped might
give the silent Master something to talk about. “Master,” he ventured,
“I have been reading Matthew Arnold’s poems, and I think he is a great
poet.” There was a dead silence while the company waited for the Master
to follow up the theme. “We all think so, Mr. X.,” he piped in his high
treble, and it was felt that he could not have blanketed the conversation
more effectively if he had left the room, slamming the door behind him.

“If you have nothing more sensible to say than that, you had better be
silent altogether,” is another of his recorded repartees to some one who
remarked upon the weather; and one could make a long list of similar
retorts of deadly finality behind which the Master entrenched himself. He
probably did not know how much they hurt, but fought, not aggressively,
but in self-defence, being sensitive, and fearing to be drawn, having
a lively recollection of cases in which men had tried to draw him by
arguing, in their weekly essays, in favour of atheism or anarchism, or
setting any other sort of pitfall into which it would be pleasant to
see one in authority stumbling. At all events men seem to have accepted
his severe rejoinders in that spirit, and to have had too profound a
reverence for his high intellectual standards to resent their rude
practical application. If they did not suffer a rebuff from him gladly,
at least they suffered it, as something inherent in the mysterious nature
of things, something the reason for which might thereafter, if they were
patient, be revealed to them.

For Jowett was not only a great man, but also, like most great men,
a great enigma. Many wondered, and perhaps no one ever knew, how he
reconciled his position with his conscience. He had subscribed to the
Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England, and then he had disproved
them, or a good many of them, and then he had subscribed to them again.
He had attached no condition to his second subscription of them except
the simple one, “if you will give me a new pen.” There was also a story
current, though it is probably untrue, as it is also told of Theodore
Hook, of St. Mary Hall, that he offered to sign forty Articles if the
signature of thirty-nine did not suffice.

Why did he do these things? What remnant of belief remained to him after
he had done them? By what chain of argument was he bound to his office as
a clergyman of the Church of England? Those were the problems posed, but
he would have been a bold man who ventured to press the Master for the
solutions.

His chief interests, at this stage, indeed, were rather practical than
speculative. He gave large house parties of people who had succeeded in
life. He bought an organ, and arranged for the Balliol Sunday evening
concerts. He shortened the chapel services, saying—or so it is said—that
if one could praise God adequately in half an hour, it was an absurd
waste of time to devote three-quarters of an hour to the proceeding. He
allowed Oxford to have a theatre—a thing forbidden by the pious wisdom of
the men of old. He quoted “_sat prata biberunt_,” and negotiated for the
drainage of the Oxford swamps.

He also preached, of course, and his sermons were always interesting, and
sometimes pleasingly satirical, as when he smote Renan and Farrar with
a double stroke, expressing his desire to read a Life of Christ which
should be neither “sentimental” nor “picturesque”; but it could hardly
be said that they settled the vexed question of his personal attitude
towards the creeds which he recited without taking them too seriously or
the formulæ which he manipulated with a sort of spiritual sleight-of-hand.

Possibly he argued that, as no clergyman ever believed all the Articles
of the Christian Faith, one clergyman had as good a right as another to
pick and choose among them. Or he may have felt that for a man to quit
the Church merely because he had demonstrated some of its propositions
to be erroneous was as ridiculous as for a doctor to take down his brass
plate merely because he had discovered a new treatment of a disease at
which the old-fashioned practitioners shook their heads. But, if that was
his view, he never uttered it, preferring to go his own way, possessing
his own soul and guarding his own secret.

One could almost see him guarding it; so that our last glimpse may be of
a quaint-looking little old man in evening dress trotting through the
parks in that unusual costume on a Sunday afternoon: an arresting figure,
with venerable white hair, a beautifully fresh pink face, and the seal of
inscrutable mystery on his forehead.

MERTON COLLEGE

Though in this work, as in the Oxford University Calendar, Merton stands
third among the colleges, there is a sense in which the first place may
be claimed for it. Both University and Balliol got their endowments at a
slightly earlier date, but Merton was the first College to be launched,
in 1264, a year before the meeting of the first English Parliament, as a
self-governing corporation.

The bequest of William of Durham, which resulted in the foundation of
University, was in its origin merely a pension fund, and John of Balliol,
in the first instance, only paid for the support of scholars in a hired
house. Walter de Merton, on the contrary, began at once to build and to
legislate, and his Statutes were the model of the Statutes of subsequent
foundations, not only at Oxford, but at Cambridge also. The founder
of Peterhouse, the first of the Cambridge colleges, expressly decreed
that the Peterhouse students were to live according to “the rule of the
scholars of Merton at Oxford.”

It follows that the history of Merton is more closely connected than that
of any other college with the earliest turmoils—which were many; and the
historian of Merton may properly begin with a glance at those brawls
which a later civilisation came to know as “town and gown rows.”

* * * * *

Discord between the town and the University began as soon as the
University became important and powerful, and it owed its origin, not to
incompatibility of temper between undergraduates and bargees, but to the
mutual jealousies of conflicting jurisdictions, ill-defined and therefore
liable to clash. Nowadays, of course, the object of the authorities on
both sides—the police on the one hand and the proctors on the other—is
to keep the peace between the combatants. In the Middle Ages the seniors
were as pugnacious as the juniors, and joined as ferociously in the
affrays.

Theoretically it was the function of the town to prevent, or punish,
breaches of the peace by townsmen, while the University had a similar
responsibility with regard to breaches of the peace by gownsmen; but when
townsmen and gownsmen fell out, each authority resented the interference
of the other. That was one cause of friction, and further friction
occurred in connection with disputed points of sanitation and hygiene.
The gownsmen objected to the sale of stinking fish and to the brewing
of beer from water contaminated by sewage; the townsmen thought the
objection fastidious, and were very angry when the University appealed to
the King to interfere with these time-honoured customs. Hence constant
bickerings, and a frequent exchange of abusive language; hence ultimately
open war and that bloody Battle of Saint Scholastica’s Day, in which the
townsmen found the scholars of Merton their most formidable foes.

The trouble began in a tavern, on February 10, 1354. Some scholars who
were drinking there found fault with the wine, and the vintner said that
it was quite good enough wine for them. The scholars then threw the wine
at the vintner’s head, and the vintner called his friends and neighbours
to the rescue. They rang the bell of the Church of Saint Martin at
Carfax, and the populace, summoned by that tocsin, shot at the scholars
with bows and arrows. The Chancellor of the University—the Lord Curzon
of Kedleston of his epoch—appeared upon the scene, ingeminating peace
where there was no peace, and he also was shot at. Then the bell of the
University Church of Saint Mary began to ring, and the gownsmen gathered,
and the _mêlée_ became general and lasted until the setting of the sun.
No one was killed; the gownsmen got the best of it, and the Chancellor
supposed that the riot was over. He issued a proclamation bidding the
scholars go to their lectures as usual on the following day.

They went, but found the townsmen lying in wait for them.
Reinforcements—two thousand peasants carrying an ominous black flag—had
swarmed into the city from Cowley, Headington, and Hinksey. The Carfax
tocsin pealed out a second time, just after the dinner hour, and the
tocsin of Saint Mary’s responded as before. The townsmen, with their
bucolic allies, not only assailed the scholars in the streets, but
pursued them into their lodgings, inns, and halls, beating down the doors
with improvised battering-rams, killing all the gownsmen they could
catch, and stealing or destroying all the property that they could lay
their hands on.

The Friars came out, carrying their huge crucifix and chanting their
Litany, to try to compose the strife, but their intervention was in
vain. They themselves became the objects of the popular fury, and one
scholar was struck down even while clinging to the crucifix. Other
scholars were followed into the churches and massacred at the foot of the
altar. Dead bodies were flung on to dunghills, the wounded were hailed to
prison, and even torture was not spared. “The crown of some chaplains,”
says the chronicler, “viz., all the skin so far as the tonsure went,
these diabolical imps flayed off in scorn of their clergy.”

At last the University could resist no more. The gownsmen began to flee
into the country—all save the scholars of Merton. These had their solid
walls behind which they could retire. Withdrawing to their college, while
the town triumphed without—the sole representatives of learning in a
deserted city which the Bishop had laid under an interdict—they waited
for the day of vengeance and redress of grievances.

It came. The King sent down a special commission to investigate the
matter. The Mayor of Oxford and his bailiffs were sent to prison; the
sheriff was removed from office; and presently the town was further
humiliated by the bestowal of fresh privileges upon the University
authorities. They thenceforward, and not the townsmen, were to decide
whether fish stank, and if they decided that it did, they were to
send it to the hospital for the consumption of the sick. In addition
to this privilege, they were to receive pecuniary compensation for the
damage done in the riot, and their supremacy was in various other ways
established on a firm constitutional basis.

Merton, that is to say, saved the University at an hour when, but for
Merton, the townsmen would have wiped it out, and its clerks would have
been dispersed over the face of the country.

* * * * *

As Merton was, through the scenes above described, the first college to
be interesting, so, too, it was the first college to rise to conspicuous
dignity, and enjoy the glories of a golden age. The supreme position
achieved by Christ Church towards the end of the eighteenth and by
Balliol in the middle of the nineteenth century, was won by Merton in the
reign of Queen Elizabeth, under the Wardenship of Sir Henry Savile, and
at the time when the founder of the Bodleian Library was a Fellow of the
College.

It may be that Savile’s name has not echoed down the corridors of time
quite as loudly as the names of some other Oxford men; but it is kept
alive by the Savilian Professorships, and one may fix his position fairly
well by saying that he was at once the Jowett and the Liddell of his
generation. He was, that is to say, a great scholar and a great teacher;
a great innovator and a man of great personal prestige; a link between
the academic world and the world of action; the sort of man whom kings
delighted to honour. Elizabeth honoured him, and so also did James I.

It was Savile who entertained Elizabeth on her visit to Oxford in
1592. He presided over the disputations held in her honour in Saint
Mary’s Church, and delivered a ringing panegyric on her reign with the
inevitable reference to the British triumph over the Armada: “_Tuis
auspiciis Hispania Anglum non vidit nisi victorem, Anglia Hispanum nisi
captivum_.” It was after enjoying his hospitality at Merton that her
Majesty, as she rode away, paused on Shotover, and “looking wistfully
towards Oxford,” said: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee
and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

Elizabeth furthermore made Savile Provost of Eton—an office which he held
concurrently with the Merton Wardenship. She gave him the office in spite
of the fact that the Statutes reserved it for clergymen, and that Savile
was a layman. He suggested to her Majesty that Statutes could not bind
a sovereign, and her Majesty agreed with him, and it was while he was
Provost of Eton that he entertained James I. and was made a baronet.

The Fellows of Merton of those days were already far removed from their
early condition of “poor scholars.” They could hold their own at Court,
and were well qualified to serve their country as ambassadors. Elizabeth
sent one Merton man as Ambassador to Madrid, and another to Venice,
Switzerland, and France; but the College did not lose touch with learning
because it had gained touch with affairs. Sir Thomas Bodley, as all
the world knows, returned from his travels to found the library which
bears his name, and Savile assisted in the preparation of the Authorised
Version of the Bible, produced an edition of St. Chrysostom which cost
him £8,000, and founded the Professorships of Geometry and Astronomy in
order that the multitude might no longer think “that the most useful
branches of Mathematicks were spells and her professors limbs of the
devil.”

He is said to have been a “very severe governor”—one whose students
“hated him for his austerity.” He preferred the plodding and persevering
to the brilliant. “If I would look for wits,” he said, “I would go to
Newgate. There be the wits.” And there is a story of his own assiduous
devotion to his studies, which probably illustrates the attitude of a
good many homely wives towards learned husbands.

“He was so sedulous,” we read, “at his study that his lady
thereby thought herself neglected, and coming to him one day as
he was in his study, saluted him thus: ‘Sir Henry, I would I
were a book too, and then you would a little more respect me.’
Whereto, one standing by replied, ‘Madam, you must then be an
almanack, that he might change every year.’ Whereat she was not
a little displeased.”

Those were the great days; but the times were to be more exciting when
the Civil War broke out, and Oxford, after the battle of Edgehill, became
the Royalist headquarters, garrisoned by the royal troops, surrounded
by fortifications which townsmen and gownsmen helped to build, and
beleaguered, more or less—at first rather less than more, but finally
rather more than less—by the Parliamentary forces under Fairfax, who
threw a bridge over the Cherwell, near Marston, and mounted a battery on
Headington Hill.

One cannot pause to tell that story at length, or draw that picture in
detail; but a stray fact or two will indicate what Oxford in general and
Merton College in particular then looked like.

Soldiers were, of course, encamped wherever there was room for them. The
New College cloisters were turned into an arsenal, and a powder factory
was established at Osney. New Inn Hall was the mint at which the College
plate was being melted down and coined into money. A line of earthworks
ran from Folly Bridge across Christ Church Meadows. Parliament—the
Royalist section of Parliament, that is to say—met in the House of
Convocation. Prisoners of war were stowed away, and very nearly starved,
in the castle in which Queen Maud had once been beleaguered by King
Stephen. Charles I. held his Court at Christ Church, and Queen Henrietta
Maria held hers at Merton, the two royal apartments being connected by a
secret passage.

It followed, therefore, that Merton was the centre of the light side of
war. The Warden, Nathaniel Brent, was a Parliamentarian, and was absent,
acting as Judge-Marshal in the Parliamentary Army; William Harvey, of
Caius College, Cambridge, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood,
was thrust into his place; and Merton, having accepted him under protest,
lived joyously, doing its best to entertain the Queen and her ladies,
who, on their part, did their best to be gracious to Merton. “_Tota
Academia morbo castrensi afflicta_” is one Mertonian’s summing up; but
that is a grumbler’s unkind way of putting it.

Regiments of University men were raised. They did good service, but they
could not always be fighting. They sallied, and raided, and cut up
convoys, and then returned to their headquarters; and, on their return,
the dust-soiled warriors were received by smiling ladies in the Merton
Gardens or the Christ Church Broad Walk, or listened, with the ladies, to
concerts in the college chapels, or played in a _masque_ in one of the
college halls for their diversion.

It was a glorious time—a time when gaudily apparelled boys swaggered
about with the assurance of men and the sincere conviction that the only
life worth living was the life of the gallant who fought the King’s
enemies in the morning and made love to the Queen’s ladies at night.
But it was not a time at which students could be expected to mind their
books; and the habit of study, when once lost, is not easily recovered.
Amid the clash of arms Merton ceased to be a reading college, and
circumstances conspired to prevent it from reverting to that character
until after the lapse of many generations.

* * * * *

Three later royal visits—two by Charles II. and one by James II.—may be
supposed to have operated unfavourably to study; and another cause of
deterioration can be detected in the measures which the College took
for the relief of its pecuniary embarrassments. A resolution was passed
to the effect that the presence of poor men in the College should be
discouraged, and that preference should be shown to postulants who were
willing to present the College with silver tankards and subscribe heavily
to the replenishment of the College Library.

The plan served its purpose. The Merton plate-chest was soon full to
overflowing, and the shelves of the Merton library were also filled. But
the College had, in the meantime, become a College of rich men, bent upon
amusement rather than profit, and more eager to kindle material bonfires
in the quad than to hand on the metaphoric torch of culture. Perhaps it
has, by this time, lived down that reputation, but it certainly retained,
and even nursed it, long after most of the other colleges had begun to
take life seriously.

In the eighteenth century, indeed, one does not expect to find the
age anything but dark; but even in that scandalous period Merton was
distinguished by a special scandal of its own. Ladies of more charm than
reputation came to Oxford in large numbers in those days, and the gardens
of Merton were their favourite haunt. Their presence there has been
celebrated alike in verse and prose. The prose censor rudely complains of
“that multitude of Female Residentiaries who have of late infested our
learned retirements”; while the poetical satirist exclaims:

“In vain his tutor with a watchful care
Rebukes his folly, warns him to beware,
Aspire above the common Merton crowd,
The vain, the lewd, the impudent and proud.
Beauty at Oxford is a thing so scarce
That all thy panegyrick turns to farce.”

From which state of things there resulted “imprudent marriages”—and
worse—with the result that sleepy authority at last awoke to what was
going on, and locked the garden gates.

The locking of the garden gates, however, did not in itself suffice to
make Merton a hive of industry, or even a home of order; and legends
of stormy occurrences within its walls continue to be frequent until a
comparatively recent date. “All that I can say, gentlemen,” said the
Warden, Dr. Marsham, on one occasion, haranguing the undergraduates in
hall—“all that I can say is, that if you want to behave like barbarian
savages, why—ahem! ahem!—you should come and ask leave first”; and an
authentic story relates that Dr. Mandell Creighton, the late Bishop of
London, was once, while an undergraduate, “employed to fetch in after
dinner a supply of penny whistles and other musical instruments, armed
with which, with tea-trays as drums, making the most horrible din, and
letting off squibs and crackers as they went, the undergraduates marched
round and round the Fellows’ quad.”

And, if Creighton did these things, what may we suppose to have been
done by Creighton’s pupil, the late Lord Randolph Churchill? That is
a delicate subject on which Lord Randolph’s biographers do not as a
rule say more than is strictly necessary; but there is at any rate one
story of his undergraduate days which it seems right to tell, because
the delightful audacity of the future leader of the Fourth Party is
foreshadowed in it.

Lord Randolph, it is said, was once “sent for” to be “ragged,” whether
for cutting lectures or for some other offence against discipline. He was
received by an indignant don, who began to deliver stern expostulations
from the hearthrug, on which he stood, warming his back at the fire.
In the heat of self-justification Lord Randolph advanced boldly, and
the don, intimidated, shrank away. As the interview was approaching its
conclusion, another undergraduate, who had also been summoned to the
presence, knocked and entered. He found Lord Randolph on the hearthrug,
with his coat-tails comfortably drawn up, delivering a vehement harangue,
while the don cowered submissively in a corner of the apartment listening
to him.

Remembering that story, we cannot wonder that Lord Randolph is still a
hero with the rising generation of the College which educated him so
imperfectly that when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was confronted
with some decimal fractions, he had to send for a permanent official to
tell him “the meaning of those d—d dots.”

EXETER COLLEGE

The West Country College—A Whig College—“Debauched by a
drunken governor”—Eminent _Alumni_—“Parson Jack”—His bout
at fisticuffs—Garibaldi’s Englishman—His prowess on the
river—James Anthony Froude—His innate Protestantism—The burning
of his “Nemesis of Faith”—Burne Jones and William Morris.

Exeter is the College for whose founder’s soul the author of this work
is particularly bound to pray; and he hereby renders grateful homage to
the memory of the Bishop of Exeter and Lord High Treasurer of England
in the sorry reign of Edward II., whose benefaction he enjoyed in the
character of a Stapledon scholar. If he says but little about Walter de
Stapledon, that is because there is little to be said, except that he was
a good bishop and a King’s man who lost his head in the King’s cause,
being charged with the defence of London when the King fled to Wales,
with the result that he was seized by the mob and brought to the block in
Cheapside.

[Illustration: EXETER COLLEGE: FELLOWS’ GARDEN.

[To face p. 70.]

His period was one in which it was thought proper to combine the
patronage of learning with the patronage of a particular locality. He
wished the scholars, and also the Fellows, of his College to be taken
from the counties of Devon and Cornwall; and his patriotic injunctions
were faithfully observed until the University commissioners interfered,
happily leaving a certain number of West Country scholars, but condemning
the West Country fellowships to extinction. The last of the West Country
Fellows was the Rev. Charles Boase, who piloted the present writer
through the ceremony of matriculation, and concerning whom a statistician
with a pencil once computed that he talked in the course of a single
evening, on sixty-seven learned subjects, ranging from the Chemistry of
Agriculture to the Philosophy of the Unconditioned.

Commoners, however, have followed where scholars led the way; and Exeter
has always been recognised as the particular College of West Countrymen.
Even the connection between Blundell’s School, Tiverton, and Balliol has
not broken down its claims to this distinction. In “Westward Ho” we find
Frank Leigh, as a matter of course, sent there from the Bideford Grammar
School; and one of the characters in “Tom Jones” went there, equally as a
matter of course, from Taunton, in the dark days in which the College was
reputed to be given over to “nothing but drunkenness and duncery.”

The College was, at that melancholy period, known, equally with Merton,
as a Whig College; and one of the rectors is said to have carried
democratic principles to the point of marrying the daughter of the
College cook. It distinguished itself, at one of the borough elections,
by inviting Whig voters not only to pass through the College quadrangle
on their way to the poll, but also to taste the College beer while
passing. For several days, it is said, the Hall was filled with “a
smoking, drinking, expectorating crowd,”—a spectacle which it is indeed
difficult to conjure up in the decorous circumstances of contemporary
academic life.

But let that pass. The interest of a college—of Exeter as of any other
college—depends, not upon the proceedings of the vulgar herd, but upon
its association with names which have left a trail of glory behind them.
In the days when Exeter was, as Wood says, “debauched by a drunken
governor,” and in the days immediately before and immediately after that
deplorable debauchery, the most conspicuous Exeter names are hardly names
which the plain man recognises at the first glance; but the nineteenth
century introduces names worthy of remark in more than one department of
endeavour.

Let “Parson Jack” come first.

To students of the Clergy List he is the Reverend John Russell, Perpetual
Curate of Swymbridge. To the West Country he is “Parson Jack”—the
hunting parson who kept the hounds and defied the Bishop who bade him
give up keeping them: a man, no doubt, of more energy than intellect,
but a clergyman—he would not have thanked any one for calling him a
priest—whose parishioners carefully minded what he said, holding, it may
be, that so good a judge of a horse must be an equally good judge of a
religion.

Parson Jack won no laurels for his College in the schools, being
contented with a pass degree; but it is said that the supper-party at
which he bade the College farewell was the noisiest supper-party ever
given within College walls, and that, as this chronicler knows, is saying
a good deal. For, if he had not distinguished himself at his books, he
had at least distinguished himself with his fists, in circumstances
graphically described by his biographer.

A certain gentleman-commoner named Gordon, addicted to the society of
out-college men, had, it appears, been boasting in hall of the superior
prowess “with the gloves” of some friends of his at Christ Church. A
certain Denne, lately from Eton, withstood him, saying: “Bring your three
best men from Christ Church to my rooms, and if they can only stand up
in a fair set-to against three of Exeter, we’ll give your heroes full
credit for all you say of them, but not till then.”

Such a challenge, of course, could not be declined; and while Gordon
was accepting it on behalf of his out-college friends, Jack Russell,
overhearing the conversation, rose from his place and volunteered his
services.

“Don’t forget me, Denne,” he said. “I’ll be one of the three, mind that,
and the sooner we meet the better.”

So the meeting was arranged, and the result of it may best be given in
the words of Russell’s biographer:

“Russell was deputed to open the ball, the antagonist selected
to meet him being the second best of the Christ Church lot. It
was a brisk set-to while it lasted, but evidently a one-sided
affair from beginning to end; for Russell’s long reach, and
quick, straight blows, which fell with tremendous thuds on his
adversary’s visage, brought the trial to a close in little more
than ten minutes.

“The latter, admitting himself over-matched, then declined the
unequal contest; while Russell, self-reliant and still “fresh
as paint,” refused to take off his gloves, calling stoutly
for the next man to come on. Denne, however, interposed, and
would have his turn; going in first with No. 1, then No. 3, and
finally polishing them both off with as much ease as if they
had been two old women.

“‘Now,’ said Russell, addressing Gordon aside, ‘I think you had
better take your three fellows home; and don’t make such fools
of them again.’”

Another hero who flourished at a slightly later date in the same field of
prowess as Parson Jack was James Whitehead Peard. He had “the shoulders
of a bull,” and when he played his part in one of those town and gown
rows of which mention has just been made in the account of Merton, the
town, with one accord, fled before him. He was to become Colonel Peard,
to distinguish himself in a revolution in Italy, and to be known to
the whole world as Garibaldi’s Englishman. At Exeter, however, he was
principally a boating man. He rowed against Cambridge; and at a time
when, as the Rev. J. Pycroft has related, “the dons held the boat in
abhorrence and considered any man belonging to it as keeping rather
questionable company,” he insisted that rowing was not only a manly but a
moral recreation.

In proof of his claim, he submitted the rules of the Boating Club to Mr.
Richards, then a tutor, and afterwards the Rector, pointing out that
they forbade to men in training the indulgences which one is accustomed
to couple in the pentameter line of elegiac verse as “_Bacchus et alma
Venus_.” Whereupon Mr. Richards fell upon him crushingly.

“Exactly,” he said, “as I have always maintained. These rules show
plainly and are a written confession of the wild character of the men for
whom you can anticipate the necessity of such fines; no decent men would
want such rules.”

Let us hope that modern boating men, at all events, are virtuous by
instinct and need no laws to keep them so; and then let us cull a few
other Exeter names, illustrious in other fields.

* * * * *

James Anthony Froude was elected a Fellow of Exeter from Oriel, in the
days when the Tractarians seemed likely to succeed in their great task
of turning Oxford upside down. More brilliant than industrious in those
days, he had only taken a Second; but he had the clean-cut intellect
which “penetrates through sophisms, ignores commonplaces, and gives to
conventional illusions their true value,” and it was inevitable that,
while looking for his way in life, he should come into violent collision
with the Obscurantists. He did so on at least two notable occasions.

He began life in the shadow of his brother’s greater name and of the
expectation that he would adopt his brother’s point of view and echo
his brother’s opinions. Richard Hurrell Froude—a most imperious and
dictatorial personage—had bullied him into seeming acquiescence in his
doctrines. For the time being he presumably believed that he believed in
them; and his vivid literary gifts marked him out as an ideal contributor
to Newman’s projected series of “Lives of the Saints.” Newman wanted to
establish the continuity of miracle within the Church; and he regarded
Froude as a man credulous of miracles, and a dialectician capable of
making out a good case for them. His instructions to his contributors
were, not to try to find out whether the alleged miracles had really
happened or not, but, in effect, to accept as many of them as a man could
swallow without making himself too conspicuously ridiculous.

Froude accepted the commission; and there is no reason to doubt that he
accepted it in good faith. The truth, however, was too strong for him;
the evidence was too weak; and he had a turn for biting irony which he
could not suppress. Saint Neot was his subject, and he ended his study
with the remarkable sentence: “This is all, and perhaps rather more than
all, that is known of the life of the blessed Saint Neot.” It was as
if he had played a practical joke on Newman; and there were those who
considered that to play practical jokes on Newman was almost as bad as
laying a profane hand on the Ark of the Covenant. Newman himself was
almost certainly of that opinion; but Protestantism “will out,” and
Froude was a Protestant in grain, and was to become something more than a
Protestant when he matured.

He first matured into a deacon of the Church of England; but that meant
nothing. The College Fellows of those days took orders as normally as
they took their degrees, and without making more ado about it. There was
no more a question of a “call” to be a shepherd of souls than of a “call”
to be a Master of Arts. In travelling so far, Froude was only travelling
the common road. The desire to divagate from it did not come to him
until later; and, even so, no one would have troubled much about his
divagations if he had not chosen to divagate in print.

Like most of the other “honest doubters,” however, he could not keep
his honest doubts to himself. He wrote and published “The Nemesis of
Faith,” and then the fat was in the fire. The publication cost him his
fellowship, and the book was burnt. The latter incident is famous, and
has been magnified by legend. The belief prevails that there was a
solemn and formal _auto da fé_ under the direction of the University
authorities. There was, in fact, only a private display of theological
temper on the part of the Rev. William Sewell.

Sewell, afterwards the founder of Radley School, was a High Churchman,
encompassed by all the limitations of that intellectual state. He was
also a discursive lecturer who stood with his back to the fire, and made
Aristotle’s “Ethics” or Virgil’s “Georgics” an excuse for propounding his
opinions on matters of topical interest. He did not set out to talk about
“The Nemesis of Faith,” but came to talk of it by accident, and then
proceeded to denounce it with the vigour of a _Quarterly_ or _Saturday
Reviewer_. Finally he inquired whether any member of his audience
possessed a copy of the book. One of them admitted that he did.

“Then bring it here, sir,” thundered Sewell.

It was brought; and Sewell stripped off the binding, tore the pages
across, pitched the mutilated volume into the flames, and stood over it,
thrusting at it with the poker until it was burnt to ashes.

Such was the actual occurrence, as related by Mr. Boase, who was present
at the lecture at which it took place. There was no public holocaust,
but only a spasmodic explosion of wrath on the part of a single excited
theologian. The act, however, gained piquancy from the fact that Froude
was Sewell’s colleague. The witnesses went out, and told what they had
seen; and the story lost nothing in the telling. In after years, as
we have seen, some of them recovered their historical consciences and
reduced it to its true proportions; but, at the moment, they indulged
their mythopœic faculties to their hearts’ content, and erected an
enduring edifice of romance on a scanty foundation of fact.

And Froude, at any rate, had to go. The Rector and the Fellows asked him
whether he would prefer to resign or to be turned out; and he elected to
resign. The Visitor of the College—the Bishop of Exeter—applauded their
action; and Froude’s father, the Archdeacon of Totnes, “conceiving,” as
Mr. Herbert Paul puts it in his Life of Froude, “that the best remedy for
free thought was short commons, stopped his son’s allowance.” Such was
the message to him of “the last enchantments of the Middle Ages.”

* * * * *

Time passed. R. D. Blackmore, the immortal author of “Lorna Doone” took
his degree at Exeter in the forties. He and Charles Reade, of Magdalen,
of whom more in due course, are without dispute the two greatest
novelists whom Oxford has yet produced; and there shall be no attempt
here to prove that either of them was greater than the other. Has it not
been written that, to a West Countryman, “Lorna Doone” is “almost as
good as clotted cream”? Did not the author reply that he was too fond
of clotted cream not to be gratified by the compliment, but also too
fond of it to admit that any book whatever could successfully challenge
comparison therewith? He was a modest man, however—so modest that hardly
anything is known of him; and as no stories of his quiet passage through
Exeter have been preserved, we may pass on to our next interesting names,
which are those of William Morris and Edward Burne Jones.

They came up in 1853; and Morris’ biographer, Mr. J. W. Mackail, has
given a good deal of offence by his supercilious account of the internal
condition of Exeter at that period. Himself a Balliol man, he appears to
take the view that outside Balliol there is no academical salvation.

That is a proposition which we need not turn aside to discuss at any
length. It is neither to be desired nor to be expected that all the
colleges of the University should resemble each other like peas in a pod;
and it is not to be denied that there are some functions which Balliol
fulfils better than Exeter. It dry nurses its men with more success,
takes greater pains to make them conform to a type, and then lays itself
out to magnify the type to scale. The result is conspicuous in the higher
ranks of the most efficient Civil Service that the world has ever seen.
It is an excellent system for its purpose; but it has its limitations,
and is not equally suitable for all men, as even Jowett recognised.

Jowett doubted whether, if a poet came to Balliol, Balliol “would be able
to hold him.” But Balliol held Swinburne; and the real danger is rather
lest Balliol should turn a poet into a Judge of the High Court, or a
stiff and starched Permanent Under-Secretary. Perhaps it would be a good
thing for many poets to be thus transfigured; but it is not good for all
of them; and it would not have been good for William Morris. What Morris
wanted was to be left alone and not worried by pastors and masters who
“generalise” and try to compel exceptional men to walk in conventional
paths. Whatever may be the case now, Exeter was, in no distant past, a
College in which a man might go his own way without excessive admonition;
and William Morris was indubitably one of the successes of the system.

His tutor described him as “a rather rough and unpolished youth who
exhibited no special literary tastes or capacity but had no difficulty in
mastering the usual subjects of examination.” The opinion which he, on
his part, entertained of tutors generally was not more flattering. “The
name of ‘don,’” says his biographer, “was used by him as a synonym for
all that was narrow, ignorant, and pedantic.” But the dons did him a good
turn, though neither he nor they knew it at the time, by not going out of
their way to disturb his view of them, their interests, and pursuits.

Except for Burne Jones, indeed, he had hardly a friend in his own
College. With the reading men and with the uproarious men—and Exeter has
always had its share of these—he had equally little in common. Men called
him “Topsy” on account of his uncombed woolly head of hair; he accepted
the nickname and was not to be driven by it into tidiness. Art, and
beauty, and antiquities, were the things which interested him; and Oxford
was for him, not a seat of learning, but “a vision of grey-roofed houses,
and a long, winding street, and the sound of many bells.”

His rooms were in Hell Quad, and his favourite diversion was talking.
Burne Jones tells how, on one occasion, “Morris came tumbling in and
talked incessantly for the next seven hours and a half.” Most of his
talking, however, was done at Pembroke, where he had two great friends:
Faulkner, the mathematician who is said to have been ploughed in Divinity
for including the Prophet Isaiah in a list of the Twelve Apostles, and
Dixon, afterwards Canon Dixon, the pre-Raphaelite poet. He paid his
tribute to the influence of his ecclesiastical surroundings by talking of
devoting his entire private fortune of £900 a year to the foundation of
a monastery; but he happily was wise in time. And presently his friends
discovered his genius, though the dons did not.

“He’s a big poet,” Burne Jones one day exclaimed.

“Who is?”

“Why, Topsy.”

So he took his degree, and went down; and the rest of his career does
not concern us, except for the beginnings of his association with Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, who was brought up to Oxford to decorate the ceiling
of the Union Debating Hall. He and Morris and Burne Jones were always
together in Rossetti’s rooms in George Street; and a fourth member of
their coterie was Swinburne of Balliol, the poet whom Balliol “held.”

They talked and talked interminably. Their talks were the beginning
of that pre-Raphaelitism which was, in due course, to develop (or to
degenerate) into the Æsthetic Movement; and the most picturesque incident
of their alliance took place when they set out together to accept an
invitation to dine at Christ Church.

Morris, who had with difficulty been persuaded to dress for the
banquet, happened to remove his hat, and it was then discovered that
the connection between art and letters was symbolised by an enormous
daub of blue paint on his hair. But for that accident, and the hurried
visit to the barber which followed it, he would have sat at high table,
illuminated like a saintly figure in a missal or a stained-glass window.

ORIEL COLLEGE

Edward II.’s almoner, Adam de Brome, obtained his charter for the
foundation of a new College at Oxford in 1324. Originally called the
House, or Hall, of the Blessed Mary at Oxford, it took the name of
Oriel from La Oriole—a tenement included in the premises. Among its
endowments was included the advowson and rectory of the Church of St.
Mary—a fact of which we shall perceive the importance as we proceed.
It was a small College, and a poor one, but it was to have its hour of
signal intellectual pre-eminence, though not until the early days of the
nineteenth century. Before that time the noteworthy names are scarce.

[Illustration: ORIEL COLLEGE.

[To face p. 86.]

The most noteworthy of them all, if one could be sure of one’s facts,
would be that of Sir Walter Raleigh. Sir Walter is said to have been
an Oriel man, and one likes to think that he was—if only to furnish an
Elizabethan Oriel precedent for Cecil Rhodes; but the proofs offered are
inconclusive. Of the undisputed _alumni_ of the darker ages the greatest
was Bishop Butler, of the “Analogy”—a precedent, perhaps, if one is
looking for precedents, for those Oriel “Noetics” of whom we shall have
to speak; but Oriel owes more to Butler than Butler owed to Oriel. He
is a witness—like Gibbon of Magdalen and Adam Smith of Balliol—to the
inefficiency of Oxford teaching in the eighteenth century.

“We are obliged,” Butler wrote, “to mis-spend so much time here in
attending frivolous lectures and unintelligible disputations that I am
quite tired out with such a disagreeable way of trifling.”

He also threatened to leave Oxford and migrate to Cambridge, though, as
the historian of Oriel writes, “it saves the blushes of an Oxonian to
reflect that the migration was never carried out.” That is all that can
be said, however, for that is all that is known; so we will leave Butler,
and hasten on to the really interesting epoch.

* * * * *

The fame of Oriel, at the time when Oriel was famous, depended upon
the distinction of its Fellows. The Statutes allowed more latitude to
the electors there than at most of the other colleges. They were not
restricted in their choice to their own men, to their founders’ kin,
or, except in the case of a few specific fellowships, to candidates
from particular counties. A few happy selections made the tuition
exceptionally efficient. The reputation for efficiency attracted a
steady supply of good men. The attraction was the greater because the
electors chose for themselves, on principles of their own, and were but
little, if at all, influenced by records of successes gained in other
examinations. The ideal man for them, they said, was a man whose mind
was “an instrument and not a receptacle”; and they often, for that
reason, preferred men who had taken seconds to men who had taken firsts,
and their preference was generally justified by developments. Whately,
Newman, Matthew Arnold, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Richard Hurrell Froude
all took seconds, and became Fellows of Oriel.

An Oriel fellowship became, in that way, like a Balliol scholarship,
the real “blue riband” of the University. It marked a man, not as a
precocious scholar, but as an intellectual force—a man who was expected
to make his mark on thought. Oriel, in consequence, came to be
recognised as a great intellectual centre—the seething source of the new
ideas which Oxford would presently diffuse through England. That was the
great and golden age of the Oriel Common-room. It began under Provost
Eveleigh, who was jointly concerned with the Master of Balliol and the
Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools. It
continued under Coplestone, who resigned to become Bishop of Llandaff in
1826. It came to an end, some time in the forties, under Hawkins.

The golden age, however, ought really to be divided into three golden
ages, which ran into each other, but must here be glanced at separately.
The first period is that of the so-called “Noetics,” who had Whately
for their prophet and leader. The second is that of the Tractarians—the
period when the influence, first of Keble and then of John Henry Newman,
was paramount. The third, following on the secession of some of the
Tractarians to Rome, and the defeat, so far as Oxford was concerned, of
those who remained in the Church of England, may be called the period
of the Honest Doubters. The names belonging to it, which all the world
knows, are those of Clough and Matthew Arnold. First, then, of the
“Noetics.”

The word “Noetic” has gone out of use. Our own generation hardly knows
what it means; and perhaps its meaning was not very precise, even when it
was bandied freely. If we render it “Intellectuals”—with a capital I—we
shall get as near to it as we need to go; but we must also remember that
the Noetics flattered themselves on being, above all things, logicians.
It was a common saying, in the Oxford of their time, that the Oriel
Common-room “stank of logic.”

Provost Eveleigh, whom we have mentioned, was not exactly a Noetic
himself, but it was his policy which brought the Noetics together at
Oriel. He was the first Provost who insisted that the College should make
a proper use of its freedom in the choice of Fellows. The tendency of the
times was to use that freedom to serve the ends of private friendship,
and bring clubbable and convivial men together. Eveleigh took the line
that intellectual distinction was of more account than good manners or
geniality in social intercourse. There were those who said that, by doing
so, he made the Oriel Common-room a bear-garden; but that is only a way
of saying that it focussed heat as well as light.

Coplestone, afterwards Bishop of Llandaff, Hampden, afterwards Bishop
of Hereford, Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, Arnold of Rugby,
Hawkins, presently to be Provost, Baden-Powell, Savilian Professor of
Geometry—these are the principal Noetic names. They formed no definite
school of thought; they had no common body of doctrine. Some of them were
more noetic than others, and one or two of them ended by relapsing into
reactionary ways. Some of them, again, were very polished, while others
were very rough diamonds. But they were, all of them, very clever, and
knew it, and liked other people to know it. They brought the dry light
of logic to bear upon ecclesiastical and other conundrums. Liberals in
theology, equally contemptuous of High Church aridity and oleaginous
Evangelicanism, they liked to express their Liberalism in terms of robust
and aggressive common sense.

Arnold and Whately are perhaps the only two of them whose names now live;
and Arnold, of course, made his fame elsewhere than at Oxford. Whately,
however, was a tutor at Oriel for a considerable time, and afterwards
became Principal of St. Alban Hall. He was a Bohemian of Bohemians,
an eccentric of eccentrics, the least donnish of dons, and the most
carelessly defiant of all academical etiquette. The Provost of Oriel, who
hated tobacco, was once shocked to discover him on the roof of Oriel,
smoking a cigar among the leads.

In costume, too, as well as in conduct, Whately outraged the prejudices
of his fellow-men. It is related that, when there were holes in his
archiepiscopal silk stockings he neither bought new ones nor sent the
old ones to be darned, but tried to conceal the deficiencies by affixing
black sticking-plaster to his calves. At a time when other dons were
never seen in Christ Church meadows except in cap and gown, he walked
there in his ordinary attire—described as consisting of “pea-green coat,
white waistcoat, stone-coloured shorts, flesh-coloured stockings.” He
took a number of dogs with him on his walks, and trained them to climb
trees and drop into the Cherwell; and when Coplestone accompanied him,
as he sometimes did, that very dignified man was quite appalled by his
proceedings.

“Whately,” said Coplestone in a pained tone, “really forgot himself
during our walk this afternoon; he actually, while in sight of other
passengers, picked up a stone and threw it at a bird.”

In the lecture-room, again, Whately’s deportment was all his own. He
lectured, lying on his back, on a sofa, with his legs dangling over the
end of it, puffing a large pipe. It was in that attitude, no doubt,
that he delivered himself of his famous aphorism that “woman is a
creature that cannot reason and pokes the fire from the top”—an alleged
example, of course, of definition _per genus et differentiam_. As for
his deportment at the breakfast-table, it is recorded that “he would
scatter tea-leaves over the table while he talked, and made rings on
the tablecloth with the wet bottom of his teacup”; while an account
of his demeanour in drawing-rooms may be borrowed from Mr. Tuckwell’s
“Reminiscences of Oxford”:

“I remember,” Mr. Tuckwell writes, “my mother’s terror when he
came to call. She had met him in the house of newly-married
Mrs. Baden-Powell, who had filled her drawing-room with the
spider-legged chairs just then coming into fashion. On one of
these sat Whately, swinging, plunging, and shifting on his seat
while he talked. An ominous crack was heard; a leg of the chair
had given way; he tossed it on to the sofa without comment, and
impounded another chair.”

It was while Whately was a tutor of Oriel that Newman was elected a
Fellow, and the two men saw a good deal of each other. Newman, in those
days, might have been described, as Lord Morley during his Lincoln days
has been described by one of his unauthorised biographers, as “somewhat
of a mooning evangelical.” He had lately been converted, in strict
accordance with the evangelical programme; and Whately decided to take
him in hand, wake him up, and teach him to think for himself. He did so,
though with results quite different from those which he anticipated; for
he was not other-worldly enough for Newman. Newman thought that he lacked
spirituality and inwardness—that he had too much common sense and too
large an appetite. He preferred the influence of the saintly Keble and
the “bright and beautiful” Richard Hurrell Froude; and so he set out,
first as a disciple, presently as a leader, on the long, straight road to
Rome.

This brings us, of course, to the Tractarian Movement; and we will
glance, though space hardly suffers us to do more, at the part which
Oriel played in it.

* * * * *

Keble, Newman, Pusey, Richard Hurrell Froude—those are the great Oriel
names in this connection, though Pusey, at the time when he joined the
alliance, had left Oriel and become a Canon of Christ Church. Keble, if
one may draw invidious distinctions, was the saintliest of them, Newman
the most eloquent, Pusey the most learned, Richard Hurrell Froude the
most energetic. But for Pusey’s learning, the Movement might never have
taken seriously; but for Froude’s activity, it might never have been
started.

Whether Froude had any firm intellectual grip on religious problems
may be questioned; but there can be no disputing that he was a very
strong man, and a very practical man, and a man who descended into the
fray, filled with the joy of battle. He reminds one, a little, _mutatis
mutandis_, of the “boss” in American politics, directing and controlling
the “machine.” “Here,” one seems to hear him saying, “is something
movable—let us have a Movement. Here is a ball—let us set it rolling.”
And he did set the ball rolling, and it continued to roll, long after
his premature death, at the age of thirty-three, had saddened his
fellow-workers.

The Church, as it seemed to this little company, was being assailed
by dangers, alike from without and from within. It was neither
sufficiently respected nor sufficiently worthy of respect. Erastianism
and Indifferentism were in the air. There was a tendency, among Churchmen
as well as laymen, to regard the Church, not as a Catholic Apostolic
institution of Divine origin, but as “a branch of the Civil Service.”
Bishops had been mobbed in the riots which attended the passing of the
Great Reform Bill. A Liberal Statesman had presumed to warn bishops to
“set their house in order.” Superfluous bishoprics in Ireland—bishoprics
supported at the expense of a conquered people who did not want
them—were being suppressed; and that act of justice and common sense
was the “last straw.” Keble thundered at justice and common sense as
“national apostasy.” His thunder was the signal for the Movement, and its
first overt act.

What, then, did the Tractarians want? The complete definition of their
aims must be left to theological controversialists, and a layman can only
presume to sketch the roughest outline of their objects.

They insisted, in a general way, that the Church of England was the
creation, not of Parliament, but of God—that it was the duty of the State
to recognise the Church, and do it homage, and back it up, but that
these obligations carried with them no corresponding right to dictate to
the Church, or to interfere with it in any way. In doubtful matters of
doctrine the Church must decide and the State must accept its decisions.
The Church was the repository of truth, guaranteed by apostolic
succession, the sole interpreter of the teaching of the Bible, and of
its own traditions and formulæ; and the true interpretation of those
traditions and formulæ was—the interpretation which John Keble, John
Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and Richard Hurrell Froude chose to
give them.

The logical weakness of the position was obvious. The Tractarians were
not the Church, but only members, more or less worthy, of the rank and
file of the Church. Oriel College had no more right than Exeter Hall to
define the doctrines of the Church. The doctrines of the Church had been
defined, once for all, by Act of Parliament; and there was no authority
within the Church empowered, even by ecclesiastical law, to define the
definitions. It needed a secular tribunal to “dismiss hell with costs,”
as other English Churchmen were presently to discover; and a Church
possessing the authority which the Tractarians thought that a Church
ought to have was only to be found at Rome.

In due course the most logical of them realised that fact and ’verted.
They only worked their way slowly, however, to their conclusion; and,
in the meantime, remaining within the Church of England, they engaged
in vigorous propagandism. Their views were spread partly by the famous
Tracts from which they derived their name, partly by means of Newman’s
sermons in St. Mary’s Church, partly by their personal influence over
their juniors—partly also by their readiness to take the lead in the
persecution of the “unsound.” They were in the thick of the fight over
Hampden’s preferment, by Lord Melbourne, to the Regius Professorship
of Divinity; and it was one of them who denounced Hampden in a sermon
as “this atrocious professor” because he had proposed the opening of
the University to Nonconformists. Evidently they were too conscious of
meaning well to care to mince their words.

Space forbids us to follow all the vicissitudes of their fortunes. Enough
to say that they made rapid progress at first, but presently ran upon
the rocks. There was a beauty in their holiness which aroused widespread
and sympathetic interest; it was generally recognised that they were
making religion poetical; but points were discovered in their doctrines,
as they developed them, which a Protestant people could not accept even
from the saintliest of men. When they came to recommending “reserve” in
the communication of religious knowledge, and argued, in the notorious
Tract 90, that the language of the Thirty-nine Articles was compatible
with Roman tenets, there was an outcry through the length and breadth of
England. Arnold of Rugby called them “Malignants,” and other theologians
called them other names, not less offensive. Shouts of “No Popery!”
assailed them; and, in the midst of the din, the more clear-sighted of
them discerned how hopelessly impossible was the position which they had
occupied.

There was no way of escape for them from the Erastian net. Whatever the
Church of England ought to be, it actually was, among other things, a
branch of the Civil Service. The Tractarians were merely junior members
of the Civil Service, trying to ride rough-shod over the senior members;
and the heads of departments—which is to say the bishops—had no intention
of allowing their subordinates to dictate to them. They would neither
follow the Tractarians, nor allow the Tractarians to push them along in
front. On the contrary, they snubbed the Tractarians, called them to
order, exhorted them to sit down and hold their tongues, and practically
stopped the publication of the Tracts.

Nor is it easy to see what else they could have done. The Church of
England, by the very nature of its constitution, lacked a spiritual
head exercising jurisdiction in matters of faith. It could not, even
in theory, obtain such a spiritual head without the sanction of King,
Lords, and Commons; it could not hope, in practice, to obtain such a
spiritual head by any means whatsoever. If individual members of the
Church of England tried to recognise, or set up, such a head on their
own responsibility, they would cease to be members of the Church of
England, and would become Dissenters—just as much Dissenters as those
Congregationalists and Methodists and Baptists for whose exclusion from
the Universities they had fought with such bigoted bitterness. The only
Church so constituted that it could legislate for itself in spiritual
matters, binding its own members, and expelling them if they refused to
be bound, was the Church of Rome.

That discovery was the rock on which the Tractarian Movement split. Its
more logical adherents, scorning compromise, and “damning consequences,”
pursued the road to Rome. Others, like Pusey and Keble, held back in
the Church of England by the chain of old associations, either made the
best of things, or gravely pretended that the Church was something which
it was not. Others, like Mark Pattison, who had found his Tractarian
opinions an obstacle to his election to a fellowship, relapsed into
Indifferentism, and rejoiced that preoccupation with religion had ceased
to stand in the way of that sound learning which it was the main business
of a University to promote.

So that, so far as Oxford in general and Oriel in particular were
concerned, the Movement came to an end. It was, indeed, still to exercise
a certain æsthetic influence throughout the country, and it was to
colour the churchmanship of such bishops as Samuel Wilberforce, of
such statesmen as Gladstone, of such lawyers as Lord Selborne, of such
newspaper proprietors as Beresford Hope of the _Saturday Review_. It
was also to stimulate the ritualistic innovations which brought about
the Public Worship Regulation Act, and the persecution, and passive
resistance, of the Rev. Arthur Tooth. But Oxford—the intellectual Oxford
which counted—had done with it, and was to give itself over to Liberalism
and Honest Doubt instead.

* * * * *

The most notable of the Honest Doubters, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh
Clough, have already been mentioned. They were Arnold of Rugby’s most
brilliant pupils, and the pick of the Balliol scholars of their period.
Jowett once told John Addington Symonds that Clough was the only man
of his acquaintance whom he knew for certain to be a man of genius. On
Matthew Arnold’s remarkable talents and originality, no Oxford man,
writing for Oxford men, feels it in the least necessary to insist. Yet
both Arnold and Clough missed their firsts; and the blame for their
failure is commonly, and not altogether unjustly, attributed to the
Tractarians.

They came into residence in the midst of the Movement, and spent too much
of their time in considering whether they could move with it or not.
Clough, in particular, was, for a time, conscious of the attraction,
and felt himself, as he put it, “like a straw drawn up the draught of a
chimney.” He was not, indeed, drawn very far—a pupil of Arnold’s hardly
could be. His mind was so constituted that “religion which has grown
incongruous with intelligence” appealed to his credulity in vain. He
shrugged his shoulders and withdrew—but not before he had devoted to the
doctrine of the apostolical succession many precious hours which were due
to the Ethics of Aristotle. The result was the painful surprise which the
class list had in store for him—a surprise which seems to warrant the
saying that the great Tractarian leader was not only a second-class man
himself, but was the cause of second classes in others.

The winning of an Oriel fellowship redeemed Clough’s failure as it had
redeemed Newman’s. Like Newman, he became a tutor of the College; and his
connection with it, like Newman’s, was severed by the development of his
theological opinions. Newman had believed too much for Oriel, and Clough
believed too little. “I have given our Provost notice,” he presently
wrote to Arnold, “of my intention to leave his service at Easter. I feel
greatly rejoiced to think that this is my last term of bondage in Egypt.”
And he went on, speculating as to his prospects: “One may do worse than
hire oneself out as a common labourer; ’tis at any rate honester than
being a teacher of Thirty-nine Articles.”

So he went his way—another of the prophets, though by no means the last
of them, whom Oxford has first cast out with unimpeachable solemnity,
and then regretted and made an idol of. No one needs to be told that he
is the “Thyrsis” of Matthew Arnold’s famous poem; but a passage from
“Thyrsis”—a passage which conjures up the picture of the Honest Doubter
taking his honest doubts very seriously, eating his heart out, unable, as
yet, to attain to that “Stoic-Epicurean acceptance of life” which was the
ultimate philosophy of his friend—may fittingly conclude this section:

“It irk’d him to be here, he could not rest.
He loved each simple joy the country yields,
He loved his mates; but yet he could not keep,
For that a shadow lour’d on the fields,
Here with the shepherds and the silly sheep.
Some life of men unblest
He knew, which made him droop, and fill’d his head.
He went, his piping took a troubled sound
Of storms that rage outside our happy ground;
He could not wait their passing; he is dead.”

And so we leave him, and come to Cecil Rhodes; and it seems as though we
had taken a very long journey indeed.

* * * * *

Rhodes went up to Oriel, with some South African experience behind him,
in 1873. He rowed for Oriel, in 1873, spent his long vacations at the
Cape, and ultimately took a pass degree. To the Dean who warned him
that he might be ploughed if he persisted in cutting his lectures, he
replied, “Oh, I promise you I’ll manage it. Leave me alone, and I shall
pull through.” And the Dean left him alone, and in due course he did pull
through. It is also recorded of him that he looked so little like an
Oxonian that he was able to deceive even the Proctor. This is the story
as he told it:

“The Proctor,” he said, “took off his cap to me with the utmost
politeness, and I did the same to him. ‘Well, sir,’ said the Proctor to
me, ‘your name and college?’ ‘My name is Rhodes,’ I replied, ‘and I have
just come here from the Cape of Good Hope, and am making a short stay in
Oxford; and now, sir, may I ask your name and college?’”

Whereupon the Proctor apologised for what he supposed to be his mistake,
and Cecil Rhodes escaped unfined.

That is practically the only story that there is to be told of Cecil
Rhodes’s undergraduate days; and it would, of course, be superfluous to
relate how Oriel benefited by his will. One of the statements in that
will, however, was to the effect that he regarded the Oriel dons as
“children” in matters of finance; and if a man’s will were the proper
place for pleasant anecdotage, he might have illustrated and supported
that allegation by an Oriel story.

Once upon a time, it is recorded, the Bursar discovered an inexplicable
deficiency in his accounts of something between £1,800 and £1,900.
He knew that he had not embezzled the money, but he did not see how
his balance-sheet was to be explained to the auditors except on the
hypothesis that he had done so. In his distress he took his accounts to
the Common-room, and asked his colleagues to check the figures. They did
so, pored over them, and could find nothing wrong in them, until, at
last, the Provost solved the mystery.

“Good gracious!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see what you’ve done?”

“No, Mr. Provost, I don’t see any mistake.”

“Why, on the liability side you’ve added the date of the year to the
pounds, shillings, and pence!”

QUEEN’S COLLEGE

What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his
criticism—The boar’s head and the canticle—Another song on
the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black
Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford
Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy
Bentham—Walter Pater.

A Queen’s man observed lounging in the portico of his own College is
spoken of by Little Mr. Bouncer in “Verdant Green” as thus “openly
confessing his shame”; and the playful criticism doubtless mirrors the
public opinion of a period when social distinctions were marked by more
outward signs than at present.

There were, and indeed there still are, at Queen’s a considerable
number of scholarships and exhibitions tenable only by youths educated
at certain specified North Country grammar schools. Religion and sound
learning may or may not have flourished in these remote educational
establishments, but they certainly were not, in past times, schools of
polished manners. Civilisation, as it were, filtered through to them,
leaving a good many of its graces in the filter. The undeniable virtues
of their _alumni_ were of the rugged order. They asserted themselves
in the broad accents of the fells and dales, and, in the matter of
dress, they supported the home industries of provinces in which the
art of tailoring was in its infancy. Such is the inwardness of Little
Mr. Bouncer’s comment, set forth as expressing the view of the “very
gentlemanly set of men” of the early Victorian Brasenose.

[Illustration: QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL.

[To face page 106.]

All that, however, is ancient history. _Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur
in illis_, is doubtless the well-warranted reflection of the Queen’s men
of to-day. The old traditions which they still keep alive fall under the
head, not of manners, but of customs. There is the custom, for instance,
of blowing a trumpet to signify that dinner is ready; there is the custom
of using the founder’s horn as a loving-cup on gaudy days; there is the
Bursar’s custom of presenting every guest, on New Year’s Day, with a
needle threaded with silk, and wishing him prosperity in the formula,
“Take this and be thrifty.” Finally there is the Christmas Day custom,
which never fails to get a paragraph in the papers, of bringing in the
boar’s head to the accompaniment of music.

* * * * *

To this last custom, of course, a story is attached, which may or may
not be true. A scholar of Queen’s, we are told, went, in the remote past,
for a walk on Shotover, and there met a wild boar, which charged him.
Instead of running away, he thrust the Aristotle which he was reading
down the beast’s throat and choked it; and then he cut off its head and
brought it home for supper—an heroic act, emblematical of the triumph of
scholarship over brute force, which was duly celebrated in a canticle,
still sung every Christmas night in the College hall while the butler is
bringing in the delicacy, and running thus:

“The boar’s head in hand bear I,
Bedecked with bays and rosemary.
And I pray you, my masters, merry be yee,
_Quot estis in convivio_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._

The boar’s head, as I understand,
Is the bravest dish in all the land,
And thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us _servire cantico_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._

In memory of ye King of Bliss
Which on this day to be served is
_In Reginensi atrio_.

_Caput apri defero,_
_Reddens laudes Domino._”

Such is the carol which, at Queen’s, links the present with the past;
and if any reader desires a more modern song on the same subject, he may
find one in “The Oxford Sausage.” It may suffice to quote the last three
stanzas:

“So dreadful this bristle-backed foe did appear,
You’d have sworn he had got the wrong pig by the ear,
But instead of avoiding the mouth of the beast,
He rammed in a volume and cried—_Græcum est_.

In this gallant action such fortitude shewn is,
As proves him no coward, or tender Adonis,
No armour but logic, by which we may find,
That logic’s the bulwark of body and mind.

Ye squires, that fear neither hills nor rough rocks,
And think you’re full wise when you outwit a fox,
Enrich your poor brains and expose them no more,
Learn Greek and seek glory from hunting the boar.
Derry down, down, down, derry down.”

This boar’s head story is, beyond question, the most picturesque item
in the Queen’s annals. In more recent times the College has twice
been seriously damaged by fire, and each of the two outbursts invites
a marginal comment. One of them originated in the bursary, and was
attributed by the wits to the action of the Bursar in cooking the
accounts. On the occasion of the other, the Provost nearly perished in
the flames as a concession to dignity and decorum. The Fellows and
scholars, who had fled into the quadrangle, missed him, and wondered what
had become of him. He had, in fact, lingered in the blazing building to
complete his toilet. He did not emerge from it, like the others, in his
night-gear, but in his wig, and cap and gowns, and bands, and complete
ecclesiastical trappings. A magnificent spectacle truly! Having conjured
it up, we may turn back and call the roll of the names of which Queen’s
is most justly proud.

* * * * *

The eponymous Queen of the College was Philippa of Hainault, the
consort of Edward III., whose chaplain and confessor was the founder.
It followed, most naturally, that Edward the Black Prince was for a
time a student there, though no legends, whether of his studies or his
diversions, have been handed down. It was, at any rate, on quite other
fields than those of learning that the Black Prince was to win his fame;
and the first serious Queen’s man whose reputation really counts is
Wiclif.

Queen’s, it is true, has no exclusive claim to him. He was also, for a
period, Master of Balliol, and, for another period, Master of Canterbury
Hall—an extinct establishment on the site of the present Canterbury Quad,
at Christ Church. He is further said, though on doubtful evidence, to
have been, for a while, a Fellow of Merton. The brief years, however,
during which he occupied rooms at Queen’s were among the most important
of his life; for to those years belong the preparation and inauguration
of the first of the Oxford Movements.

Personal details are almost entirely lacking—personal details are nearly
always to seek in the biographies of the great men of the Middle Ages.
It may be that Wiclif was the student who thrust the Aristotle down the
throat of the wild boar. It may also be—and, on the whole, it is quite
as likely—that he was not. There is no evidence either way, and the
probabilities are nicely balanced. But he was, at any rate, the Morning
Star of the Reformation. He translated the Bible; he stood up against the
Pope; and he called upon the laity to reform the clergy. Nor was that
all. He also missed preferment through his zeal, and organised “poor
preachers” to spread the light which he had kindled.

Oxford, indeed, was in those days the only available centre for the
dissemination of a new idea. The light of Paris had temporarily paled,
and the light of Cambridge had hardly yet begun to shine; so that Oxford
was the most important of the stages in the pilgrimage of a wandering
scholar. Then, if ever, there was reason to hope that what Oxford thought
to-day England would think to-morrow. The machinery for bringing this
result about existed, and Wiclif set it in motion, “pressing the button,”
as we moderns say, in his room at Queen’s. The excesses of disciples who
joyously predicted the coming of a day when “priests’ heads would be as
cheap as sheeps’” no doubt outran his intentions; but it is worth while,
in view of current political conflicts, to note that this first Oxford
Movement was the occasion of an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the
House of Lords to usurp the privileges of the House of Commons.

The Archbishop of Canterbury proposed, the Lords passed, and the King
assented to a law to the effect, broadly speaking, that the “poor
preachers” should be arrested wherever found, and locked up in whatever
house of detention was most convenient, until they gave such an account
of themselves as satisfied Holy Church. The Commons represented that this
so-called Statute was not a Statute, since it had not been laid before
them. They demanded its withdrawal, and it was withdrawn; the privileges
of the Lower House being thus asserted, in the interest of an Oxford
Movement, as long ago as 1382.

Already at that date, however, the Movement had had its martyrs. Some
Fellows of Queen’s had been expelled as Wicliffites in 1376; and it
cannot be said that they had departed in a blaze of glory, for it appears
that they had taken with them the common seal, and some jewels and other
valuable property belonging not to them, but to the College. That, too,
may have been a picturesque proceeding; but the details are obscure, and
the subject cannot be discussed with profit.

* * * * *

Wiclif, of course, is eminent not only as a Reformer, but also as a man
of letters. His version of the Bible helped, no less than Chaucer’s
“Canterbury Tales,” to fix the English language; and so we are led on, by
a natural transition, to mention Wycherly, the dramatist, who was also a
Queen’s man, and Addison, and William Collins, the poet, who were both
tempted by the offer of demyships to migrate from Queen’s to Magdalen,
and Tickell, who contributed to Steele’s _Spectator_—Steele himself being
a Merton man—and William Mitford, the historian of Greece, and Jeremy
Bentham, whose “mark of everlasting light,” being “the greatest happiness
of the greatest number,” could hardly be said to be “above the howling
senses’ ebb and flow,” and Francis Jeffrey, the founder of the _Edinburgh
Review_, and Walter Pater, who is more interesting than any of them.

Jeremy Bentham is, perhaps, most memorable as the third of the great trio
of Oxonians who have “shown up” the inefficiency of Oxford University
teaching in the eighteenth century. The comments of Adam Smith on that
branch of the subject have already been quoted; those of Gibbon will
have to be quoted presently; those of Bentham, of Queen’s, may as well
be quoted now. He learnt at Oxford, he said, nothing except “mendacity
and insincerity.” He found his tutor, Joseph Jefferson, morose—“a sort
of Protestant monk,” who even forbade him to play the innocent game of
battledore and shuttlecock. His lectures, and the lectures of the other
tutors also, were “foolish,” teaching only “something of logical jargon”;
and Bentham listened even to the law lectures of the great Blackstone,
Fellow of All Souls, “with rebel ears.” Moreover, he tells us that he was
afraid of encountering ghosts on the solitary staircases of the College.

His own ghost, dreading other ghosts, is indeed one of the gloomiest
that one meets at Oxford. The pursuit of the greatest happiness of the
greatest number had not, in his college days, begun; and there was but
little happiness for “number one.” Bentham went up too young—he was only
thirteen; he was kept short of money, and he was badly dressed. “I wish
you would let me come home very soon,” he wrote to his father, “for my
clothes are dropping off my back”; and happiness is often a shy fugitive
when chased by a ragged man in the midst of more fashionably attired
companions. Indeed, the one service which Oxford rendered Jeremy Bentham
was to cure him of a taste for gambling. “They always,” he says, “forced
me to pay when I lost; and, as I could never get the money when I won, I
gave up the habit”—a statement which sheds a queerly lurid light upon the
conduct of the gamesters of Queen’s in the year 1761. They seem to have
bullied this lad of thirteen somewhat in the style of Flashman in “Tom
Brown.” We can only pity him, and leave him.

* * * * *

Of Pater, of course, there will be more to be said when we come to
Brasenose, where he won his fellowship and made his name. Even at
Queen’s, however, where his undergraduate days were passed, he did not
fail to make some mark. He was conspicuous, among other things, for
ugliness—an ugliness so extreme that it excited the sympathetic attention
of his friends, who formed themselves into a Committee to Consider what
could be Done for the Improvement of Pater’s Personal Appearance. A
suggestion that he should buy a new hat was discarded on the ground that
he could not be expected to wear his hat in bed. What was wanted, it was
agreed, was an irremovable addition to his features; and the Committee,
after taking all available evidence, reported in favour of a moustache.
The moustache, when ultimately grown, was at least a palliative. It was
no longer necessary for Pater, when examining himself in the mirror, to
exclaim that he would give ten years of his life to be better looking.
He acquired, according to Mr. Edmund Gosse, the aspect of a benevolent
dragon.

His intellectual outlook, however, was already beginning, even in those
days, to divide attention with his physical features. He combined a
sceptical disdain for the doctrines of the Church of England with an
æsthetic sympathy for its ritual; and he made no secret of either the
sympathetic or the intellectual attitude. His friends were interested,
intrigued, and ultimately excited. They watched his spiritual
development, much as Lausanne watched the spiritual development of
Sainte-Beuve, when he was lecturing there on the Jansenists, and Vinet
was expected to convert him to Protestantism. Some of them even ended by
quarrelling with him and renouncing him.

The trouble was that, having gone up to Oxford with a view of taking
Orders, he still proposed to take them, in spite of his effaced beliefs.
Others had done so, he said, so why should not he? And, suiting the
action to the argument, he asked the Bishop of London to ordain him.

The Bishop, not being in his confidence, was aware of no reason why he
should not do so; but Pater’s friend, McQueen—who is only famous because
he was Pater’s friend—resolved to stop the crime. He sought advice on
the matter from Canon Liddon, then Principal of St. Edmund Hall; and
Liddon’s answer was: “Write to the Bishop of London. You might be able
to prevent ordination, and if not you will have delivered your soul.” He
did write, and he did prevent ordination; and no doubt it was well, for
Pater’s sake no less than for the sake of the Church, that ordination was
prevented. Having said that, we will leave Pater until we meet him again
at Brasenose.

NEW COLLEGE

William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and
his elaborate statutes—The College depressed by too much
Founder’s kin—“Golden Scholars, Silver Bachelors, and Leaden
Masters”—Notable new College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry
Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden
Shuttleworth and others.

William of Wykeham, the founder of New College, was perhaps the greatest
pluralist in the history of the Church. Ecclesiastical benefices were
heaped upon him in unexampled profusion as the reward for services in no
sense of an ecclesiastical character. He served his King chiefly as a
Clerk of the Works—or perhaps one should say as a Chief Commissioner of
the Works—at Windsor and elsewhere; and the King, instead of paying him
an adequate salary, bestowed upon him prebends, canonries, deaneries, and
archdeaconries. No fewer than nine prebends were given to him in a single
year; he received three more prebends a year or two afterwards. While
holding them, he also held at least one deanery and two archdeaconries,
as well as several livings; and in the end he became Bishop of
Winchester. The story that he established himself in the royal esteem by
persuading his niece to become the King’s mistress may be the calumnious
invention of a later age; but it is evident, at any rate, that he was
more a man of the world than a Churchman, and only found that godliness
was great gain because he combined it with other qualities.

[Illustration: NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER.

[To face page 118.]

He was not himself a University man, but had left school early and
entered a notary’s office. Perhaps he was the more deeply impressed
with the value of “educational advantages” because he had enjoyed so
few of them. There are men who admire learning for that reason, just as
there are those who despise it on the ground that it unfits a youth for
walking in the wily paths of commerce; and William of Wykeham admired
it sufficiently to endow it in the grand style and on a great scale,
like the Rockefellers and the Johns Hopkinses of a later age and a newer
continent. He endowed Winchester School as well as New College—the former
to feed the latter, and “Manners makyth man” to be the motto of both; and
he gave his foundation both more elaborate buildings and more elaborate
Statutes than any previous college had had, with the result that Wiclif
sneered at him as a man “wise of building castles or worldly doing,
though he cannot read well his psalter.”

While the Warden of Merton lived in a “lodging” and kept only four
horses, the Warden of New College was to keep six horses and have a house
to himself. That was one of the founder’s splendid provisions. He also
provided that there should be no fewer than five Deans and three Bursars;
and he made many minor stipulations which have had an enduring influence
upon University development. His sense that his soul stood in sore need
of the prayers of the faithful impelled him to prescribe that daily
attendance at the chapel services—Masses, of course, in those days—should
be compulsory. He believed in a simple and serious life, and therefore
forbade his scholars to play games. Not only “wrestlings, dances, jigs,”
&c., were forbidden by his regulations, but the prohibition extended to
games of “ball” and games of chess; while the interests of morality were
safeguarded by the direction that the College laundress should be “of
such age and condition that no sinister suspicion can, or ought to, fall
on her.” Finally, by enacting that there should be special teaching in
the College in addition to the teaching provided by the University, he
foreshadowed what is known as the “tutorial system.”

The Statutes, it must be admitted, were, on the whole, in advance of
the times in which they were drafted. The founder had clear and, in the
main, sound ideas on the subject of educational reform. He understood,
for one thing, that classical Latin was better than monkish Latin; and
he understood that, in order to shape students as he wished, it was
necessary to catch them young. That was the significance of the linked
endowment of the College and the School; and no doubt it seemed to
William of Wykeham only an act of common justice that, in the selection
of recipients of his bounty, a preference should be shown to “founders’
kin.”

But he did not foresee. Or perhaps it would be juster to say that he
foresaw, and provided for, too much. The world moved, and New College
could not move with it because it was tied up and entangled. The
restrictions on the diversions of the students did not, of course, matter
much. They could be, and were, ignored, when it was recognised that they
were obsolete and unprofitable. The limitation of the choice of students
to a narrow field, and the provision of an income for them for life
whether they worked or were idle, had more pernicious consequences. It
condemned New College, in spite of the magnificence of its buildings, to
insignificance in the life of the University; and it now makes the task
of the historian in search of interesting _alumni_ an extremely hard one.

Nowadays, let it be ungrudgingly admitted, New College is prosperous
and successful. Its scholars, and also its Fellows, have distinguished
themselves in many ways, and have won particular distinction in the
highest walks of journalism. Mr. Buckle, the editor of the _Times_, was
a scholar of New College, and so was Mr. E. T. Cook, who successively
edited the _Pall Mall Gazette_, the _Westminster Gazette_, and the _Daily
News_. Mr. W. L. Courtney, whose signature is familiar to every reader
of the _Daily Telegraph_, was a Fellow; as was also Viscount Milner,
a journalist before he became a pro-consul. In literature, too, the
College has been represented by Lionel Johnson—one of the most subtle and
delicate poets of our generation, though one whose course was brief like
that of Young Marcellus.

But all those names are modern names, occurring subsequently to the
cutting of the entanglement by the University Commissioners. To plunge
into the past is to plunge into a very different state of things. We
quickly get back to a time when it was justly said of New College that
it had “golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden masters”—a time
when the College was famous, not for its output of learning, but for
its consumption of negus. There was once a dispute as to the comparative
merits of the negus of New College and of All Souls; and a jury of
Queen’s and Brasenose men who were invited to decide the question gave
a unanimous verdict in favour of the New College recipe. Balliol, where
Southey drank so much negus, was not in the competition.

The notable New College names in this dark age, and in the ages hardly
less dark which preceded it, are names which mean little to the
University and less to the community at large. There are the names of
some respectable divines among them, and even the names of some more than
respectable bishops—two, for instance, of the seven who stood up against
James II; but there is hardly a single name which burns like a beacon; as
does, say, the name of Shelley at University, or the name of Dr. Johnson
at Pembroke.

* * * * *

There is Sydney Smith; but of his Oxford career hardly anything is known
except that he had to get through it on an allowance of £100 a year, and
consequently could not afford to play his part in the dissipations of
the day. He took his degree a year before Southey came into residence at
Balliol, “got into debt to buy books,” and formed such a poor opinion of
his _alma mater_ that he never, throughout the remainder of his life,
ceased to sneer at her. When, for example, the Honours Schools were
instituted, he wrote:

“If Oxford is become at last sensible of the miserable state to which it
was reduced, as everybody else was out of Oxford, and if it is making
serious efforts to recover from the degradation into which it was plunged
a few years past, the good wishes of every respectable man must go with
it.”

And when he heard that a lady of his acquaintance was sending her son to
Oxford, his comment was:

“I feel for her about her son at Oxford, knowing, as I do, that the only
consequences of a University education are the growth of vice and the
waste of money.”

On which the only reasonable comment is that, if Sydney Smith had been at
another college, he might have written less vituperatively.

* * * * *

Another name which arouses some, though only a mild, interest is that of
Sir Henry Wotton, the diplomatist, who ended by becoming Provost of Eton.
He was not on the foundation, but was a gentleman commoner—though few
gentlemen commoners were permitted to enter at New College—and it may be
hoped that he behaved better there than he did afterwards, when he lived,
for a while, in the house of Isaac Casaubon, at Geneva. He was the great
scholar’s “paying guest”; and he not only went away without paying, but
pledged his host’s credit for the horse on which he took his departure.
Casaubon ultimately got the money, but not until he had written to nearly
every classical scholar in Europe to expose Wotton’s outrageous behaviour.

For the rest the stories which centre around New College are mainly
about celebrities whose celebrity is purely local. It would be possible,
of course, if reverence did not forbid, to speak at some length on the
alleged Spoonerisms of Canon Spooner; but most of those stories are
probably untrue. It cannot be true, for instance, that Canon Spooner,
at a dinner-party inadvertently stuck his fork into the white hand of
the lady sitting next to him, murmuring, “Excuse me, I think that is my
bread.” It is still less credible that Canon Spooner, when a lady of his
family was seeing him off at the railway-station, gave the lady sixpence
in mistake for the porter, and kissed the porter in mistake for the lady.
And who believes that Canon Spooner, setting out to propose the health
of “our dear old Queen,” found himself proposing the health of “our
queer old Dean” instead? The trail of the mythmaker is over all these
anecdotes; and indeed it is said that the fabrication of “Spoonerisms” is
a favourite undergraduate diversion on Sunday afternoons.

An earlier Warden, Dr. Shuttleworth, is famous for a remarkable poem
which he composed while a Winchester boy—an Address to Learning, which
ends with the often-quoted lines:

“Make me, O Sphere-descended Queen,
A Bishop, or at least a Dean.”

His prayer was answered, and he became Bishop of Chichester, and, in that
capacity, made Manning an Archdeacon. He was, however, an opponent of the
Ritualists, and so formidable a one that his death was saluted by Pusey
as “a visible token of God’s presence in the Church of England”; whence
it appears that Pusey worshipped a God whom he believed to be capable of
killing off Broad Churchmen in order that High Churchmen might be spared
the embarrassment of meeting them in controversy.

A few stories of Shuttleworth, and a few other stories of other New
College notables of the same generation, may be found in Mr. Tuckwell’s
entertaining “Reminiscences of Oxford.” There is the story, for instance,
of Lancelot Lee, the incumbent of the College living of Wootton, near
Woodstock.

“Coming out of church one day, he found two disreputable
vagabonds in the churchyard.

“‘What are you doing here?’

“‘Oh, sir, we are seeking the Lord.’

“‘Seeking the Lord, are you? Do you see those stocks? That is
where the Lord will find you if you stay here another minute.’”

Then there is the story of Christopher Erle, who held a living in
Buckinghamshire, in the immediate vicinity of Lord Rothschild’s estate.
It seemed to Erle, as it has since seemed to Mr. Lloyd George, that it
was possible to have “too much of Lord Rothschild,” and he suppressed him:

“It was Erle’s whim to dress carelessly; and the plutocrat,
walking one day with a large party and meeting his Rector in
the parish, had the bad taste to handle his sleeve and say,
‘Rather a shabby coat, Parson, isn’t it?’ Erle held it up to
him—‘Will you buysh? Will you buysh?’ There ensued an _exitus
Israel_, and Erle walked on, chuckling and victorious.”

But perhaps the most characteristic of the stories is that of the highway
robbery:

“Some men were going to the Abingdon ball; and in the
common-room the conversation turned on a highway robbery
recently perpetrated near Wheatley. The ball-goers talked
valiantly of their own courage, contemptuously of brigand
dangers; their fly was announced, and off they drove. Coming
home, they were stopped in a dark part of Bagley Wood by
two masked men, one of whom held the horses’ heads, while
his mate pointed a pistol into the fly with the conventional
highwayman’s demand. Meekly our gallant travellers surrendered
money, watches, jewellery. One pleaded for a ring which had
belonged to his old mother; the deceased lady was consigned
to Tartarus, the ring was taken, and the marauders rode away.
Great commiseration was shown to the victims when they told
their tale, great activity displayed by the police; until on
going into Hall the next afternoon, they saw lying in a heap
on the centre of the high table the abstracted valuables,
including the maternal ring, while mounting guard over them
was a broken candle-stick which had done duty as a pistol. The
two practical jokers had ridden to the wood, tied their horses
to the trees, waited for the travellers, and played the wild
Prince Poins.”

And so forth; for all the best New College stories are stories of that
sort—stories of which the heroes are jesters or eccentrics rather than
men of light and leading. The future, no doubt, will be much richer in
intellectual glory; but the College has had but a short time in which to
assert itself since the University Commissioners released it from William
of Wykeham’s Statutes.

LINCOLN COLLEGE

A small College with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S.
MacColl and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the “Sporting
Times”—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the
Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark
Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His
abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of
undergraduates.

For a small College—and it has always been one of the smallest—Lincoln
is associated with a goodly list of outstanding names, notable in
very diverse departments of endeavour. Mr. D. S. MacColl, of the
National Gallery, is, perhaps, the most distinguished of its recent
representatives. He won the Newdigate; and is said to have won it, as
Dean Burgon did, by the supreme merit of a single line. Burgon’s striking
line was, as all the world remembers:

“A rose-red city—half as old as time.”

To do full justice to Mr. MacColl’s line one must also quote the few
lines which precede it:

“But better still, in slumber-slanting ease,
To be beside the falling of the seas,
To listen and to listen till the tune
Of all the life of all the afternoon
Deepens to one note of a long distress—
_The monotone of everlastingness_.”

To quote Mr. MacColl, however, is to begin at the end. There are earlier
names which also scintillate with varying degrees of brilliance, and
make their appeal to hero-worshippers of various temperaments. The
most remarkable are those of John Wesley, “Ideal” Ward, more commonly
associated with Balliol, where he held a fellowship until his conversion
to Roman Catholicism, Mark Pattison, Lord Morley, Cotter Morrison, and
“Shifter.”

* * * * *

It was a question, earnestly considered, whether “Shifter” should
be mentioned in these pages. The question was finally put to a
representative assemblage of literary men—only a minority of them from
Oxford; and the answer was unanimously in the affirmative. The name of
“Shifter,” it was agreed, was by no means to be treated as if it had been
“writ in water.” If it had ceased to be a household word, at any rate it
was remembered. His case was interesting, if only because he had arrived
at fame by a road not commonly travelled by modern Oxford men; and there
were those, it was felt, who would learn, with a sort of scandalised
astonishment, that “Shifter” was once Goldberg of Lincoln.

The present writer once met “Shifter,” and discovered that the vogue
of his pseudonym filled him with genuine pride. The meeting-place was
a printing office in the purlieus of Fleet Street. A diminutive man
of rather drowsy manner was sitting at the end of a long, bare table,
engaged in slow and careful literary composition. An impatient boy was
carrying off the sheets of his copy as he finished them. He looked up
with affability, yet with an air of self-importance, at the new arrival,
and introduced himself. “You know who I am, don’t you?” he said. “I’m
‘Shifter.’ I’m writing the Office Boy’s Diary”; and there followed
an invitation to partake of refreshment with him, after his task was
concluded. The invitation was accepted, and there ensued some talk of
Oxford—a place which, in those rather sordid surroundings, seemed very
far away.

Oxford, in fact, used to figure, from time to time, in “Shifter’s”
contributions to the sporting press. He liked to describe himself as the
_enfant terrible_ returning to the respectable bosom of _alma mater_ and
creating a sensation there. He spoke, in particular, of a “respectable
brother,” in residence at another College, whom he used to visit—and to
shock. The stock story was that he stayed out all night, and came back
to College with the milk, and threatened to report the milkman to the
College authorities for neglecting to mix rum with it.

Probably the story was untrue—such stories generally are. It reads like
the humorous invention of a “fanfaron of vice.” Of “Shifter’s” actual
career at Lincoln there are few authentic records except that he wore
plum-coloured clothes, and slopped about the quad in slippers. He might
easily, it is said, have been a good scholar if he had been industrious;
he was a very tolerable scholar in spite of his lack of industry, as,
indeed, were a good many members of the original team driven by the
famous “Master” of the pink _Sporting Times_. But the “Master” showed a
good many clever young men how the “fanfaron of vice” could make a living
out of the fanfaronade. Goldberg of Lincoln was one of the cleverest of
the young men who learnt the “Master’s” cynical lesson. He blossomed into
“Shifter,” and his name was more often in the mouths of men than those of
many worthier persons.

It is tempting to moralise; but the temptation shall be resisted—or very
nearly so. “Shifter” was not, after all, an absolutely unique Oxford
product. One can find Oxford parallels and Oxford precedents for his
case. There are several precedents in Elizabethan Oxford, among the wits
who came to town, and wrote for the stage, and died young as the result
of too much tavern life—George Peele of Christ Church, for example.
“Shifter” also died young, not, one fears, because the gods loved him,
being of the same year as Oscar Wilde, and Mr. A. D. Godley, and Mr. L.
R. Farnell, and Dr. Horton, the Hampstead preacher. His appeal, it must
be granted, was to the lower elements in our fallen nature; but at least
he appealed to them wittily, and not like the vulgarians of the _Winning
Post_. _Sit terra levis!_ One may wish that for him, though one would not
wish it for them; and then one may pass on, striking a pleasant note of
contrast, to the very different case of John Wesley.

* * * * *

Let us be fair to Wesley. Above all, let us avoid the easy error of
supposing that we shall be helped to draw the picture of his manner and
deportment by visiting the nearest Wesleyan chapel and listening to any
Wesleyan minister who may happen to conduct the service there.

The modern Wesleyan organisation is democratic in a sense in which the
Church of England is not. Its ministers are mostly men of the people,
fluent but shallow, good biblical scholars but not otherwise highly
educated, and lacking in social polish. Their accents are often broad;
their gesticulations are often violent; they are skilled in exhorting the
lower orders in language which the lower orders understand.

Perhaps that is as it should be; perhaps their limitations are included
among the sources of their strength. Their congregations often think so,
and say so. One may sometimes hear Wesleyan Church members accounting for
their preference for Wesleyan places of worship on the express ground
that Wesleyan ministers are not, as they themselves choose to put it,
“gentlemen.” The priest of the Church of England, they aver, patronises
the artisan and small shopkeeper and keeps them at a distance. The
Wesleyan minister treats them as his brothers and sisters, and takes tea
with them, in a friendly way, in their back parlours. As the arrangement
pleases him, and pleases them, no one else is called upon to criticise
it. The matter is only mentioned here for the purpose of removing a
possible misapprehension and pointing out that Wesley of Lincoln was not
that sort of Wesleyan.

Wesley of Lincoln, who had been at Charterhouse and Christ Church before
his election to a Lincoln Fellowship, was a gentleman and a scholar,
in the fullest sense of the words. He had as much of the Oxford manner
as had been invented in his time, and he was rather a reserved than an
effervescent man. One must picture him, to picture him rightly, as a
kind of High Church don, of studious habits and ascetic inclinations, a
little more anxious than the other dons to enroll undergraduates as his
disciples. One finds his closest counterpart in modern times, not in any
of the tub-thumpers of any of the denominational tabernacles, but in some
of the Canons of Christ Church—say Canon Pusey, or Canon King, or Canon
Liddon. He was the kind of man, in short, who, in slightly different
circumstances, might have inaugurated, not an evangelical revival, but a
Tractarian Movement.

In order to understand him, one has to understand, not only the England,
but also the Oxford of the eighteenth century. It is not necessary to
enter into the alleged “aridity” of that century; but it is important
to remember that it was a century in which spiritual problems were very
generally waved aside. And the tendencies of the country as a whole were
reflected in an exaggerated shape at Oxford.

Oxford was comfortable, and was taking no thought for the morrow. The
dons, being well provided for, liked to sit in coffee-houses and read
the papers, indolently jeering at the House of Hanover. It did not
occur to them to concern themselves with the salvation of their souls
or of the souls of their pupils. It hardly even occurred to them to
concern themselves with the education of their pupils. Gibbon’s tutor,
remembering that he had a salary to receive but forgetting that he had a
duty to perform, was, in spite of the exceptions which can be adduced,
a typical don of the date. Indifferentism, in short, was the note; and
enthusiasm, at Oxford, was regarded as the abomination of desolation
standing where it ought not.

Such was the scene on which Wesley entered. He came from a country
parsonage where, in spite of the general trend of theological thought,
the lamp of piety had been kept burning. It was more natural to him to
work than to be idle, and he was keenly conscious that he had a soul
to be saved. He did not quite know how to save it; but he had picked
up hints from the writings of Thomas à Kempis, Jeremy Taylor, and John
Law. On the whole he was inclined to think that the way of salvation lay
in doing as the Churchmen did, only more so, in redeeming the time by
industry, and in sedulously observing the ritual prescriptions of the
Book of Common Prayer.

He made the acquaintance of a small group of like-minded men. He, and his
brother Charles, and George Whitefield (of Pembroke), and James Hervey
(of his own College), who was to win fame by meditating among the tombs,
and one or two others, formed a Club. The rules of the Club, which was
called, in derision, the Holy Club, were merely to the effect that the
members must order their lives regularly, discharge all their duties
punctually, and receive the Sacrament at appointed intervals. Because
they were thus men of method, they were nicknamed Methodists. The name
had no more recondite origin than that. The actual thing—the spiritual
point of view distinctive of Methodism—was of later date. The young
Fellow of Lincoln and “those about” him were only feeling their way to
it. Far from being Dissenters, they were better Churchmen than their
neighbours; their purpose was not to rouse the country but to rouse the
Church.

Wesley, moreover, was, at this date, an Oxonian of the type that clings
to Oxford. He could not bear the thought of “going down,” even for the
purpose of taking a cure of souls. It was put to him that he ought, for
family reasons, to take over his father’s country living; but he raised
objections—just the sort of objections which it is natural for an Oxford
man to raise. He knew, he said, of “no other place under heaven, save
Oxford, where I can always have at hand half a dozen persons of my own
judgment and engaged in the same studies.” The sociability, that is to
say, of Oxford appealed to him. He enjoyed his position as the sovereign
ruler of a small coterie, even though that coterie was unpopular with the
rest of the University.

The University, in truth, had no case against the Methodists. If they
were zealots, they were not, as yet, schismatics. There was nothing to
be said against them except that they rose early, kept regular hours,
received the Sacrament as often as possible, visited the prisoners and
the sick, and lived economically in order that they might be able to
afford to be charitable—proceedings which it must have been exceedingly
difficult for other Churchmen to indict. Yet the University did, as a
matter of fact, dislike them; and its displeasure was justified by Dr.
Johnson, and was manifested in a variety of ways. “They were not fit,”
said Johnson, in his robust and ponderous way, “to be in the University
of Oxford. A cow is a very good animal in the field, but we turn her out
of a garden.” And there were others who said that the conduct of the
Methodists was only excusable if it could be assumed that they were mad;
others, again, who pelted them with mud when they were on their way to
church. It is worth while to remember that it was in the days when Oxford
was entirely in the hands of the orthodox that communicants were pelted
with mud near the porch of Saint Mary’s Church as a protest against the
strictness of their religious observances.

And there we may leave them, for the story of Methodism is much too long
a story to be repeated. How Wesley presently ceased to make broad his
phylacteries, and suddenly awoke to a sense of the supreme importance of
the “inward witness” to the Christian propositions, and founded the vast
organisation which numbered 12,000,000 adherents before his death—all
this is written in innumerable biographies and need not be re-written
here. Here it is enough to indicate the personality of the man: to point
out that he was no ranter, but a don on whom Oxford had set its mark—a
scholar, quiet, reserved, and dignified, though with an immense fund of
strength and energy in reserve. And perhaps one may conclude with a story
of his passage of arms with another Oxford man of a very different type—a
passage of arms in which his quick wit and dignified demeanour easily won
him the victory.

The place was Bath, and the time was near the beginning of Wesley’s
missionary journeys. A certain Nash of Jesus was there—the Nash of Jesus
whom the world knows as Beau Nash, the King of Bath. The two men met on a
narrow pavement, and one of them had to make way for the other.

“I never make way for a fool,” said Nash of Jesus, insolently holding his
ground.

“Don’t you? I always do,” replied Wesley of Lincoln, quietly stepping on
one side; and the world is agreed that it was Wesley of Lincoln who got
the best of that encounter.

And now leaving Wesley, we will evoke the memory of another notable
Lincoln man, Mark Pattison, so long the Rector of the College.

* * * * *

Mark Pattison won his Lincoln fellowship from Oriel; and he resembled
Wesley in beginning life as a High Churchman. He was Newman’s curate,
and, being much attached to Newman, very nearly accompanied, or followed,
him into the Church of Rome. He only failed to do so, according to the
commonly accepted story, because he missed the train, or the omnibus,
or whatever conveyance it was by which he had arranged to travel to
the place appointed for his “reception.” While waiting for the next
train or omnibus, it is said, he changed his mind and decided to
remain, provisionally at all events, a member of the Church of England.
Nominally he remained a member of the Church of England until the end;
but it was an open secret, confirmed by statements in his “Memoirs,” that
he believed in nothing in particular and did not believe very profoundly
even in that. He is one of the many men who have been credited with the
pregnant saying: “Nothing is new, and nothing is true, but it doesn’t
matter much.”

His reasons for not formally quitting the Church in which he had ceased
to believe need not detain us. He is said to have said that, as he had
taken Orders in good faith, he felt entitled to retain them through all
beliefs and none instead of facing an unpleasant alternative; but it
shall be left to casuists to estimate the value of that casuistry. The
really interesting thing to note is that, in later life, he looked upon
the years in which he had been religious in almost exactly the same light
as that in which the Methodists of whom we have been speaking looked upon
the years prior to their assurance of salvation. He came to think that
as a Christian—and more particularly as a Puseyite—he had lived in outer
darkness; and he despised, and almost hated, himself for having done so.

“Fanaticism,” he says, “was laying its deadly grip around me.” He speaks
of his “fury of zeal” and his “abject prostration of mind” and his
“degrading superstition,” and of the “time-wasting and mind-drowning
occupation” in which he was involved by his too close attention to his
devotional exercises. He adds that he once “got so low by fostering a
morbid state of conscience as to go to confession to Dr. Pusey”; and he
continues:

“Years afterwards it came to my knowledge that Pusey had told a fact
about myself, which he got from me on that occasion, to a friend of his,
who employed it to annoy me.”

Presently, however, he began to discover that the Puseyites were “not
intellectually equal companions,” and that Newman himself was a man
of limited philosophical acquirements—a man to whom “all the grand
development of human reason from Aristotle down to Hegel was a sealed
book.” So, though there was a struggle—due to “that profound pietistic
impression which lay like lead upon my understanding”—reason got its way,
and Pattison’s intelligence evolved. There was a day when he called on
James Anthony Froude, desiring “to sympathise with his scepticism for
the purpose of helping him through it”; but presently he travelled on
the same road that Froude had taken, and travelled farther on it. The
Tractarian became an Essayist and Reviewer. The Essayist and Reviewer
came to regard all religions as vain guesses at the answer of an
unanswerable riddle.

He enjoyed, in his later years, one of those great University reputations
which, recognised by instinct, and admitted by universal assent, do
not require to be based on visible or tangible achievement. It was
commonly assumed that he knew everything, not only on his own subject,
but on all subjects; also that he had thought out all problems and was
only restrained from throwing light on them because he despised his
fellow-creatures and resented their impertinent curiosity. He was too
much absorbed, in fact, in his thoughts to pay much attention to his
duties; and he ended his pilgrimage as a somewhat weird figure—somewhat
of an enigma to the old and a formidable terror to the young.

Undergraduates, in particular, were too often the objects of a scorn
which he was at no pains to hide. The undergraduates of his own College
lived in an agony of apprehension lest he should ask them to go for walks
with him; and it cannot be said that their fears were altogether without
warrant. He did not speak when walking, but waited to be spoken to; and
the consequences of speaking to him were incalculable—not unlike the
consequences of trying to make friends with some strange and dangerous
wild beast.

There is a stock story of an undergraduate who ventured to break the
embarrassing silence by contrasting the irony of Sophocles with the irony
of Euripides; but he only discovered that the irony of the Rector of
Lincoln was greater than either. “Quote, sir, quote,” was the Rector’s
only rejoinder; and as the timorous youth was not prepared with a
quotation, nothing further was said, on either side, on any subject,
for the remainder of the afternoon. But the undergraduate who confined
himself to simple topics which he did understand—the state of the
weather, for example—was handled still more roughly. “If that is all you
have to say, you are not a very intelligent young man,” was the retort
with which the Rector closured him.

ALL SOULS

Peculiarities of the Constitution—A College without
undergraduates—Court favourites jobbed into
fellowships—Fellowships bought and sold—All Souls Fellows
a link between Oxford and the outside world—Sir William
Blackstone—Edward Young—The song of the All Souls mallard and
the scandal connected therewith.

The founder of All Souls was Archbishop Chichele, who had been educated
on the foundations of William of Wykeham at Winchester and New College.
The souls which the name commemorates are those of the soldiers who fell
in Henry V.’s French wars—wars for which the Archbishop’s pugnacious
patriotism was very largely responsible. The distinctive feature of the
College is that it neither supports scholars nor harbours commoners,
its only undergraduate members being a sprinkling of Bible clerks.
The purpose of the founder, that is to say, was to endow study—not
to endow teaching; and the fact that the College was small prevented
undergraduates from creeping into it. There was no provision for their
instruction, and there was no room for them. A few commoners did, at one
time, obtain admission, but they were soon eliminated.

[Illustration: REREDOS, ALL SOULS CHAPEL.

[To face p. 145.]

Various consequences have followed from this state of things—some of
them good, and others not so good. The All Souls fellowships did not, in
practice, in the early days at all events, become the rewards of studious
virtue. They were regarded, on the contrary, as sinecures to be scrambled
for, to be jobbed into, to be bought and sold. No definite obligations,
unless it were of residence, attached to them; they were merely positions
in which a man might draw a living wage for doing nothing. Royal
favourites were pushed into fellowships, in the Stuart times, as a cheap
proof of royal favour, and fellowships could be purchased in the open
market, just like commissions in the Army—an abuse which was brought
about in this way:

When a resignation created a vacancy, the College co-opted a successor
to it; but the retiring Fellow shared with the other Fellows the right
to nominate a candidate. On the principle of “scratch my back and I’ll
scratch yours,” the tacit understanding was established that the retiring
Fellow’s candidate should always be elected. This was an opportunity for
any Fellow to offer to retire in favour of a particular candidate in
consideration of a money payment; and many Fellows availed themselves
of the opportunity. Hence the scandal of “corrupt resignations,” not
unknown, indeed, at other colleges, but specially gross and glaring at
All Souls, where it flourished long, and was not suppressed without great
difficulty.

Jobbery and corrupt resignations, in fact, combined to fill All Souls
with Fellows of a different stamp from the Fellows of the other colleges;
and the difference was, in some respects, for the better, and in other
respects for the worse. The Fellows, having no academic duties, were
idle; and Satan provided mischief for their idle hands. The Punishment
Book, and other official records, show them comporting themselves more
like junior than senior members of the University. We hear of several of
them being dropped upon for “noctivagation.” We find the Visitor calling
upon the Warden to “punish such of your Society as do spend their time
in taverns and ale-houses to the scandal of the House.” We discover a
representation that the College ale is too strong for students, and
that only small beer ought to be brewed there. We read that one of
the Fellows was reprimanded for “beating the Under-Butler.” Proof is
abundant, in short, that the College was by no means such a quiet resort
of industrious men as the founder had intended it to be.

Such were the drawbacks of the system; but it also, incidentally,
produced advantages. While many of the Fellows were worthless and
indolent persons, the loose mode of election and the total absence of
academic duties resulted in the introduction of a type of Fellow who
served as a link, just as we have noted that some of the Merton Fellows
did, between the University and the external world—the type of Fellow
whom the College porter appears to have had in mind when he replied
to the visitor who inquired whether the Fellows read the books in the
College library: “Lord bless you, sir! They don’t need to read books.
They’re gentlemen!”

“Well-born, well-dressed, and moderately educated,” is the hackneyed
description of a Fellow of All Souls. The candidates for fellowships, it
used to be said, instead of being put through an examination were invited
to dinner and given cherry-tart to eat; their fate depending upon the
manner in which they disposed of the cherry-stones. The story is told
of a Fellow who was elected as a reward for his delicacy in swallowing
the cherry-stones. It is not to be supposed that the story is literally
true; but no doubt a certain symbolical truth is enshrined in it. The
unmannerly bookworm has never been wanted at All Souls. The scholar who
is also a gentleman has always been preferred to him; and from the time
of Sir Christopher Wren to the time of Lord Curzon of Kedleston, the
College has generally been able to boast of some Fellow of wide fame, not
of a rigidly academic character.

* * * * *

Those great physicians Linacre and Sydenham were Fellows of All Souls;
and Linacre, in an age in which men could afford to specialise in more
than one subject, excelled in Greek as well as medicine. Sir Christopher
Wren has just been mentioned. The College owes to him its famous
sun-dial, with the motto: _Pereunt et imputantur_. It cost him £32 11s.
6d.; and its exactitude was such that Oxford watchmakers used to set
their clocks by it. General Codrington, to whom the College owes the
Codrington Library, went from All Souls to be Governor of Barbadoes, at
the time when Admiral Benbow was beating the French there; and other
Fellows whose names are known to all the world were Blackstone, of the
Commentaries, Edward Young, the author of “Night Thoughts,” and Bishop
Heber.

Blackstone was Bursar of All Souls. The Vinerian professorship was
expressly founded for him. His “Commentaries on the Laws of England”
were first delivered as a course of professorial lectures. He took his
position so seriously that he declined to read his lectures to the Prince
of Wales on the ground that he could not quit his duties at Oxford.
Campbell says of him that he was, after Bacon, “the first practising
lawyer at the English bar who, in writing, paid the slightest attention
to the selection or collocation of words.” He served his College by
compelling the executors of the Duke of Wharton to pay over to it a
donation promised by him at the instance of Edward Young.

Wharton was a rake; and Young, in his youth, was fond of consorting with
rakes. In later life, however, he repented and cancelled the dedications
of poems which he had addressed to his more disreputable associates. The
College books describe him as _poeta celeberrimus_; and he certainly had
for a time a vogue as great as that of Tennyson, or even Martin Farquhar
Tupper, though nowadays he is only remembered for the single sentiment:
“Procrastination is the thief of time.” A passage in Johnson shows that,
though he combined worldliness with his other-worldliness, he could be
effective as a Christian controversialist.

“The other boys,” said the atheist, “I can always answer,
because I always know whence they have their arguments, which I
have read a hundred times; but that fellow Young is continually
pestering me with something of his own.”

Heber remains; but what there is to be said about Heber may be better
said when we come to Brasenose. Here he is mentioned principally because,
in one of his letters home, he describes how, looking out from Brasenose,
he saw the All Souls Fellows searching for the All Souls mallard, and so
introduces us to the interesting legend of that bird.

The story is that, when the foundations of the College was being dug, a
mallard flew out of a drain. Thereupon, or it may be at a later date, a
College poet wrote a song about the mallard, of which the first and last
verses and the chorus may be given here:

“The griffin, bustard, turkey, capon,
Let other hungry mortals gape on,
And on their bones with stomach fall hard,
But let All Souls men have their mallard.

CHORUS.

Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.

Then let us drink and dance a galliard
In the remembrance of the mallard,
And as the mallard doth in poole,
Let’s dabble, dive, and duck in bowl.

CHORUS.

Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
Oh, by the blood of King Edward,
It was a swapping, swapping mallard.”

The song is still sung at College gaudies. In the old days the Fellows,
after singing it, used to make a solemn pilgrimage round the College to
look for the mallard; but though the pilgrimage began solemnly, it was
apt to end uproariously. Bonfires were lighted; furniture was smashed;
the oaks of the unpopular were forced—all on pretence of discovering the
undiscoverable bird. The Fellows, in short, made their rounds “not on the
viewless wings of poesy, but charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; and
their proceedings attracted the attention of their Visitor, Archbishop
Abbot, who wrote to them:

“The feast of Christmas drawing now to an end both put me in
mind of the great outrage which, as I am informed, was the last
year committed in your College, where, although matters had
formerly been conducted with some distemper, yet men did never
before break forth into such intolerable liberty as to tear
down doors and gates, and disquiet their neighbours, as if it
had been a camp or a town in war. Civil men should never so far
forget themselves under pretence of a foolish mallard as to do
things barbarously unbecoming.”

MAGDALEN COLLEGE

The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the Æsthetic
Movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.

“Little is known,” say the works of reference, of William Waynflete,
Bishop of Winchester, the founder of Magdalen; and the little that does
happen to be known is of no absorbing interest.

The event in its history of which the College is officially proudest is
its battle with James II. The King, for purposes of his own, proposed to
nominate a President. The College demonstrated that the royal nominee was
an unsuitable person to fill the office, and, “having first received the
blessed Eucharist,” proceeded to elect a man of their own choice, and
successfully upheld their election in the face of the royal displeasure.
“Is that Magdalen Tower?” asked the Prince Regent when he visited Oxford
with the allied sovereigns in 1814. “Yes, your Royal Highness,” replied
his travelling companion, “that’s the tower against which James II. broke
his head.”

[Illustration: MAGDALEN COLLEGE.

[To face p. 153.]

A second object of the pride of Magdalen is the long presidency of Dr.
Routh, whose long life was a link between historical and modern times.

There must be many men still living in Oxford who remember him, for
he only died (at the age of ninety-nine) in 1854. He, on his part,
remembered, and talked of, Dr. Johnson’s visits to Oxford, had attained
his majority before the American Declaration of Independence, was old
enough to be at a dame’s school when Wolfe was storming the Heights of
Abraham, and had an aunt who had known a lady who had seen Charles I.

That he was either a great man or a great college ruler it would be an
exaggeration to affirm. He was famous rather for wearing a wig, defying
University Commissions, and favouring traditional abuses. His wig was
sent, after his death, to the Knaresborough well to be petrified, and he
himself was reverenced chiefly as an interesting relic of that remote
past which his conversation could recall. A crowd used to assemble daily
to see him shuffle from his lodgings to the chapel. He recollected
Gownsman’s Gallows, on which he had seen undergraduate members of the
University hanged for highway robbery. His politics, it is said, were
those of Strafford, and his religion was that of Laud. He spoke currently
of the Jacobite faction as a still living force; and his favourite
joke was to inquire after people who had long been dead, and express
astonishment when informed of their decease.

Among a mass of stories told about him the best are perhaps those related
by the biographers of Charles Reade, who had been elected to a demyship
under his presidency. In one of those anecdotes we see an undergraduate
hauled before him by the tutors. The young man having delayed in town to
amuse himself, and not having arrived in Oxford until three days after
the commencement of the term, the tutors represented to the President
that he ought to be rusticated.

“‘Three days late, is he?’ whimpered the old fellow in his
childish treble. ‘Well, sirs, there has been an heavy fall of
snow, and as the gentleman resides in Norfolk, no doubt the
coaches have been detained along the road.’

“‘But,’ urged the tutors, ‘he could have reached Oxford in a
few hours by railway.’

“‘Railway?’ quoth Dr. Routh incredulously. ‘Ah, well, I don’t
know anything about that’; and so, with the typical flea in its
ear, minor authority was dismissed.”

Another story relates to the case of an undergraduate who, after being in
residence for three years and three-quarters, had not yet succeeded in
passing “Smalls.” The junior tutor called to propose that the young man
in question should be invited to remove his name from the College books.

“The venerable President at once assumed an expression of
extreme astonishment. ‘I don’t know anything about your
examinations,’ he replied to the complaining don. ‘Have you
anything to say as regards the gentleman’s moral character or
conduct?’ The tutor responded in the negative. ‘Then,’ cried
the President in an outburst of righteous indignation, ‘how
dare you come here, sir, to attack a respectable member of the
College? His father, sir, is a friend of my friend, the Bishop
of Bath and Wells; and I will not listen, sir, to any such
frivolous allegations.’”

And finally there is the story of the President’s visit to London. He
went there seldom, and always by coach, and the day came when competition
compelled the reduction of the fares:

“Dr. Routh alighted, as was his wont, in Oxford Street, and
was assisted respectfully by the coachman, to whom he handed
£1 7s. 6d.—twenty-five shillings the fare, and half a crown,
the gratuity to John, who, as the money was being paid to him,
said, ‘The fare, Mr. President, is reduced to a guinea.’ Dr.
Routh paused and reflected. ‘Sir,’ he replied, ‘I always have
paid twenty-five shillings, and I always shall.’”

Such is our picture—a picture of an imperious old gentleman,
constitutionally opposed to progress, looking upon his College as a Duke
looks upon his estate, regarding a reformer as a Duke regards a Radical
Chancellor of the Exchequer, convinced that the general well-being
depended upon his being left at liberty to manage, or mismanage, his own
affairs.

And the point of view of the President was also, for many generations,
the point of view of the Fellows under him. They had a very fine piece
of property to cut up, and they carved it to their common satisfaction.
The endowment amounted to about £24,000 a year in all. The President
took about £4,000 a year, and the Fellows from £500 to £600 a year
each; while the Demies, who were nominated by the Fellows in their
turn, had a statutory right to succeed to the Fellowships as vacancies
occurred—the elections, save in rare instances, being governed by the
sacred principles of nepotism. “Your nominee, sir,” the President might
occasionally remark with sarcasm, “may be a very excellent young man, but
he is no scholar”; but the excellence was almost invariably allowed to
compensate for the lack of scholarship.

It could only, in such circumstances, be by accident that the names of
good men were entered on the College books; but such happy accidents
did, of course, occur from time to time. Addison was the first accident,
Gibbon the second, and Charles Reade the third.

* * * * *

Addison, in fact, did get his demyship as the reward of merit. He was
originally at Queen’s, but was invited to migrate to Magdalen because his
Latin verses were admired. “Addison’s Walk” still keeps his memory alive
there. He is even said to have planted some of the trees in the walk,
though he was not the sort of man who was likely to spend much of his
time in planting trees; but little is recorded of the incidents of his
career, except that he “was always very nervous,” and that he “kept late
hours.” One pictures him as sleek, correct, precocious, grave, yet with a
sound appreciation of good claret.

Of Gibbon there is more to be said; for the historian’s description of
the manners and tone of Magdalen society is one of the most pleasant
passages in his famous Autobiography. It is well known, but it must
nevertheless be quoted:

“The fellows, or monks, of my time” (says Gibbon) “were decent
men who supinely enjoyed the gifts of the founder: their days
were filled by a series of uniform employments; the chapel and
the hall, the coffee-house, and the common-room, till they
retired, weary and well-satisfied, to a long slumber.... Their
conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory
politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal: their dull
and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth.”

There were few lectures, he continues, and the tutors did not insist upon
attendance at such lectures as there were. He gravely tells us with what
impunity he “cut” them:

“As they appeared equally devoid of profit and pleasure, I
was once tempted to try the experiment of a formal apology.
The apology was accepted with a smile. I repeated the offence
with less ceremony; the excuse was admitted with the same
indulgence; the slightest motive of laziness or indisposition,
the most trifling avocation at home or abroad, was allowed as
a worthy impediment; nor did my tutor appear conscious of my
absence or neglect.”

Nor does it even appear to have been necessary for Gibbon to apply for an
_exeat_, or to plead the necessity of consulting his dentist or attending
the funeral of his grandmother, when he wished temporarily to absent
himself from Oxford. The tutor who, when granting his pupil a grudging
permission to attend such a funeral, added that he “could wish that it
had been a nearer relative” belongs to a later generation. Gibbon’s tutor
seems never to have known whether his pupil was in residence or not.

“The want of experience, of advice, and of occupation” (he
says) “soon betrayed me into some improprieties of conduct,
ill-chosen company and inconsiderate expense. My growing debts
might be secret; but my frequent absence was visible and
scandalous; and a tour to Bath, a visit into Buckinghamshire,
and four excursions to London in the same winter, were costly
and dangerous frolics.... In all these excursions I eloped from
Oxford; I returned to College; in a few days I eloped again,
as if I had been an independent stranger in a hired lodging,
without once hearing the voice of admonition, without once
feeling the hand of control.”

This in the case of a boy of fourteen (for Gibbon was no more when
he matriculated) and in a College in which religion, discipline, and
learning were jointly and severally endowed with £24,000 a year! There
could be no clearer proof of the darkness of the dark ages at Oxford;
and, in spite of the testimony of Adam Smith, already quoted, as to the
state of things at Balliol, it seems that they were really darker at
Magdalen than elsewhere.

They were still dark, though not so dark as they had been, when Charles
Reade came into residence.

* * * * *

Charles Reade, in a sense, got his demyship by merit; but it was only by
accident that his merit was allowed to count. The nominee of a nepotist
had broken down so utterly in the qualifying examination that President
Routh for once lost his temper and declared that he would not consent to
the election of an absolute ignoramus. The examiners then proceeded to
look at the papers of the other candidates; and Charles Reade’s English
Essay impressed them. “Look here!” one of them was heard to shout into
the deaf President’s ear. “Here is a boy who gives us his own ideas
instead of other people’s!” The President read the essay, and agreed that
it was so; and Charles Reade was duly elected to a demyship, which led,
in due course, to a fellowship, tenable for life.

Even so, however, he still needed accident to befriend him, and did not
trust to accident in vain. His election to the fellowship hung upon his
ability to pass an examination in the Rudiments of Faith and Religion—an
examination which has since come to be known, first as “Ruders” and
latterly as “Divers.” Candidates for that examination were required to
know all the Thirty-nine Articles by heart. Charles Reade had only learnt
three of them; but he happened to be asked to recite one of the three,
and came off with flying colours, though the odds, as can be shown by the
subtle processes of arithmetic, were thirteen to one against him.

A little later he won the Vinerian Law Scholarship; and that success also
was a triumph, if not of accident, at least of favour. The election to
that scholarship, in those days, did not depend solely on the examiners,
but was decided, in the last resort, by the votes of all the Masters
of Arts whose names were on the books. Charles Reade and his mother
instituted a careful canvass of the country clergy and the country
squires, and even supplied conveyances to drive the voters to the polling
station. He was returned at the head of the poll, and defended his
corrupt practices by an ingenious argument.

“The way,” he said, “in which my canvass was organised and carried out
was rather unusual, but it argues a talent of the practical kind superior
to that of my competitors. The University in its wisdom has chosen right.”

Thereafter he lived a good deal, from time to time, in his Magdalen
rooms, and did a good deal of his work there. “The rooms he occupied in
No. 2, New Buildings,” say his biographers, “were scantily furnished.
MSS. and books littering in heaps on the floor, the walls being decorated
with looking-glasses instead of pictures.” He thought so highly of the
College cook that, when in London, he often had his dinner cooked at
Magdalen and sent up to town in a set of silver dishes. The cook, in
return, thought so highly of him that he spoke of “It is Never Too Late
to Mend” as “the fifth Gospel.” Mr. Tuckwell relates that he “would
beguile acquaintances into his ill-furnished rooms, and read to them _ad
nauseam_ from his latest MS.”

Though he was never a College tutor, he held two College offices—those
of Dean of Arts and Vice-President. It is on record that he performed
the functions of Dean in a bright green coat with brass buttons—a
costume considered objectionable by Professor Goldwin Smith, who was
then a Magdalen undergraduate. It was also while Charles Reade was
Dean that John Conington, the future Professor of Latin, known to his
contemporaries as “the sick vulture,” was put under the College pump as
a punishment for starting a College debating society, and migrated in
consequence to University.

Whether this last incident is really typical of the attitude of Magdalen
Philistinism towards culture may be arguable; but it forms, at any rate,
a fitting prelude to the story which remains to be told of the great
Magdalen outburst which finally overthrew the Æsthetic Movement.

* * * * *

The source of æstheticism is presumably to be found in
pre-Raphaelitism—that interesting revolt against the Philistinism and
general ugliness of early and mid-Victorian life. It established a new
religion of beauty, albeit on what must have seemed to the Philistines a
somewhat doleful basis. It lacked laughter. The enemies of Philistinism
who laughed, as Matthew Arnold did, were not pre-Raphaelites. The
pre-Raphaelites themselves were perhaps a little too conscious that the
overthrow of Philistinism was no laughing matter. Ecstasy was perhaps
their substitute for hilarity. It was a disposition to a sort of æsthetic
ecstasy which they bequeathed to their Oxford successors, specifically
known as Æsthetes, who had first Walter Pater, a Fellow of Brasenose, and
then Oscar Wilde, a demy of Magdalen, for their prophets.

A number of Oxford men not yet middle-aged can well remember that
Æsthetic Movement and the strange jargon, initiated by Oscar Wilde, and
talked by the _illuminés_. They were “utter,” they said; they were “too
too”; they were “all but.” And no doubt the boast that they were “all
but” was the best founded, and received the most ironical justification.
They had not, that is to say, the sincerity of conviction which could
enable them to stand firm in the day of persecution; and that day of
persecution came upon them with the suddenness of a thunder-clap.

What happened, to be precise, was this: Towards the end of a certain
summer term, and in the midst of the season of bump suppers, a certain
æsthete of some notoriety brought forward a resolution at the Oxford
Union proposing that the Society should discontinue its subscription to
_Punch_, because that journal was ridiculing the “New Renaissance.” The
proposal was rejected; but the end of the matter was not in the Debating
Hall, but at the æsthete’s own College, which happened to be Magdalen,
where a party of boating men were convivially celebrating their success
upon the river. The harmony of the evening ended in an attack upon the
æsthete. His collection of blue china was thrown out of his window, and
he himself, like John Conington, was put under the College pump. It was
threatened that the same measures would be taken with other æsthetes in
other colleges, and in the panic which ensued, the Æsthetic Movement
perished. The leading æsthetes hurried as one man to the barber’s to
get their hair cut, and to the haberdasher’s to buy high collars. Men
who, on the previous day, had resembled owls staring out of ivy-bushes
now cultivated the appearance of timid cows shyly peeping over white
walls; and all the available enthusiasm—since Oxford must always have
an enthusiasm of some sort—was transferred to Canon Barnett’s scheme
for conveying the higher life to the lower orders through the medium of
University Settlements in the slums of London.

Such is the history of the Æsthetic Movement, compressed into a nutshell,
and related with the irreducible minimum of reference to Oscar Wilde;
but there is not really, at this time of day, any reason for leaving him
out. Magdalen, of course, is not proud of him, though he took two firsts
and won the Newdigate; but visitors to Magdalen are generally inquisitive
about him. He was a feature—an institution; and he belongs to literary
history.

Probably no undergraduate ever attracted more attention while still an
undergraduate, or left a more enduring trail of legend behind him when
he went down. He understood, as the pre-Raphaelites whom he succeeded
had not understood it, the great art of posing—the art of challenging
attention, not for what he had done but for what he was. He was the
first to expound the art of life as the art of “existing beautifully.”
The conception appealed to the _âmes sensibles_ and the vain—especially,
no doubt, to the vain whose vanity had no _raison d’être_ in the way of
visible achievement. It supplied them with passwords and shibboleths; and
it filled Oxford with a long, limp, languishing procession of mild-eyed
enthusiasts, who preferred the easy morals of Greece to the stern code of
Palestine, and took their leader far more seriously than he took himself.

His sayings were quoted, and anecdotes of his strange doings were passed
round. One heard, and talked, of the blue china which he “lived up to”
in the most æsthetically furnished rooms in Oxford, and of his discovery
of the “utter” loveliness of sunflowers. One was particularly proud of
the stories of his contemptuous treatment of the Professor of Poetry.
Principal Shairp, it was said, had read over his prize poem with him and
suggested alterations. He had listened with the politeness of a potentate
negotiating with a rival potentate, and had then printed his poem
without adopting a single one of the proposed amendments.

There was a time when he was “ragged” on account of his eccentricities,
but he was ragged in vain. On one occasion eight stalwart Philistines
bound him with ropes and trailed him along the ground to the top of a
hill. Instead of losing his temper, he expressed himself as lost in
admiration of the view. After that, it seems to have been felt that he
had earned his right to be eccentric. At all events, the Philistines
troubled him no more. He had founded his school. It continued to flourish
for some years after his departure, and to feed itself upon stories of
his sayings and doings in the wider world.

There were the stories, for instance, of his lecturing tour in America.
He had gone “to carry culture to a continent,” but he had been
“disappointed with the Atlantic Ocean.” There was the story of his
comment on the case of the man—a brother poet named John Barlas—who was
reported to have gone mad as the result of reading the Bible. “When I
think,” said Oscar, “of all the harm that book has done I despair of ever
writing anything to equal it.” And, finally, there were the innumerable
stories which identified him with Du Maurier’s Postlethwaite. A feeble
follower of his—one of those who ultimately suffered martyrdom for the
cause—was ridiculed in the Union, in the course of the debate above
referred to, as “the least of all the a-Postlethwaites and scarce worthy
to be called an a-Postlethwaite.”

Afterwards, of course—but why dwell upon what happened afterwards?

Wilde’s biographer, Mr. Sherard, suggests that he was “to a very
large extent a victim of the Oxford educational system, of the Oxford
environment.” He supports his view by the statement that Oxford “produces
side by side the saint, the sage, and the depraved libertine,” and “sends
men to Parnassus or to the public-house, to Latium or the lenocinium.”
But that will not do at all; for precisely the same thing might be said,
with equal truth, of any curriculum through which large masses of young
men pass, or any environment which they frequent. The descent to Avernus
is easy, and hell has many gates quite as accessible from the seats of
ignorance as from the seats of learning.

“With my brain,” Oscar Wilde once said in later life, “I might have
become anything that I chose.”

Undoubtedly he might; and it is a great tragedy that he chose so ill; but
it would be a gross injustice to hold Oxford responsible for his choice.
Oxford, as we have seen, did its best to curb his wantonness by trailing
him on the ground to the top of a hill; and even when he was no longer
_in statu pupillari_, Oxford planned a second effort for his salvation.

He was at Oxford, on a visit to a friend at University College on the
night of the riot, already spoken of, which put the Æsthetic Movement
down. He had even accepted, for that night, an invitation to the rooms of
a Magdalen disciple; and the plot had been laid to seize him, and submit
him, together with his disciple, to the discipline of the College pump.
One of the conspirators privately warned him of his danger, and he made
an excuse, and stayed away.

Perhaps, if he had gone, the pump would have saved him from himself; but
that, after all, is an idle speculation.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE

The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has never seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his Philosophy of Life.

There are two questions which every visitor to Brasenose can be relied
upon to ask: What, he will demand, is the origin of the eponymous nose?
And what are the rights of the story about the Hell Fire Club and its
ghost?

[Illustration: BRASENOSE KNOCKER.

[To face p. 171.]

As regards the nose, two doctrines have gained currency. The first is
contained in the works of the French traveller, Dr. Sorbière:

“I shall not take upon me,” writes the Doctor, “to describe all
the colleges to you. There is one at whose gate I saw a great
brazen nose, like Punchinello’s vizard. I was also told they
call it ‘Brasen-Nose College,’ and that John Duns Scotus taught
here, in remembrance of which they set up the sign of his nose
at the gate.”

The other explanation is to be found in that entertaining classic,
“Verdant Green”:

“Mr. Larkyns,” we there read, “drew Verdant’s attention to
the brazen nose that is such a conspicuous object over the
entrance gate. ‘That,’ said he, ‘was modelled from a cast of
the principal feature of the first Head of the College, and so
the College was named Brazen-nose. The nose was formerly used
as a place of punishment for any misbehaving Brasenosian, who
had to sit upon it for two hours.... These punishments were so
frequent that they gradually wore down the nose to its present
small dimensions.’”

It is hardly necessary to add that Dr. Sorbière, as well as Mr. Verdant
Green, was hoaxed. The nose seems originally to have been a knocker of
no importance, though, at a later date, it came to be regarded almost
as a fetish or a mascot, and acquired an accretion of legend. When, in
the year 1334, some members of Brasenose Hall (which preceded Brasenose
College) migrated from Oxford to Stamford, in Lincolnshire, because
Oxford was too riotous a place to suit their tastes, they took the
knocker with them. The students who stayed in Oxford procured another
nose in place of it; but the nose which had gone astray was bought back
by the College, 656 years after its removal, and now embellishes the
dining-hall.

That point cleared up, we may go on to the story of the Hell Fire Club
and the ghost.

* * * * *

The Brasenose Hell Fire Club was an imitation of the more famous Hell
Fire Club of Medmenham Abbey. It flourished from 1828 to 1834, and its
_raison d’être_ was the defiance of religion and mortality. The meetings
were held in the various members’ rooms. The members sat at a table with
a vacant chair at the head of it—the theory being that their chairman was
the invisible but omnipresent Enemy of Mankind—and they drank hard and
competed with one another in blasphemous declamation and the telling of
indecorous stories. The dons, it appears, had some vague inkling of their
proceedings, but no precise information on which it was possible for them
to act. They did not know how the Club differed from other wine clubs,
nor had they a list of its members; but the truth was to be revealed to
them in a sudden and dramatic manner.

One of the Brasenose dons had been dining with the dons of Exeter—in the
Senior Common-room of which College an excellent port is dispensed—and
his way home took him along Brasenose Lane, which, as strangers will
remark, is one of the darkest and loneliest thoroughfares in Oxford.
On one side of it is the forbidding _façade_ of Brasenose itself,
with savage iron bars fastened across all the windows to prevent
undergraduates from climbing out of them and seeking adventures at
unseemly hours; on the other side is the high, blank wall of the Exeter
Fellows’ garden.

The hour was midnight, and as the don pursued his solitary way he heard
sounds of revelry—and then sounds which were not of revelry—proceeding
from a room on the ground floor in which the members of the Hell Fire
Club were assembled. He was startled; he stopped; he looked up, and saw
an astounding and appalling spectacle. The first figure which met his
eyes was that of Beelzebub, the Prince of Darkness—blue fire, and horns,
and hoofs, and all; and then he perceived that Beelzebub was not alone.
An undergraduate, well known to the don as a _mauvais sujet_, was in his
grip, struggling, resisting, with agony and terror in his face, while the
Evil One dragged his body in mocking triumph through the bars.

Doubting the evidence of his senses, the don took to his heels and
ran all the way to the College gate. He knocked and was admitted, and
staggered, in an almost fainting condition, into the porch. At the same
time there was a cry and a rush of men from one of the rooms on the right
of the quadrangle. They came from a meeting of the Hell Fire Club, with
the news that the owner of the rooms in which the session had been held
had suddenly fallen dead—of apoplexy, as one gathers—in the midst of a
blasphemous tirade.

The story is told by the Rev. F. G. Lee in his “Glimpses of the
Supernatural.” It was current in his own Oxford days, Mr. Lee says, “on
what could not but be regarded as good authority.” It is still current,
whatever be the value of the authority, and is invariably recalled
whenever a College debating society discusses the motion, “That this
House believes in ghosts.” Probably, since the ghost does not appear
in the record of the circumstances preserved in the Vice-Principal’s
Register, the supernatural element in the story is a later accretion, due
to the mythopœic faculty of youth; but the sudden death of the member of
the Hell Fire Club is history.

Even that fact, indeed, has sometimes been denied by rationalising
sceptics, who have gone so far as to declare that there was no death
in the College in the year in which the Hell Fire Club was wound up;
but the death of Edward Leigh Trafford, the member in question, is duly
chronicled in the Register above referred to, and the present writer has
even heard a contemporary witness, an aged clergyman whose acquaintance
he made in a hotel smoking-room, relate that the dead man’s coffin was
solemnly laid out in the College hall, and that all the undergraduates
in residence were paraded before it, and warned of the judgment by which
sinners might at any hour be overtaken.

* * * * *

Another Brasenose Club, hardly less famous than the Hell Fire Club, and
much more worthy of fame, is the Phœnix. It is sometimes said that the
Phœnix was so called because it rose from the ashes of the Hell Fire
Club; but that is a mistake. The Phœnix is the older society of the two,
dating from 1781 or 1782, and is, in fact, the oldest social club in the
University. Its traditions, though convivial, are seemly. Many of its
members have risen to high places, alike in the University and in Church
and State. Five of its original twelve members, indeed, became Fellows of
Colleges; and one of its later members, Frodsham Hodson, became Principal
of Brasenose, and so great a man that, according to Mark Pattison, when
he returned to College after the Long Vacation, he drove the last stage
into Oxford with post horses, lest it should be said that “the first
Tutor of the first College of the first University of the world entered
it with a pair.”

Other members of the Phœnix were Bishop Heber, R. H. Barham, the author
of “Ingoldsby Legends,” and the late Dean Hole. The names are of high
repute, a testimonial in themselves; and we probably shall not be wrong
in saying that it is characteristic of the tone of Brasenose that the
most intellectual as well as the least intellectual of its _alumni_, its
clerical as well as its sporting prodigies, have seen no harm in filling,
or in emptying, the flowing bowl. That, at any rate, has been one of the
characteristics of the College, though not, of course, the only one.

“A very gentlemanly set” is the appreciation of Brasenose men in “Verdant
Green”; and as the author of “Verdant Green” speaks of an undergraduate
of another College as “openly confessing his shame” by displaying himself
in the porch of that College, we may take it that he was not using words
at random but affirming a proposition which he was prepared to defend in
argument. Most of the men, in fact, have belonged to good and well-to-do
families in the northern counties, and have exhibited both the qualities
and the limitations to be expected from such an origin.

They have been terribly in earnest about athletic and other sports,
but they have seldom been very much in earnest about anything else.
Their scholarship, when they have been scholarly, has been more often
graceful than profound; and, in the matter of religion, they have shown
a disposition to save themselves the trouble of thinking by taking the
conventional for granted, accepting the religion provided for them in
the spirit in which one accepts the _plat du jour_ at a restaurant, but
accepting it in a hearty spirit, without feeling that it implied any
obligation to pull long faces or to mortify the flesh. We may find an
exception to the rule in the case of Robertson of Brighton, of whom more
presently; but if we desire an example of it, we may find one in the case
of Dean Hole.

* * * * *

The Dean was an excellent and breezy person who, even as an octogenarian,
gave one the impression of a young man rejoicing in his youth; but no
one ever accused him of endangering his intelligence by over-taxing it,
and he seems hardly to have been less at ease in Zion than at the jovial
gatherings of the Phœnix. That is not only a critic’s view of him; it is
also his own view of himself and his life, frankly expressed by him in
both prose and verse. “The reading men,” he tells us in his delightful
reminiscences, “were not, as a rule, such cheery companions as the men
who rode, and drove, and played cricket, and wore gay clothing, and
smoked fragrant regalias”; and when he drops into poetry, it is:—

“How jollily, how joyously, we live at B.N.C.!
Our reading is all moonshine—the wind is not more free.”

The Dean also tells us that he went to Brasenose with a serious intention
of studying, but soon found his energies diverted into other channels.
He read hard for two terms; but one day he “met a friend in black velvet
cap and scarlet coat, a bird’s-eye blue tie, buff kerseymere waistcoat,
buck-skin breeches, and pale brown tops,” and the splendid spectacle
aroused his envious ambition. He bought a horse, and wrote home for his
pink. It came, and he enjoyed, and distinguished, himself in the hunting
field; and his attitude towards the problems of the spiritual life became
that which seems generally to have found favour at Brasenose.

Concerning the official attitude of Brasenose towards such matters he
tells two good stories. Two Brasenose men, it appears, on two different
occasions, being perplexed by religious doubts, ventured to lay their
difficulties before their tutor. The poor man was amazed. Such a thing
had never happened to him before in the whole course of his tutorial
experience. He told one of the young men that his digestion was probably
out of order, and that he had better see a doctor; he told the other
that, if he cherished this desire for auricular confession, he had
better join the Church of Rome. The Dean himself, one gathers, never
laid himself open to any such rebuke; but his comments on the Romeward
movement, of which he was a contemporary, are eloquent as to his
religious mentality. The fish caught in the Roman net, he says, were so
poor and flabby that a true sportsman would have thrown them back into
the water.

So much for the jolly and Philistine Dean. It was worth while to dwell
on him because he seems to represent, better than any other Brasenose
man, the distinctive Brasenose point of view; but when we proceed to the
task of praising famous men, there are other famous men whom it is more
imperative to praise.

* * * * *

Bishop Heber is beyond question the most famous of them; and his
Newdigate on “Palestine” is the most famous Newdigate ever written. That
it is also the best will be disputed by admirers of Dean Burgon’s “Petra”
and Mr. D. S. MacColl’s “Carthage,” not to mention Sir Rennell Rodd’s
“Sir Walter Raleigh”; but that point of taste cannot be debated here.
“Palestine” has, at any rate, been reprinted several times, and derives a
special interest from the fact that it was amended at the suggestion of
Sir Walter Scott. The story is an old one; but it must be repeated.

Scott was a friend of Heber’s half-brother, Richard, the
book-collector—“Heber the magnificent,” he called him, “whose library and
cellar are so superior to all others in the world.” Richard Heber took
him to Oxford, and they went together to see Reginald Heber, whose poem
had just won the prize.

“Scott observed,” says Lockhart, “that in the verses on
Solomon’s Temple, one striking circumstance had escaped him,
namely that no tools were used in the erection. Reginald
retired for a few minutes to a corner of the room, and returned
with the beautiful lines:

“No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!”

It may be added that Heber was not only a serious but also a humorous
poet. He wrote a satire called the _Whippiad_, and was also the author
of a _jeu d’esprit_ on the misfortunes of the Dean of the College, a
gentleman nicknamed “Dr. Toe,” whose _fiancée_, a Miss Belle H——, jilted
him and married a footman:

“’Twixt footman John and Doctor Toe
A rivalship befell,
Which of the two should be the beau
To bear away the _Belle_.

“The footman won the lady’s heart,
And who can blame her?—No man.
The _whole_ prevailed against the _part_;
’Twas _Foot_-man _versus_ _Toe_-man.”

It will be agreed that there is something piquant and refreshing in the
discovery that these lines are the product of the same pen that wrote
“From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”; but even in that great missionary hymn
by a missionary bishop the hand of the satirist has been detected. The
hasty generalisation that, in the Orient, “only man is vile” is said to
have found its way into a devotional composition because Heber discovered
that a Cingalese tradesman had cheated him. If so, the interpolation may
be accepted as a delightful example of what may be styled “the Brasenose
touch.”

* * * * *

Reginald Heber’s brother Richard has already been mentioned; and there
are those who would consider him a greater man than the Bishop. The
Bishop, they would say, was only one bishop among many, whereas the
bibliophile was the greatest bibliophile that the world has ever seen.
He was less than sixty when he died, and he had already accumulated a
library of 146,827 volumes, stored in six houses in various parts of
England and the Continent. He was so occupied in collecting them that he
quite forgot to dispose of them by will, and his executors had to sell
them for the benefit of his estate. The sales extended over a period of
three years, and the English sales alone realised £56,774. One gets a
glimpse at the collection in the “Literary Reminiscences” of a brother
bibliophile, Dr. T. F. Dibdin.

Dr. Dibdin had long been Richard Heber’s friend, and, hearing of his
unexpected death, he hastened to his house in Pimlico, and was admitted
to the room in which he lay in his coffin.

“And then,” he writes, “the room in which he had breathed his
last! It had been that of his birth. The mystic veil, which
for twenty-five years had separated me from this chamber, and
which the deceased would never allow me, nor any one else, to
enter, was now effectually drawn aside by the iron hand of
Death. I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen
rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors so choked, so
suffocated with books. Treble rows were there, double rows were
there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were
longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos,
reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the
very ceiling the piles of volumes extended, while the floor was
strewed with them in loose and numerous heaps.”

A marvellous spectacle truly, and a case to be quoted whenever it is said
that all Brasenose men are obtuse to the charms of literature, though,
of course, it may be said that Richard Heber was not a typical Brasenose
man. Yet we may find the Brasenose touch in the statement already quoted
from Scott, that his fine taste in books was combined with an equally
fine taste for port and claret; and if we continue to seek that touch
through the later history of the College, we may find it in the fact
that Dean Milman, another of the great men of Brasenose and a winner of
the Newdigate, began his literary career by producing a play at a London
theatre, and we may further find it in the one story which survives of
the Oxford career of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham.

The piety of the author of the “Ingoldsby Legends” is described by his
biographer as “unostentatious.” It was, in fact, so little ostentatious
while he was at Brasenose that he was “sent for” to explain his too
frequent absence from the College chapel.

“The fact is, sir,” urged his pupil, “you are too late for me.”

“Too late?” repeated the tutor in astonishment.

“Yes, sir—too late. I cannot sit up till seven o’clock in the morning; I
am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed by four or five at
latest I am really fit for nothing next day.”

* * * * *

If any one desired still further examples of the Brasenose touch,
he might have them by studying the career of Sir Tatton Sykes, that
excellent Yorkshire sportsman who used to breakfast off “a jug of new
milk and an immense apple-pie,” who broke stones to give him an appetite,
thrashed impertinent bargees for his amusement, and seldom missed a day’s
hunting till he had passed his seventy-sixth birthday, and lived to be
ninety-one. It so happens, however, that though Sir Tatton was classed
with York Minster and Fountains Abbey as one of the three great marvels
of his native county, his residence at Oxford has left no trail of
legend; so that we must leave him and pass on to the two eminent men of
whom it may fairly be said that, though they were in Brasenose, they were
not of it. They are F. W. Robertson—“Robertson of Brighton”—and Walter
Pater.

* * * * *

F. W. Robertson seems to have resembled the mass of Brasenose men in one
circumstance only: he took a pass degree. No doubt he would have obtained
high honours if he had sought them; but, like John Richard Green, of
Jesus, he did not seek them, and this may therefore be the proper place
in which to recall the untrue story that when, in the least intellectual
period of the history of Brasenose, the name of some commoner was, by
some accident, placed in a class list, the other commoners proceeded to
punish him under the pump as a violator of the unwritten law.

For the rest, F. W. Robertson, while at Brasenose, resembled neither the
average Brasenosian nor the F. W. Robertson of later days. He was the
Broad Church philosopher in the making, but he was not yet the Broad
Church philosopher fully made. His views, according to Mr. Stopford
Brooke, were “those of the Evangelical school, with a decided leaning to
moderate Calvinism.” He organised “a society for the purposes of prayer
and conversation on the Scriptures,” but it languished and died, and he
was “chilled by the apathy and coldness of Oxford.”

That one can understand and believe. Oxford has been a place of many
enthusiasms, many of them of a religious character, but private
initiative in religious matters, however devout, has never been
encouraged there. That sort of thing has always struck Oxford as odd,
and even a little disrespectful towards the ample official provision of
the means of grace. We saw the attitude exemplified when we spoke about
the experiences of the Wesleys at Lincoln, and there is a characteristic
story of a snub administered by the Head of a college to an undergraduate
who had taken to preaching at the corners of the streets.

The young man challenged the Head with what he thought would prove an
awkward question. What answer would he be able to make, he asked, if his
Divine Master reproached him on the Day of Judgment for having neglected
this means of diffusing a knowledge of the gospel truth? But the Head was
equal to the occasion. “You need have no anxiety about that,” he replied;
“I myself will take the entire responsibility.”

Robertson, one recognises, was the last man likely to feel at home in an
atmosphere in which some things were not only said, but said as a matter
of course, and approved. Probably they were heard with more approval at
Brasenose than at most other colleges; and Robertson appears to have
been hardly less out of his element there than was Nathaniel Hawthorne at
Brook Farm. In one field of Oxford activity, indeed, he did distinguish
himself. He was one of the orators of the Union Debating Society, where
he maintained against John Ruskin, then of Christ Church, that the
theatre was not an influence for good. “Pray for me,” he appealed to
the man sitting next to him when he rose, rather nervously, to make his
speech. But it cannot be said that he was, either in that or in any other
respect, a typical Brasenose man.

Still less was Walter Pater a typical Brasenose man.

* * * * *

Pater came to Brasenose as a Fellow from Queen’s, where he had been a
Scholar. For a time he was a lecturer and tutor, and all the stories
indicate that, in engaging in those activities, he made a false start in
life. A pupil coming to him for advice as to his reading was recommended
to read the whole of Plato and the whole of Kant—which, from the point of
view of the examinations, was almost the worst counsel that could have
been given to him. His chief contribution to metaphysical thought is said
to have been an expression of opinion that Plato was “not such a fool
as he looked.” His attitude towards the discipline of the College was
illustrated by a commendation of the bonfires which destroyed the statue
of Cain and Abel, on the ground that they “lit up the spire of St. Mary’s
so beautifully.” He once was one of the adjudicators in a prize essay
competition, but when asked by the other adjudicators for his opinion,
he replied that he could only remember that one of the essayists was
called Sanctuary, and that Sanctuary had impressed him as a remarkably
euphonious name.

In spite of this, however—and even to some extent because of it—Pater cut
a considerable figure, and exercised a considerable influence, in the
Oxford of his day; and he became the hero of almost as many legends as
either Jowett or Mark Pattison. Mr. Edmund Gosse, as has been mentioned,
graphically described his personal appearance as that of “a benevolent
dragon.” All the world knows that he was the “Mr. Rose” of Mr. Mallock’s
“New Republic,” and his place may be defined as that of the link between
the pre-Raphaelites and the Æsthetes.

The note in his work which found the most eager listeners was the note of
artistic Epicureanism; the place in which it was most definitely sounded
was the “Conclusion” of the “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.”
There was the exhortation to “burn always with a hard gem-like flame”;
there was the eulogy of “great passions” as the source of a “quickened
sense of life”; there was the declamation on the best way of making the
most of life, leading up to the announcement that “the wisest” spend
it “in art and song”; there, finally, was the view of art “professing
frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they
pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

The essay containing those precepts became the gospel of a considerable
number of young men, and it was an insidiously dangerous gospel. The
proclamation of it in a company of money-grubbers might, indeed, have
some force, but, as a matter of fact, the audience which had least need
of it was precisely the audience which heard it most gladly. It appeared
to them to set a seal upon a holy alliance between debauchery and art;
and whereas few of them were much concerned about art, a great many of
them were deeply interested in debauchery. Debauchery, they now gathered,
was being held up to admiration as the duty which lay nearest to them.
They recognised it as an easy and agreeable duty, and they made haste to
discharge it.

Perhaps that was not precisely what Pater meant. He said that it was not,
and he ultimately struck the passage out lest it should “mislead some of
the young men into whose hands it might fall.” But he might nevertheless
have found it difficult to reply effectively to any controversialist who
urged that, if he had not meant what he had been taken to mean he could
not have meant anything at all.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE

The foundation by Bishop Foxe—Compulsory Greek—Strict
discipline in early times—The visitation by the Parliamentary
Commissioners—The ejection of the Fellows—Eminent _alumni_—The
judicious Hooker and his unhappy marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.

Corpus Christi College was founded in 1516, by Bishop Foxe; and it may
be necessary to anticipate the questions of some strangers by stating
at once that he was not the author of the “Book of Martyrs” but the
predecessor of Cardinal Wolsey in the counsels of Henry VIII. He spoke
of the College as his “hive” and of the scholars as his “bees” whom he
expected to be “busy bees” and to “make honey.”

[Illustration: CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.

[To face p. 192.]

They have made plenty of it. The output of Corpus in the way of
scholarship has been out of all proportion to the small size of the
College. If it has never, like University, had an opportunity of
expelling a man of genius, it has trained innumerable men of talent; and
if the distinction of the most distinguished of its sons has not been,
with rare exceptions, of the sort that makes a magnetic appeal to the
imagination of mankind, there is, at least, no breach in the continuity
of its long list of _alumni_ illustrious through their services to humane
letters; a list which begins with the Hooker whom it is customary to call
“judicious” and is by no means ended when we come to Professor Case, who
alone, when Oxford seemed to be given over to the Hegelians, maintained,
with the robust vigour of a true sportsman, his belief in the reality of
the external world.

* * * * *

The original note of Corpus was an insistence upon compulsory Greek.

Modern reformers appear to think that, in demanding that the study of
Greek should be optional at Oxford, they are marching forward—“moving
with the times.” As a matter of fact, they are proposing to revert to
a condition of things which prevailed at Oxford in the ignorant times
prior to the Revival of Learning. Greek was, in those times, in the noble
language of school prospectuses, an “extra”; and men could only learn it
at their own expense from private tutors. Bishop Foxe put it into the
curriculum, endowing a Reader in Greek, and required all Corpus men to
attend his classes on pain of “loss of commons”—the loss, that is to say,
of their dinner—if they should fail to do so.

That was one of his severe regulations; and there were many others which
show him to have had a keen eye for discipline and detail.

Every Fellow of Corpus, it was ordained, was to share his bedroom with a
Scholar; the Fellow sleeping in a high bed, and the Scholar in a truckle
bed. One also gathers, since the Statutes contain no provision for
scouts, that it was by the Scholars that the beds were to be made and
the slops emptied. Dinner was to be eaten in hall, and the diners were
only to converse in Greek or Latin. Those who went for walks were to go
in parties of three, carrying no weapons except bows and arrows; and the
only games permitted were “games of ball” in the College gardens. Certain
prayers, private as well as public, were obligatory. It was expressly
forbidden to any Scholar or Fellow—to any one, in fact, under the grade
of President—to carry his own washing to the laundress; and violations of
this, or any other rule, were to be punished in various ways. The junior
members of the society might, for sufficient cause, be whipped; or they
might be compelled to sit at separate tables in hall, consuming dry
bread and water, while the well-conducted dined.

Such were the sanctions of industry and virtue; and the archives of the
College are full of records of their application. One of the Scholars was
once deprived of commons for a fortnight for “attempted murder”—a light
sentence which suggests that the Senior Common-room had but an imperfect
sympathy with the victim. Another, bearing the unusual name of Anne, was
castigated for writing a satirical poem on the Mass. As he was condemned
to receive a stripe for every line of his composition, he doubtless rose
from the block with a sincere conviction that brevity is the soul of wit
and crystallised epigram the best form in which to exhibit poetry.

Save for incidents of that sort, however, Corpus has not had a specially
exciting history; and the first really animated scene in its annals
occurs when Oxford, so to say, changed hands, and Charles I. being a
prisoner, and the city having surrendered to Fairfax, the Lords and
Commons resolved upon the Visitation and Reformation of Oxford with
a View to “the due correction of offences, abuses, and disorders,
especially of late times, committed there.”

* * * * *

Corpus, curiously enough, is a College which preserved its plate at
a time when the plate of most of the colleges was melted down into
money to reinforce the royal treasury. The story goes that it was
preserved—exactly how, the story does not say—through the devotion of
a butler to the College interests. The exploration of a secret cellar,
or of an old drain, according to the legend, discovered the skeleton
of a butler with the grip of his bony fingers clenched upon a precious
punch-bowl. That is not the sort of story that one would willingly
give up; but the evidence for it does not appear to be very solid; and
the conjecture of Dr. Fowler that the bowl was first surrendered and
afterwards redeemed with a money payment has more of the ingredients of
plausibility.

Be that as it may, however, the Corpus men suffered more than the members
of most colleges from the heavy hands of the Parliamentary Commissioners;
and we have to picture “a Drum with a guard of musketeers” marching
through the gate into the quadrangle—the drum beaten as a call for
silence—the affixing of the Visitors’ Orders in the porter’s lodge—and
the reading of a long list of Fellows and Scholars who were to be
expelled.

It was a longer list than at some of the other colleges because the
Visitors had been received in a contumacious spirit. They had no sooner
entered the name of the new President of their choice, Dr. Staunton, in
the College Register than two Scholars of the College—Will Fulman and Tim
Parker—first erased the entry, and then tore out the sheet on which it
had been made. When they proceeded to break open the College Treasury,
which the Bursar would not unlock for them, they found that its valuable
contents had already been removed. Whence resulted wholesale evictions of
a brutally precipitate character.

The proclamation, according to one of its victims, was to the effect that
“whosoever named in the Order should remain in Oxon, or within five miles
of it, after sunset, should be taken and prosecuted as a spy.” This,
it is added, was taken to mean that they would be hanged, “though many
knew not whither to go on so short warning, nor could they have time to
dispose their books and such goods as they had”; while, as an additional
affront, “some were searched for letters only to pick their pockets.”
It must have been a shocking scene, though the relation of it can be
relieved by an anecdote which has the merit of exhibiting Oliver Cromwell
in a more human light than usual.

One of the ejected, it appears, a certain James Quin, was presented to
the Lord Protector; and the Lord Protector, having been told that he had
a good voice, called upon him for a song. He sang so well that the Lord
Protector “liquor’d him with sack,” and bade him ask a favour. He asked
that his place on the foundation of the College might be restored to him,
and his request was granted: a quaint incident, judged by our modern
notions, but one for which there is a parallel in the later annals of the
College, during the genial period of the Restoration.

Dr. Staunton had, by that time, been turned out; and his predecessor, Dr.
Newlyn, had been brought back. This Dr. Newlyn was a shocking nepotist.
He filled all the profitable places on the foundation with relatives of
his own, and was only moderately shocked by the fact that one of them
broke into the rooms of one of the Fellows and tried to murder him in his
sleep; but there were some offences at which he drew the line, as the
occurrence of a gross scandal was presently to prove.

This time there was a lady in the case. The offender was Matthew Curtois,
a Probationer Fellow, a Master of Arts, and a Clerk in Holy Orders; and
the offence was committed within the College walls. The punishment was
a refusal to confirm Matthew Curtois in his Fellowship; but Matthew
Curtois, instead of submitting and slinking away, made bold to appeal to
the King. His weakness, he judged, was one with which the lover of Nell
Gwynne and so many others was likely to sympathise; and his judgment
was correct. The King, acting through the Visitor, George Morley, Bishop
of Winchester, not only decreed his fellow-sinner’s restitution to his
honours and emoluments, but also ordered him to be paid a pecuniary
indemnity for his suspension: an act of royal interference with
academical affairs which marks, as well as any other, the difference
between those times and these.

But now, before going farther, we must turn back, and glance at the
careers of a few of the representative men of whom Corpus is most justly
proud.

* * * * *

Bishop Jewell should properly come first; but he is less interesting
than Bishop Hooker, who comes next, and was introduced to Corpus through
Jewell’s patronage. First a Scholar, he afterwards became a Fellow and
a Lecturer in Hebrew; and we read of him, in the Life by Izaak Walton,
that “in four years he was but twice absent from the chapel prayers.”
Evidently he was just such a man as good Bishop Foxe would have wished to
inhabit his “bee-hive”; and the tragedy of his life, which Walton relates
in sympathetic detail, was his removal from it. The story must be told,
if only to show that it was not in the conduct of his private life that
the illustrious author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” earned the fixed
epithet of “judicious.”

He was, in fact, a pious don of the old-fashioned, simple-minded sort;
and, of course, he was a bachelor, and in Holy Orders. Appointed to
preach certain endowed sermons at Paul’s Cross, and coming up to London
from Corpus for that purpose, he lodged in the house of John Churchman,
sometime a draper in Watling Street. He caught a chill on the way; but
Mrs. Churchman gave him “drink proper for a cold,” and then proceeded to
admonish him in a motherly manner.

“Mr. Hooker,” she said—so Walton tells us—“you are a man of tender
constitution. It would be best for you to have a wife that might prove a
nurse to you—such a one as might both prolong your life and make it more
comfortable, such a one as I can and will provide for you if you see fit
to marry.”

It was, no doubt, in the abstract, good advice. It seemed very good
advice indeed to Hooker as he sat by the roaring fire and sipped the
comforting possets which Mrs. Churchman prepared for him. And he knew
too, as an earnest student of the Bible, that a busy man might find good
precedents for entrusting the choice of his wife to another. As Eleazar
had been trusted to seek a wife for Isaac, so Mrs. Churchman should be
trusted to choose a wife for him. But Mrs. Churchman had a daughter;
and her chief anxiety was not to make Mr. Hooker happy, but to get
her daughter off her hands. So she brought Joan Churchman forward and
presented her.

“Take her—she is yours,” she said; and the simple-minded don forgot to be
judicious, but married Joan Churchman, as Mrs. Churchman had meant him to
do from the beginning, and lived unhappily with her ever afterwards.

“By this marriage,” Walton continues, “the good man was drawn from the
tranquillity of his College, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of
peace, and a sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy
world.” And he draws a pathetic picture of a visit paid to the good man
by two of his old pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, in the country
parsonage to which he retired together with the lady described by another
biographer as “a clownish, silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe.”

The pupils found their tutor in a field attached to the parsonage,
looking after the sheep; Mrs. Hooker having told him to do so, as she
wished to employ the shepherd as a man-servant in the house. They went
up to the parsonage with him, hoping to enjoy his conversation; but Mrs.
Hooker immediately called him away to rock the cradle. They fled, driven
out by Mrs. Hooker’s inhospitable proceedings; and one of them condoled
with him, saying that his wife evidently was not a very “comfortable
companion.” Whereupon Mr. Hooker made answer:

“My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of
this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator
hath appointed for me: but labour—as, indeed, I do daily—to submit myself
to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.”

The story, of course, is full of morals for bachelor dons; only one
imagines that the dons of our own day do not need the moral, but are much
better able than was Hooker of Corpus to take care of themselves in the
matters of the heart and the bonds of holy matrimony.

* * * * *

Another Corpus man of a very different character was the Duke of
Monmouth, the favourite, and reputed natural son, of Charles II. He
entered his name when the Court was driven to Oxford by the plague in
1665; but little is known about his term of residence except that he gave
the College a piece of plate which the College is believed to have melted
down in order to express its disapproval of the Monmouth rebellion. Dr.
Pocock, the Oriental traveller, should also be mentioned, for he was the
first of a long list of Oxford men who have distinguished themselves in
the exploration of the Alps. He and William Windham, meeting at Geneva,
in 1741, made up a party to explore the glaciers of Chamonix—a place
till then unknown to tourists. General Oglethorpe, the associate of the
Wesleys, and the founder of the State of Georgia, is a third who must
not be overlooked. And a passing word may be given to Edward Young,
afterwards Fellow of All Souls, the pious author of “Night Thoughts,”
and the originator of the sentiment that “Procrastination is the thief
of time.” “There are those,” we read, in a biographical account of the
doings of this divine at Oxford, “who say that Young at this time was not
the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became”; and
that is credible enough, for we all know many ornaments of religion and
morality whose proceedings while _in statu pupillari_ invite a similar
remark.

The remark, however, is, on the whole, less applicable to the divines
who have come from Corpus than to the divines who have come from a good
many of the other colleges; so we need not insist, but may pass on to
the period when the occurrence of more widely popular names gives Corpus
a blaze of glory perceptible from afar. That period was in the early
days of the nineteenth century, when Keble and Thomas Arnold—Arnold of
Rugby—were contemporaries. A third member of the society at that time
was John Taylor Coleridge—Mr. Justice Coleridge—who defeated them in
some competitions for University and College prizes, and lived to write
Keble’s Life, and to contribute a chapter of Corpus reminiscences to the
Life of Arnold written by Dean Stanley.

Most of the time of the little company, when they were not reading for
their examinations, appears to have been given to argument; most of
Coleridge’s recollections are recollections of dialectical affrays.
Oxford, at this date, was beginning to think of other matters besides
political and academical affairs. The old wrangles between Jacobites and
Hanoverians had ceased; and no one any longer thought it worth while to
provoke authority by calling for cheers for the Young Pretender. Though
the older men could remember such things, the younger men regarded them
as belonging to history. The thing which was beginning to interest them
was religion—or in some cases irreligion; and it interested them as an
end in itself, and not merely in its relation to preferment and emolument.

Keble and Arnold of Corpus, it is instructive to remember, were the
contemporaries at Oxford of Shelley of University; but Shelley does not
seem to have been known to the others. Being orderly persons, scrupulous
observers of the regulations, well-conducted reading men, they would
probably have regarded him, if they had known him, as a dangerous and
disreputable associate. Keble’s business in life was to be to preach
at, and Arnold’s to summon to his study and flog, those who were, like
Shelley, “tameless and swift and proud.” And yet he and they had more in
common than they knew. They all represented, in their several ways, the
new spirit of the dawning century; they were all, in their several ways,
revolutionists, or at least men definitely related to revolution. Shelley
was the revolutionist _pur sang_; Keble was the counter-revolutionist;
Arnold was the practical man—the reformer with a reformer’s turn for
compromise and opportunism—who knew how to make a little revolution go a
long way.

Keble may perhaps be classed as an English analogue of Chateaubriand.
Personally, it is true, he bore not the faintest resemblance to the
religious reactionary who “took up religion as a subject,” and has been
described as the Catholic Don Juan; but he resembled Chateaubriand in
being a literary artist, with an artist’s feeling for the “beauty of
holiness,” and he launched the English Movement which corresponds to
the return of the æsthetes and aristocrats to their Catholic allegiance
in France. The principal story told of him at Corpus is that he damaged
the sun-dial in the quadrangle by throwing a bottle at it; and we may
permit ourselves to discover a certain symbolism in that performance. The
great sermon on National Apostasy—preached because reformers proposed to
curtail the scandalous superfluity of Irish bishoprics—may similarly be
described as a weak man’s heroic attempt to stop the clock.

The story of that attempt, however, and of the consequences which ensued
from it, belongs more properly to the annals of Oriel than of Corpus.
Arnold as well as Keble went on from Corpus to Oriel as a Fellow; but
what there is to be said about him may best be said in the present
chapter.

He and Keble became estranged in later years; but they continued
to respect each other’s characters while examining each other’s
propositions. To Arnold it seemed that Keble’s piety was no excuse for
the narrowness of his mind, and he would have nothing to say to Keble’s
view that a man could only achieve salvation by running in a groove. He
believed in earnestness, indeed—perhaps there never was a man in more
deadly earnest; but what he desired was an earnest conduct of the common
affairs of life, not an earnest adherence to a complicated series of
ecclesiastical propositions.

Hence his success, and his fame, as a schoolmaster. It was predicted
of him, by the Provost of Oriel, when he stood for the Headmastership
of Rugby, that he would, if elected, “change the face of public school
education throughout England.” He was elected, and he did change it. Many
of the changes which he introduced at Rugby were, indeed, based upon a
system of school government already in force at Winchester; but Arnold
breathed a new spirit into the institutions which he adopted. Members of
the Sixth Form, under his inspiration, held up their heads with a new
kind of pride. Rugbeians were distinguished—and boasted that they were
distinguished—from other schoolboys by their “moral seriousness.”

The other schoolboys, of course, have not accepted the Rugbeian example
without cavil or criticism. It has even been remarked—most notably by
Etonians—that the difference between the “moral seriousness” of Rugby and
the thing which is elsewhere called “priggishness” is not always visible
to the naked eye. Possibly it is not. Possibly Arnold “overdid it,” like
many another valuable innovator. But the thing which he did needed doing.
It was better to overdo it than not to do it at all; and the pride which
Corpus takes in Arnold is amply justified.

* * * * *

And so, of course, is the pride which Corpus takes in many _alumni_
of a later date, distinguished in a great variety of fields—in Henry
Nettleship, Professor of Latin; in Professor Fowler, the historian of
the College, whose lectures on Logic used to be as good as a play; in
Professor Case, to whose robust faith in the external world a reference
has already been made; in Mr. F. T. Dalton, who, as an editor, has struck
out many purple passages from the compositions of the present writer;
in Mr. Horace Hutchinson, the greatest living authority on the game of
golf; in Mr. Henry Newbolt, the author of “Admirals All”; in Mr. Herbert
Paul; and in Mr. A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic who thrusts Aristotle
down the throats of the vulgar, and concerning whom it was deposed by Mr.
Zangwill, before a Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship,
that to him “nothing is sacred except the dancing of Adeline Genée.”

CHRIST CHURCH

Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of
Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The
parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell,
and all the little Fells—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.

Cardinal Wolsey founded Cardinal College, spent about £8,000 on it—say
£100,000 of our modern money—out of the proceeds of the disendowment of
the monasteries, and then fell like Lucifer. Henry VIII. first stopped
the work, but presently refounded the College, and united it with the
new bishopric of Oxford, which was removed to that site from Osney. The
Head of the College was also to be the Dean of the Cathedral; and the
number of students on the foundation was to be 101. The 101 strokes
of Great Tom, which are to be heard every evening of the year at nine
o’clock, were originally ordered as a separate reminder to each one of
the students that it was time to go to bed. Five minutes after the
last stroke, the gates, not of Christ Church only but of every college
in Oxford, are closed; though nowadays, as a concession to the modern
spirit, porters are in attendance to open them to those who knock.

[Illustration: TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH.

[To face p. 209.]

That is as much as space permits to be said concerning the “beginnings.”
They were not humble beginnings, like those of most of the other
colleges, but splendid and ostentatious. Christ Church started with a
flourish of trumpets which has hardly yet ceased sounding in our ears.
Henry VIII. himself often dined in its Hall; and it has ever since been
the frequent recipient of royal favours. It is impossible to walk in
Tom Quad without feeling that this is the college of all others which
kings, to whom life is a pageant, would delight to honour. Tom Quad,
with its great spaces, its fountain, its wide pavement, has “an air
about it” which no other college even simulates. There is an indefinable
suggestion, not of study for study’s sake, but rather of leisurely
preparation for the leadership of men. The very place, one would say, for
the training of statesmen and pro-consuls. It seems incredible that the
student who has had the right to pace Tom Quad should go away and fail in
life. It does not cease to seem incredible when one learns that it has
sometimes happened.

The history of Christ Church, indeed, is more of a pageant—or is fuller
of pageants—than the history of any other college. Its full history would
fill a book—not a short book, but a long one; but those whose historic
sense bids them conjure up the picturesque features of the past will make
their first pause at the striking scene of the degradation of Archbishop
Cranmer, punished for being a Protestant at a time when the majority were
Catholics: a shocking spectacle, though an imposing ceremony, and one
anticipating, in all its meanest details of humiliation, that ceremony of
the degradation of Captain Dreyfus which, not many years since, stirred
the civilised world to horror.

The exact locality of the degradation is uncertain; but it took place,
at any rate, somewhere close to the cathedral, and probably in the
cloisters. Within the cathedral, Cranmer was set up on the rood-screen
and made to listen to the recital of his iniquities. Then he was dragged
down again and invested in episcopal robes made, in mockery, of rags
and canvas. Then, when he had been declared, in the name of the Blessed
Trinity and by the authority of the Church, deposed, degraded, and cut
off from all the privileges attached to his episcopal Order, he was
marched outside to endure the remainder of his punishment.

“One by one,” writes his biographer, Dean Hook, “all the
ornaments and distinctions of office were taken off.... A
barber clipped the hair round the Archbishop’s head; and
Cranmer was made to kneel before Bonner. Bonner scraped the
tips of the Archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand which,
itself anointed, had administered the unction to others.
The threadbare gown of a yeoman bedel was thrown over his
shoulders, and a townsman’s greasy cap was forced upon his
head. The Archbishop of Canterbury, or, as he was now called,
Thomas Cranmer, was handed over to the secular power. In
the lowest and most offensive manner the innate vulgarity
of Bonner’s mind displayed itself. Turning to Cranmer, he
exclaimed: ‘Now you are no longer my Lord,’ and he thought it
witty ever afterwards to speak of him as ‘this gentleman here.’”

And so to Bocardo, and thence to the stake of martyrdom—a lamentable
illustration of the bitter saying that Cambridge educated Reformers and
that Oxford burnt them.

* * * * *

Such might be the first striking scene in a Christ Church pageant. A
further scene—a whole series of further scenes, less tragic, indeed, but
not less remarkable—may be found at the time of that Civil War to which
it has been necessary to make so many references.

The King, as has already been mentioned, lodged at Christ Church, while
the Queen’s Court was at Merton. Almost all the Christ Church men save
the old and decrepit and the few who, as Wood puts it, “retained their
sacred habit as a cloak for their sloth or timidity,” were ready to fight
for the King; and they and many other men from other colleges mustered at
the Schools and were marched through the High to Christ Church, “where,
in the great quadrangle, they were reasonably instructed in the word of
command and their postures.” They fought valiantly—twenty of them as
officers—but with the result which the world knows; and presently, of
course, when the city surrendered, and the Parliament sent its Visitors,
there was as much trouble at Christ Church as anywhere.

Dean Samuel Fell, who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University, did
his best to be dignified in extremely difficult circumstances. The
Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who was Chancellor, harangued his
Vice-Chancellor in the coarse language of the camp, and told him that he
ought to be flogged; but Samuel Fell was not to be intimidated. These
Visitors, he said, his juniors in academic standing and position, were
too “inconsiderable” persons for the Dean of Christ Church to parley
with. He therefore refused to parley with them; and they haled him off
to prison, and then proceeded to the Deanery, where Mrs. Fell and the
children held the fort.

They knocked, and there was no answer. They tried the door, and found
that it was locked and barred. They smashed their way through it with
sledge-hammers, entered, and waited for Mrs. Fell to go. But Mrs. Fell
did not budge. Mrs. Fell even said that she had no intention of budging.
When the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery argued with her, she argued back
with equal vigour; and there was nothing for it but to bid the soldiers
act. They strapped Mrs. Fell into a chair, and they strapped all the
little Fells on to boards, and they lifted their living, screaming,
and protesting loads, and carried them out, and deposited them in the
middle of Tom Quad, where they remained until three of the canons came
to the rescue, and conducted them to a place of refuge in a neighbouring
apothecary’s house. It may be doubted whether Tom Quad has ever witnessed
so strange a scene, before or since.

* * * * *

Enough of the picturesque, however. We must next turn to personalities;
and, as we find more famous men among Deans of Christ Church than among
the Heads of any of the other Houses, we may fitly begin by saying
something about some of them in the Mainly about People style. Dr. Samuel
Fell’s son John has a fair title to come first. A popular rhyme preserves
his memory, and the story of that rhyme must be told.

This second Dr. Fell was one of the first of the deans to take not only
himself but his duties seriously. He insisted that Christ Church men
should read, and also that they should wear academic dress; he raised the
standard of examinations, and was strict in all matters of discipline. As
he ruled in the loose days of the Restoration, he inevitably had trouble
with some of the livelier spirits; and one of the liveliest of the
recalcitrant was Tom Brown, an author and wit of some note in his day,
though now forgotten. Tom Brown, having offended, was to be sent down;
but, at the last moment, the Dean partially relented. He handed Tom Brown
Martial’s epigram beginning “_Non amo te, Sabidi_,” and promised to allow
him to remain in residence if he could extemporise a satisfactory English
version of it. Whereupon Tom Brown improvised the familiar quatrain:

“I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.”

Hardly less famous is Aldrich—equally famous, as a logician, as a writer
of catches, and as a smoker. His Logic remained the textbook in common
use at Oxford for more than two centuries. Concerning his addiction to
tobacco a story is told of a bet made that he would be found smoking at
ten o’clock in the morning—a bet lost because, at the moment when the
clock struck, he was not puffing at his pipe, but refilling it. One of
his most popular catches was specially composed for the use of smokers,
being so arranged as to give each singer a breathing time in which to
keep his pipe alight. Moreover, much as the Dean loved his pipe, he loved
his bowl no less; and he was the author of a Latin epigram, enumerating
five excuses for the glass:

“Si bene quid memini, sunt causæ quinque bibendi:
Hospitis adventus, præsens sitis atque futura,
Aut vini bonitas, aut quælibet altera causa.”

Aldrich’s successor was Atterbury, who had been a tutor under him;
and Atterbury was the most brilliant of the Oxford representatives in
the famous “Battle of the Books” concerning the authenticity of the
“Epistles of Phalaris.” The ultimate victory in that encounter rested,
of course, with Bentley of Trinity, Cambridge, for the Oxford case
had not a leg to stand upon; but the Christ Church wits were at least
successful in obscuring the issue and throwing dust in the eyes of their
contemporaries: a cheap success, no doubt, but better than none at all.
It is a pretty story; but the reader who is curious about it must be
referred to Macaulay or Jebb, for there remain three other deans with
clamorous claims upon our space.

Cyril Jackson is the greatest of them. He had been the tutor of the
Regent and his brothers, who had “imbibed” from him, according to his
biographer, “that elevation of sentiment, that pride of soul, and that
generosity of spirit which teaches them, as it were innately, to look
down upon everything which bears the semblance of mean, low, or sordid
feeling.” In that eulogy, no doubt, the exaggerations of the courtier are
combined with those of the necrologist; but it was not Cyril Jackson’s
fault if the lovers of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Ann Clarke failed to
imbibe all the virtues which one could wish them to have displayed. He
was an excellent tutor and an admirable Dean, who raised the College to
a pitch of efficiency never before attained. He joined with Parsons of
Balliol and Eveleigh of Oriel in originating honours examinations, and
his own men did strikingly well in them. Sir Robert Peel was one of his
double-firsts. He was in correspondence with Sir Robert at the beginning
of his public career, and advised him to perfect his oratorical style
“by the continual reading of Homer.”

His courtly dignity may be said to have laid the foundation of the
Christ Church manner—of the manner, at all events, which one associates
with the Deans of Christ Church. They, more than the Heads of any
other Houses, have aimed at fulfilling the ideal of the “magnificent
man” of Aristotle’s “Ethics”—with what success those who have seen
the towering figure of Dean Liddell, filling the aisles of the
cathedral with the pageant of his presence, are aware. This personal
majesty, it is understood, is rather the appanage of the office
than the accidental attribute of any individual; and the serene and
well-warranted self-sufficiency of Cyril Jackson, imitated, consciously
or unconsciously, by his successors, is its source.

Cyril Jackson was so satisfied with his position that he refused all
offers of ecclesiastical preferment. Probably he felt that no other
office could be more exalted than that which he held and adorned. At all
events he declined more than one bishopric, and his reply to one of the
offers is historical. “_Nolo episcopari._ Try my brother Bill; he’ll
take it.” But he did not, on the other hand, cling to the office from
which he was unwilling to be promoted. He retired from it, at the age of
sixty-three, when his reputation was at its highest, and spent his last
years quietly in the country. Some Latin elegiacs in which he expressed
his preference for the simple life are too delightful not to be quoted:

“Si mihi, si liceat traducere leniter ævum,
Non pompam, nec opes, nec mihi regna peto
Vellem ut divini pandens mysteria verbi,
Vitam in secreto rure quietus agam.
Curtatis decimis, modicoque beatus agello,
Virtutæ et pura sim pietate sacer.”

Dean Hall, who succeeded, may be passed over. Dean Smith, who came next,
was known as “Presence of mind Smith.” While an undergraduate, it was
said, he had gone boating, and had returned alone. His companion, he
explained, had fallen into the river, and had clung to the side of the
boat. “Neither of us,” Smith said, “could swim; and if I had not, with
great presence of mind, hit him on the head with the boat-hook, _both_ of
us would have been drowned.” That story, however, is only repeated, as
the journalists say, “with reserve.” Having repeated it, one passes on to
Gaisford, whose memory has left more lasting traces.

* * * * *

Gaisford was a protégé of Cyril Jackson, who is said to have said to
him: “You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty
as a scholar.” That he was not, at any rate, a man of the world, may be
inferred from his reply to the letter in which Lord Liverpool offered
him the Regius Professorship of Greek. “My lord,” he wrote bluntly, “I
have received your letter and accede to its contents. Yours, &c.” That
he succeeded as a scholar is attested by the fact that when he went to
Germany and called on Dindorf, the great Teuton, though he had never been
introduced to him, fell on his neck, and kissed him on both cheeks.

Discipline, however, did not flourish in Gaisford’s time, or in that
of his immediate predecessors, as it had flourished in the time of the
great Cyril. This was the period in which an undergraduate was killed
in a “rag”—his back broken across a chair by the too athletic Lord
Hillsborough, he who, together with Peard of Brasenose (Garibaldi’s
Englishman), cleared the streets of bargees in “town and gown rows.”
This was also the period when the Marquis of Waterford and his company
painted the door of the Deanery, and the doors of the canons’ residences,
red, because of the objection taken to their hunting in pink. It was the
period, too, when the flowers were dug up out of the Deanery garden and
scattered about the quad—whence the expression “planting Peckwater” as a
picturesque synonym for a Christ Church rag. It was the period, finally,
when the statue of Mercury, formerly standing in the centre of the
fountain in Tom Quad, was dressed in the robes of a Doctor of Divinity.
The thing happened in the dead of winter, when the water in the fountain
was frozen hard. After the deed had been done, the ice was broken, so
that none could get to Mercury without wading through freezing water,
five feet deep.

Though these things happened, however, there was a dignity about
Gaisford, none the less. It came out when he received a letter
beginning: “The Dean of Oriel presents his compliments to the Dean of
Christ Church”; on which communication Gaisford’s classical comment was
“Alexander the coppersmith sends greeting to Alexander the Great!” It
came out again in the sermon in which he exhorted his congregation to the
study of the Greek language on the ground that a knowledge of that tongue
would enable them “not only to read the oracles of God in the original,
but also to look down with contempt upon the vulgar herd.”

* * * * *

Leaving the deans, and turning to the undergraduates, one hardly
knows where to begin; for the great names are as thick as bilberries,
and belong to every department of activity. One might begin a very
miscellaneous list with the names of Hakluyt, John Locke the
philosopher, and William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania—a list which
does not become any the less miscellaneous by the addition of the names
of John and Charles Wesley, and Canon Liddon. Or one may recall that
Christ Church has educated three successive Viceroys of India in Lords
Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, and three successive Premiers in Gladstone
and Lords Salisbury and Rosebery, and various other Prime Ministers,
including Lord Liverpool, and George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel.

Peel, it is to be remembered, was the first Christ Church man to take a
double first; and he took it with remarkable _éclat_. The _viva voce_
part of the examination was much more important in those days than in
these. Theoretically it still takes place in the presence of spectators;
but the benches are usually empty. Then there often were crowded houses
to listen to the entertainment; and the examining of Peel was a great
occasion, like a first night at an important theatre. There was “standing
room only”; and when the examinee distinguished himself there was “loud
and prolonged applause,” if not actually an _encore_ and a “call.” One
wonders whether there were any who divined the verbosity of the future
orator when they heard him render _suave_ in _suave mari magno_, “It is a
source of gratification.”

Yet Peel, prematurely solemn as he was, could sometimes unbend, and once
played a practical joke. The victim of it was a timorous freshman, known
to be a scholar of poor quality. The unhappy youth received a message to
the effect that the Vice-Chancellor, having heard of his ignorance, and
desiring to test it, proposed to examine him privately, in his rooms, in
the Greek Testament. The supposed Vice-Chancellor, who duly visited him,
was Peel in disguise, attended by a scout disguised as an Esquire Bedell.
Peel put the freshman through his paces, denounced his blunders in a
severe tone of voice, and told him that he would probably be expelled.
The freshman, so the story concludes, fled from the College without
waiting for the confirmation of this sentence of expulsion, and was never
heard of again.

Gladstone, who was to be so ardent a disciple of Peel in many things,
imitated him, in the first instance, by taking a double first—he was
one of the five first-class men in both the classical and mathematical
lists; but his failures are quite as interesting as his successes. He was
beaten for a Divinity Prize by Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial
philosopher, whose acquaintance he had made as the result of their
common habit of attending the Communion Service at the Cathedral. He
also competed unsuccessfully for the Ireland; and he has related how one
of the examiners explained his defeat to him. “He abused me,” he says,
“for my essay, on which he said his own memorandum was ‘desultory beyond
belief’; also for throwing dust in the examiners’ eyes, like a man who,
when asked who wrote ‘God save the King?’ replied, ‘Thompson wrote “Rule,
Britannia.”’”

That, it will be allowed, was characteristic; and there is something not
less characteristic in the story which Lord Morley tells of his “Greats”
examination:

“The excitement,” Lord Morley writes, “reached its climax when
the examiner, after testing his knowledge of some point of
theology, said: ‘We will now leave that part of the subject,’
and the candidate, carried away by his interest in the subject,
answered: ‘No, sir; if you please, we will not leave it yet.’”

One could tell other stories, of course, if there were room for them;
but Gladstone’s life at Oxford was not, except for his success in the
schools, either sensational or eventful. His diary shows that he gave,
or went to, a wine-party nearly every night; that he was very pleased
with himself when he succeeded in making a speech of three-quarters of
an hour’s duration at the Union; and that he “haunted sermons,” as the
Consistory of Geneva ordered the Prisoner of Chillon to do. That is
practically all that there is to be said; but one may conclude by quoting
Gladstone’s mature opinion of his University. “Oxford,” he wrote, two
generations later, “had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that
liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human excellence
cannot grow up in a nation without it.”

Oxford, it is not to be denied, does sometimes tend thus to confound and
obscure the human spirit. That is one of the defects of the qualities
of its atmosphere. It not only clings to lost causes—it gets stuck to
them, as it were with glue; and it allows reactionary obscurantists like
Pusey—to take the first Christ Church instance that occurs—to have too
much to say. Gladstone evidently came to feel that, in later life, when
he had left the “weeds,” as he called them, of ecclesiasticism behind
him. But his deep love for his University was never affected by the
discovery. To say of any one, he once declared, that he was “a typically
Oxford man” was to pay him the highest possible compliment; and it will
readily be believed that that is not a proposition which this work is
written to dispute.

TRINITY COLLEGE

Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of
Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long
hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil
War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter
Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The Gentlemen
Adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.

Trinity was founded with the spoils of monasteries, in 1554; and the
property of the “buzzing monks” was thus put to better uses than ever
before. The founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was Princess Elizabeth’s guardian
at Hatfield, in Queen Mary’s reign; and he interested the Princess in his
educational enterprise. It is on record that our virgin ruler interceded
on behalf of two early Fellows of Trinity who had got out of the College
by night by climbing over the wall—for what purpose the chronicler does
not relate. They had been expelled; but—“at my Lady Elizabeth her Grace’s
desire”—they were readmitted on payment of a fine.

[Illustration: TRINITY COLLEGE.

[To face p. 226.]

The College, though a small one, and not very richly endowed, has always
had a claim to distinction. If one cannot say of it, as one can of some
of the other colleges, that, at a given moment, it stood for Oxford,
supplying the mind, or the energy, which set the mass in motion, one
can, at least, say that it preserved its intellectual activity in times
of sloth, and has an exceptionally long list of illustrious names on its
books—largely, perhaps, because it has been less hampered than some other
colleges by “close scholarships” and provisions for showing preference
to “founders’ kin.” It has educated statesmen like the Earl of Chatham
and Lord North; such prominent Parliament men as Ludlow and Ireton;
poets of varying degrees of merit from Elkanah Settle to Walter Savage
Landor; divines, of whom John Henry Newman is the most famous; a number
of gentlemen adventurers, of whom more presently; a number of men of
letters, among whom Mr. Quiller Couch must on no account be overlooked.

* * * * *

In the case of so small a College maintaining so high a standard, one
naturally looks for Presidents of commanding personality; and one finds
such a President in Dr. Kettell, who flourished in the reign of Charles
I., and whose memory is still preserved by Kettell Hall in the Broad.
Dr. Kettell, it is recorded, “had a very venerable person and was an
excellent governor”; and the chronicle of his governorship is happily
full of those picturesque details which make it interesting to realise
what the academic life of the past was like.

In his gown and surplice and hood, he had, says Aubrey, “a terrible,
gigantic aspect with his sharp grey eyes”; but the impressiveness of
his appearance must have been of a different order when he was seen on
horseback, on Sundays, riding out to preach at Garsington, “with his
boy Ralph before him, with a leg of mutton and some College bread.” He
loved his College, and lived for it, and, where deeds of charity were
concerned, let not his right hand know what his left hand did. One of
the happy deeds done by his left hand was to thrust money secretly in at
the windows of students whom he knew to be poor; and one of his modes
of promoting sobriety was to see that the Trinity beer was the best in
Oxford, so that no Trinity man should have any excuse for visiting a
tavern.

One of the best known of his idiosyncrasies was his objection to long
hair; for the wearing of long hair was not, as is sometimes carelessly
assumed, first introduced into Oxford by the æsthetes. Whereas they
wore their hair long as a mark of the sensibility of their souls, the
imitators of the Cavaliers had done so, long before them, in vanity, and
for the purpose of proving themselves to be men of fashion. President
Kettell was “irreconcilable” to the habit. He went about with a pair
of scissors for the purpose of cutting men’s hair when he found it
offensively long; and when he happened not to have his scissors with him,
he used a knife.

“I remember,” says Aubrey, “he cut Mr. Radford’s hair with the knife that
chips the bread on the buttery hatch, and then he sang,

“‘And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d?
Tonedi, Tonedi.’”

That was at dinner in hall—a curious incident; but times have changed,
and many things happened at Oxford in the reign of Charles I. which
happen there no longer. Probably, too, when the Court came to Oxford
at the beginning of the Civil War, the President’s hostility to long
hair relaxed. His principal trouble then was with the Court ladies who
attended Divine services in the Trinity chapel, “half-dressed,” to the
great scandal of the undergraduates, and walked in the Trinity Grove
with their gallants. Some of them, it seems, used to play the lute
there—a disconcertingly unacademical proceeding, most disadvantageous
to discipline; and the climax was reached when two specially audacious
ladies—“my Lady Isabella Thynne and fine Mistress Fenshawe, her great
and intimate friend”—carried frivolity to the point of calling on the
President.

That, indeed, is a scene worth picturing: on the one hand the “Oxford
character,” neither accustomed to the society of ladies nor desirous of
it, a man of dignity and authority, though unpolished, very wroth at the
intrusion of “minxes” in the paths of academic peace; on the other hand
high-spirited and mischievous beauties, to whom great academic names
were nothing and great academic potentates were only so many “musty old
professors.” Their idea, apparently, was to ogle the President—to make
him flirt with them—and, failing that, to overwhelm him with satirical
reproaches as a cross-grained old gentleman. And, no doubt, the President
was cross-grained, and entirely indisposed to flirt; but he was a match
for his visitors none the less.

“Madam,” he said, addressing himself to Mistress Fenshawe, “your husband
and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather. I know you to be
a gentlewoman, and I will not say you are a baggage; but get you gone for
a very woman!”

And, so speaking, he drove the giggling intruders from his presence, as
summarily as Benjamin Jowett, at a later date, expelled a deputation
of the Balliol washerwomen from the Master’s lodge. He makes a
characteristic exit speech in that scene, and leaves us free to call up
ghosts of other men.

* * * * *

The ghost of Dr. Johnson would readily appear if called. He stayed at
Kettell Hall while working at his Dictionary; he said that he would
rather live at Trinity than anywhere else at Oxford; his young friends
Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk were both Trinity men. Dr. Johnson,
however, will be waiting for us when we come to speak of Pembroke; so
we may put him on one side, and recall the memory of the greatest of
the Trinity poets, Walter Savage Landor. He was one of the many Oxford
poets who, like Shelley and Swinburne, have left the University without a
degree; and his manner of leaving, like Shelley’s, was violent, and the
result of variance with the dons.

Landor of Trinity, be it observed, was the contemporary of Southey of
Balliol. Like Southey, he distinguished himself by refusing to have
his hair powdered, in the conventional style, for dinner; but Southey
only knew him by repute, as he told Humphry Davy on the publication of
“Gebir.” Landor, Southey then wrote, was “notorious as a mad Jacobin.”
He would have sought his acquaintance, he said, for the sake of the
Jacobinism, if the concomitant madness had not deterred him; and he
concludes, giving chapter and verse for the madness: “He was obliged
to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through
the window.” But that was not quite true. The story, after the way of
stories, had both gained and lost something on its short journey from
Trinity to Balliol; and Landor himself has left a record of the rights of
it in a letter written shortly after the occurrence.

He was a Rugby man, of the days before Rugby had gone in for “moral
seriousness.” He exhibited the roughness of Rugby, together with a
spasmodic uncertainty of temper which was all his own; and, though he
was an excellent Grecian, he did not imitate the Greeks in mixing water
with his wine. In the rooms opposite to his there lived a man named
Leeds whom he did not like—a man of whom he writes that “with a figure
extremely disgusting, he was more so in his behaviour,” and that “he was
continually intruding himself where his company was not wanted.”

One evening it happened that Leeds and Landor were both giving wines;
Leeds’s party consisting, according to Landor, of “servitors and other
raffs of every description.” The weather was warm, and both parties
had their windows open. Neither party, one suspects, was more than
relatively sober; and so, feelings running high, the two parties began to
express their opinions of each other in a slanging match, until presently
Leeds’s party, tired of the wordy war, closed the window, and fastened
the shutters. Then Landor, as a final expression of his contempt,
discharged a shot-gun at the shutters.

Nobody was hurt—nobody could have been hurt; but Leeds complained and the
President sent for Landor; and Landor’s awkward temper was his undoing.
Availing himself of the fact that the shot had proceeded, not from the
sitting-room, but from the bedroom, he told the President that no gun
had been fired from the room in which his company were assembled; and he
added that, as no definite person was accused of the offence, he did not
feel called upon to reply to this vague charge. The President, however,
as it happened, was not the sort of man to be fooled or bluffed.

“Have you got a gun, Mr. Landor?” he asked; and Landor admitted that he
had.

“Will you show it to me?”

“Certainly.”

“Has it been fired lately?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, Mr. Landor, and as I have also taken occasion to question
your guests——”

So the dialogue ran; and the cross-examination established, if not the
legal proof, at least the moral certainty of Landor’s guilt. But he still
tried to bluff.

“Mr. President,” he said, “it is against the law of England to require a
prisoner to incriminate himself”; but the President retired to consult
the Senior Common-room, and returned to pronounce sentence.

“Mr. Landor,” he said, “it is the opinion of the Fellows that you be
rusticated for two terms.” And so it happened; and Oxford lost another
of her poets—more through the poet’s fault, it must be admitted, than
through her own.

* * * * *

The link of poetry, though there is no other, may couple Landor’s name
with Newman’s. The most momentous events of Newman’s Oxford career have
been spoken of in the Oriel chapter; but he was a Trinity undergraduate,
and Trinity’s claim to him must be recognised. “Trinity,” he has written,
“has never been unkind to me”; and in 1885 he presented the College
library with a set of his works, expressing the hope that the yearly
festival of the College might be “as happy a day to you all as in 1818 it
was to me.”

Yet there are indications that Newman’s happiness at Trinity was
diversified by spiritual distress, and by pained disapproval of the
frivolity of others. He had but lately been “converted”; and his
conversion made him a wet blanket in merry company. His thoughts, apart
from his studies, were not confined to the “snapdragon growing on the
walls opposite my freshman’s rooms” of which he afterwards spoke with
a poet’s grateful recollection. His Evangelicalism (for he was then
an Evangelical) was shocked by the too bibulous propensities of his
fellow-men. He could not share in such jollities, like Landor; and at the
approach of the College Gaudy, his letters take the tone of a Commination
Service:

“To-morrow is our Gaudy. If there be one time of the year in
which the glory of our College is humbled, and all appearance
of goodness fades away, it is on Trinity Monday. Oh, how the
angels must lament over a whole society throwing off the
allegiance and service of their Maker, which they have pledged
the day before at His table, and showing themselves the sons of
Belial!”

Is it really well, one wonders, for a young man to be quite so good as
that at quite such an early age? Probably not. The sentences seem to echo
the artificial ring of the Evangelicalism of the decadence, which is a
displeasing sound; and one turns, not without relief, from Newman to the
Gentlemen Adventurers.

* * * * *

It has been mentioned that the first Earl of Chatham was once Pitt of
Trinity; and it was under his direction that England conquered the
Empire “in a fit of absence of mind”—an Empire which, by the way, Lord
North of Trinity went the right way to lose. His name, therefore, though
no stories of his Oxford adventures have been preserved, fittingly
introduces our list.

The first name on the list is that of Sir Francis Verney, of whom many
interesting stories may be read in the “Memoirs of the Verney Family”;
he was, in turn, a galley-slave, a common soldier, and a pirate on the
Barbary coast, and died miserably in the hospital at Messina in 1615. The
second name is that of Calvert, of Trinity, who became Lord Baltimore,
and founded the colony of Maryland. The third—to pass over minor names—is
that of Richard Burton.

“Readers must be prepared,” says Lady Burton, writing of her husband’s
Oxford curriculum, “not to hear the recital of the College course of a
goody-goody boy of yesterday”; and though Burton did row in the Trinity
torpid, and compete for two scholarships, which he failed to win, his
proceedings were, on the whole, irregular. He had lived much abroad, and
came to Oxford with ideas somewhat different from those of the ordinary
public school boy.

The first thing that happened to him on his arrival was that the College
authorities requested him to shave off his moustache. He declined to do
so unless they put their request in the shape of a formal written order.
Some undergraduates then laughed at his moustache; and he handed them
his card, and called them out, though the threatened duel was prevented
from taking place. He was next advised to sport his oak, lest he should
be ragged; but instead of doing that, he left the door wide open, and
thrust the poker in the fire, prepared to give his persecutors a warm
reception if they came. The opinion gained ground that he was a desperate
character, and he was left unmolested.

His studies were as unconventional as his behaviour—he began to learn
Arabic—and so also were his recreations. Those were the days of
rowdyism—the days in which, as has just been related, the Marquis of
Waterford painted the door of the Dean and Canons of Christ Church red;
and Burton thoroughly enjoyed diversions of that order. He once caused
himself to be let down with a rope into the garden of the Master of
Balliol, pulled up that old gentleman’s choicest flowers, and planted
staring marigolds in their place. He also, when the Master of Balliol
was watering his flowers, shot at the watering-pot with an air-gun.
But, taking one consideration with another, nothing was quite so
characteristic of his life at Oxford as his leaving of it.

He had told his father, during the vacation, that he would like to take
his name off the books; but his father had insisted on his returning. He
returned with the firm resolve of overreaching the parental authority by
doing something that would bring about his expulsion; and a race-meeting
in the neighbourhood gave him his opportunity.

Undergraduates were not only forbidden to attend that race-meeting; they
were ordered to be present without fail at lectures, at the hour at which
the races took place. “Tyranny! Unjustifiable interference with the
liberty of the subject!” exclaimed Burton and a few other of the wilder
spirits; and they ordered tandems to be in waiting for them, behind
Worcester, and drove out of Oxford at a spanking pace at the very hour at
which the roll was being called.

Of course they were missed; and of course they were sent for, and asked
for explanations. The explanations of the others were of a humble
character; but Burton’s explanations made matters worse. He blurted out
that he saw no harm in attending a race-meeting, and was aware of no
reason why undergraduates should be treated like babies in arms; and he
not only said that, but went on to moralise.

“Trust begets trust,” he solemnly said, “and they who trust us elevate
us”; and it was not to be expected that the dons would put up with that.

Nor did they. They expelled Burton, while contenting themselves with
rusticating his companions; and he received the sentence with the same
imperturbably high moral tone. He hoped, he said, “that the caution money
deposited by his father would be honestly returned to him.” At that there
was “movement.” It seemed, for the moment, as if the dons proposed to
expel Burton not only from the College, but from the room. He brought his
heels together, bowed to them in the courtly Austrian fashion, wished
them happiness and prosperity, and withdrew. Then he went down.

But not immediately, and not without a demonstration; and the description
of the final scene may be taken from the Life by Mr. Francis Hitchman:

“One of his rusticated friends—Anderson of Oriel,” writes
Mr. Hitchman, “had proposed that they should leave with a
splurge—‘go up from the land with a soar.’ There was now
no need for the furtive tandem behind Worcester College: it
was driven boldly up to the College doors. Richard’s bag and
baggage were stowed away in it, and, with a cantering leader
and a high-trotting horse in the shafts, carefully driven
over the beds of the best flowers, they started for the High
Street and the Queen’s highway to London, Richard energetically
performing upon a yard of tin, waving adieux to his friends,
and kissing his hand to the pretty shop-girls.”

SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE

Saint John’s College was founded in the reign of Queen Mary, a year after
the foundation of Trinity, by Sir Thomas White, a City merchant of the
Dick Whittington type, and one of the originators of the Muscovy Company.
Its connection with the Merchant Tailors’ School was early established;
and merchants generally recognised it as the most fitting college for
them to send their sons to. It blossomed into glory under its second
founder, Archbishop Laud, who added, among other things, that “garden
front” which is one of the architectural gems of Oxford.

[Illustration: ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE.

[To face p. 241.]

Laud’s, in fact, is the chief name to be reckoned with in the College
annals. He occupied almost every position there, from the humblest to
the highest. He was, successively, commoner, Scholar, Fellow, Tutor,
President. While Tutor, he was also, for a time, Proctor. After being
President, he became Visitor of the College and Chancellor of the
University. One associates his name, in politics, with reaction; but he
was, in University matters, a reformer. He and his successor Juxon—the
Juxon who attended Charles I. on the scaffold—raised the College to its
highest pinnacle of honour. It led the van in education, and gave the
country two successive Primates.

* * * * *

Born in 1573, Laud matriculated in 1589, won his scholarship in 1590,
was elected to his fellowship in 1593, took deacon’s orders in 1600 and
priest’s orders in 1601, became a Doctor of Divinity in 1608, and was
chosen President in 1611. He held that office until he became Bishop of
St. David’s in 1621; but his interest in the College did not cease with
his preferment, as the new Statutes which Oxford owed to him bear witness.

His period, as the dates show, was chiefly that of the first two Stuart
Kings; and the Stuarts, whatever their defects, were always full of
regard for the most ancient of the English seats of learning. They
valued its loyalty and liked to visit it in state; and Oxford repaid the
attention which it received from them by modifying its theological point
of view. Laud was the moving spirit of the transformation. The Oxford to
which he went was a Calvinistic Oxford. The Oxford which he left was a
High Church Oxford; and the change was more due to his influence than to
that of any other man. He got his way there by firmness and tact, wearing
down opposition, and making his enemies his friends.

The records of his early Oxford days are scanty; but we know him always
to have been on the side of ceremony, alike in academic and in religious
observances. Of the former kind of ceremony we find a quotable example
in the account preserved of the reception of James I., on his visit to
Oxford, at the gate of Saint John’s:

“Three young youths” (we read) “in habit and attire like nymphs
confronted him, representing England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and talking dialogue-wise each to other of their state, at last
concluding yielding themselves up to his gracious government.
The scholars stood all on one side of the street, and the
strangers of all sorts on the other. The Scholars stood first,
then the Bachelors, and at last the Masters of Arts.”

Laud, we cannot doubt, had a hand in that performance; and we may also
presume him to have had something to do with the management of the
comedy which was played before the King, two days later—not, it is true,
with such unqualified success as the company might have desired:

“It was acted” (we are told) “much better than either of
the others that he had seen before, yet the King was so
over-wearied that after a while he distasted it and fell
asleep. When he awaked, he would have been gone, saying,
‘I marvel what they think me to be,’ with such other like
speeches, showing his dislike thereof. Yet he did tarry till
they had ended it, which was after one of the clock.”

It was in connection with religion, however, that Laud’s appreciation of
splendid ceremony was most important. There is a legend to the effect
that he kept a set of Roman vestments in his rooms, and dressed up in
them and admired himself before the looking-glass when he thought that he
was alone and unobserved; but that story is probably untrue. Certainly
the fact that the College treasures include Roman vestments is no proof
of it. Personally, Laud was a man of very simple tastes. Fuller says so,
and illustrates the statement with an anecdote.

“Once” (Fuller writes) “at a visitation in Essex, one in
orders (of good estate and extraction) appeared before him
very gallant in habit, whom Dr. Laud (then Bishop of London)
publickly reproved, showing to him the plainness of his own
apparel. ‘My Lord’ (said the minister), ‘you have better
cloaths at home and I have worse,’ whereat the Bishop rested
very well contented.”

That is not the language of a man who desired priests to simulate
birds of paradise; and Laud’s chief anxiety was that the conduct of
public worship should be decent, decorous, and dignified. He found the
administration of the Holy Communion conducted in a slovenly manner.
The table was kept in the middle of the Church, and communicants had
acquired a habit of putting their hats and sticks on it. Laud railed it
off, at the East end, so that it could no longer be used as a hat-rack
and umbrella-stand; and he also preached sermons before the University
in favour of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and of the divine
origin of the episcopacy.

This, at first, made him very unpopular. His election to the office of
President was only effected in the face of strenuous opposition—one
vehement antagonist presuming to seize the voting papers and tear them
up, in the vain hope of invalidating the election; and he was preached
at by the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University Church. “What!”
exclaimed the preacher, pointing at the future Archbishop. “Do you think
there be two heavens? If there be, get yourself to the other, and place
yourself there, for into this where I am ye shall not come.”

To that sort of abuse Laud had to listen for hours together. It is said
that he listened patiently. Perhaps he listened with a smile. At any rate
he was in a position to smile, for he could see that he was winning.

Probably other people did not see it; for Laud was neither overbearing
in manner nor formidable in appearance. Fuller describes him as “low in
stature, little in bulk.” When he was Proctor, a citizen of Oxford, whom
he discovered drunk on a bench and accosted with the voice of authority,
addressed him as “thou little morsel of justice” and bade him go away.
Apparently he went away. The Proctor’s Black Book contains no record
of punishment in his time, and in his college he had a reputation for
lenity. One can only in short, infer him to have been a disciplinarian
from the fact that he did, somehow or other, enforce discipline.

He not only enforced discipline, indeed, but conciliated the
recalcitrant. The very man who had tried to invalidate his election to
the Presidency by destroying the voting papers became one of his most
loyal supporters, served as Vice-Chancellor during his Chancellorship,
and sent him regular reports of the progress of University affairs.
In the end, therefore, he was able to carry matters with a high hand,
informing the Heads of the other colleges that, if they did not institute
the reforms suggested to them, “his Majesty’s commissions will reform
whatsoever you do not,” and “this breach once made upon your privileges
might lay open a wider gap in many other particulars,” and “it will be
ordered in a sourer way not so agreeable to your liberties.”

Laud, in short, was, like Lord Curzon, a Chancellor who took his
Chancellorship seriously; and no matter was too great or too little to
receive attention from him. He enriched the University with gifts of rare
and precious manuscripts; he procured fresh privileges for the University
Press; he revised the relation of the colleges to the University; and, in
addition to all that, he drafted regulations as to the conduct of junior
members of the University which we may assume to have been as necessary
in his time as they would be out of place in ours.

He forbade, for instance, long hair, top boots, and slashed doublets, and
all garments of “light and garish colours.” He also forbade “the hunting
of beasts with any sort of dogs, ferrets, nets or toils,” and any use
or carrying of “muskets, crossbows or falcons,” and prescribed that
“neither rope-dancers, actors, nor shows of gladiators” should perform in
the precincts of the University without special leave. His schedule of
prohibited games included football and knuckle-bones; and the sanction
of his Draconian rules was to be “corporal punishment if, by reason of
age, it be becoming, fines, postponement of the degree, expulsion for
a time or for ever”; and though it is difficult for us to picture the
state of things which required to be amended by this drastic code, there
is testimony that the change which it introduced was for the better. Sir
John Coke may be our witness.

“Scholars” (writes Sir John in 1636) “are no more to be found
in taverns nor seen loitering in the streets or other places
of idleness or ill-example, but all contain themselves within
the walls of their colleges and in the schools and public
libraries.”

It is a picture of an Oxford very different from the Oxford which we
know—a picture of an Oxford of old heads on young shoulders. Let Laud
be given all the credit that is due to him for creating such an Oxford,
even though the elements of permanence were lacking to his creation. He
did not altogether ignore the need for recreation, though he thought
rough games undignified, and would have been appalled by the spectacle
of an undergraduate in a blazer. He admitted plays and pageants; and as
our account of him began with a pageant, so it may end with one. Only
three years before his arraignment and execution, he organised a pageant
of triumphant splendour for the entertainment of the King and Queen, the
Elector Palatine, and Prince Rupert.

There was first a dinner of a unique description, with “baked meats”
disguised by the cook to look like Archbishops, Bishops, and Doctors of
Divinity. Then there was a play—“very merry,” Laud writes, “and without
offence.” He was very proud to think that Saint John’s was able to
stage the piece without needing to borrow a single actor from any other
college; and the costumes were so tasteful that the Queen borrowed them
for a subsequent performance by her own players at Hampton Court. All
things, in short, were in such very good order that “no man went out at
the gates, courtier or other, but content,” and all passed off “to the
great satisfaction of the King and the honour of that place.”

It was a great day for Saint John’s, and a great day for Laud.
He proceeded to Oxford for the occasion with a retinue of from
forty to fifty horsemen, and he defrayed the whole cost of the
entertainment—£2,666—out of his own pocket. But the glory was like the
glory of the sunset which precedes the dark. Laud’s further progress was
to be to the prison and the block; and the College was presently to be
called upon, like the other colleges, to yield up its plate to the King,
and to devote a portion of its revenues to the payment of the King’s
soldiers. The King promised “on the word of a king” to repay the money
advanced within a month; but he did not keep his promise; and presently
the Parliamentarians began bombarding, and a cannon ball which lodged in
the gateway tower is still preserved.

* * * * *

Having had its day, Saint John’s was never again to be so pre-eminent
a college as under Laud’s administration. Intellectually, it was to be
surpassed by Balliol; socially it was to be surpassed by Christ Church.
The Methodism of the eighteenth century was to have no repercussion
within its walls. Ecclesiastically—though Mark Pattison speaks of it as
“corroded with ecclesiasticism”—it was never to attain to the interest of
Oriel. It fell, in short, with the fall of Charles I., into that place in
“the ruck” from which it is given to few colleges to emerge for more than
a little while.

One distinction which may be claimed for the days of its obscurity is
that, once, it had a soldier for its President. President Mews had
attained the rank of captain during the Civil War, and it is related
that, while President, he lent the horses from his stable to draw
the royal artillery at the Battle of Sedgmoor, and himself not only
watched the engagement from the top of a hill, but gave advice as to
the tactics—an example which we may expect to see followed by Professor
Spenser Wilkinson (whose college was Merton) if ever the necessity should
arise.

Another incident which diversified the annals of the College in the
latter part of the seventeenth century was a visit from the Dutch Admiral
Tromp. He is described by a contemporary as “a drunken greasy Dutchman”;
but he did not get drunk alone. A drinking match was arranged by Dr. John
Speed of Saint John’s, and five or six others, “as able men as himself.”
It is recorded that, though the contest was a severe one, the Oxonians
triumphed, and at the close of a merry evening, the ancient mariner was
conveyed to his lodgings in a wheelbarrow.

And so forth, there being no other name on which it is necessary to pause
until we come to that of Dean Mansel.

* * * * *

Mansel is the divine whom Herbert Spencer claimed for his philosophical
ancestor. He had, he said, carried the speculations of Mansel a step
further—that was how he had arrived at the agnosticism expounded in
“First Principles.” Whether the one philosopher’s conclusions are really
deducible from the other philosopher’s premises is a thorny question
about which the mere historian may be contented to leave theologians
and metaphysicians wrangling. For him it is enough that Mansel was a
notable figure—a philosopher whom the average undergraduate of his period
forgave freely for being incomprehensible because he was so unmistakably
pugnacious.

In his examination for his degree, Mansel distinguished himself by
arguing with his examiner, before an admiring audience, and putting him
to shame; and Dean Burgon’s “Twelve Good Men” contains a delightful
description of the delivery of his controversial Bampton Lectures. He was
much too deep, Burgon tells us, for his congregation—not one in a hundred
of them understood a word of what he was saying. But they understood, in
a general way, what he was about.

“He was, single-handed, contunding a host of unbelievers—some
with unpronounceable names and unintelligible theories; and
sending them flying before him like dust before the wind.
And _that_ was quite enough for _them_. It was a kind of
gladiatorial exhibition which they were invited to witness: the
unequal odds against the British lion adding greatly to the
zest of the entertainment; especially as the noble animal was
always observed to remain master of the field in the end. But,
for the space of an hour, there was sure to be some desperate
hard fighting, during which they knew that Mansel would have to
hit both straight and hard: and _that_ they liked. It was only
necessary to look at their Champion to be sure that _he_ also
sincerely relished his occupation; and this completed their
satisfaction. So long as he was encountering his opponents’
reasoning, his massive brow, expressive features, and earnest
manner suggested the image of nothing so much as resolute
intellectual conflict, combined with conscious intellectual
superiority. But the turning-point was reached at last. He
would suddenly erect his forefinger. This was the signal for
the decisive final charge. Resistance from that moment was
hopeless. Already were the enemy’s ranks broken. It only
remained to pursue the routed foe into some remote corner of
Germany and to pronounce the Benediction.”

Truly there must have been theological giants in the land in those days;
and the spectacle must have been even more sublime than that of Tatham
of Lincoln contributing to Christian apologetics his famous wish that he
might see “all the German critics at the bottom of the German Ocean.” And
the curious thing is that, when Mansel was not confounding the Teuton
metaphysicians, he was engaged in building himself up a second reputation
as the most brilliant punster in the English language. Burgon credits him
with the delightful saying—sometimes attributed to Douglas Jerrold—that
“dogmatism is the maturity of puppyism”; and Burgon, in fact, fills
several pages with Mansel’s puns, setting them forth with a gusto which
may partially explain and justify the criticism once passed on Burgon
himself, to the effect that “buffoonery was his forte and piety his
foible.”

JESUS COLLEGE

Statistics concerning the Joneses of Jesus—A Welsh
_enclave_—Rarity of great names at Jesus—Henry Vaughan the
“Silurist”—Sir Lewis Morris—Beau Nash—John Richard Green.

The belief currently entertained about Jesus College in the other
colleges is that the Principal, the Fellows, the Scholars, and the
Commoners—to say nothing of the porter, the cook, and the scouts—are all
alike called Jones. It is also generally understood that such Christian
names as David and Llewellyn occur too frequently to be of any use for
the denotation of individuals, with the result that it is only possible
to distinguish a given Jones from other Joneses by means of a reference
to his personal idiosyncrasies. “I mean,” people say, “the Mr. Jones who
...” &c.

Legends of that sort, though seldom literally true, are seldom quite
devoid of foundation in fact; and the best thing to do is to take a
census. It appears from Foster’s “Alumni Oxonienses” that, between 1715
and 1886, there were 716 Joneses at Oxford, and that 299 of them were
Joneses of Jesus. Jesus, that is to say, whose just share of Joneses
would be one twenty-first, has, as a matter of fact, educated rather
less than one-half and rather more than one-third of the total number of
Joneses available. Yet, by one of those curious ironies which make life
interesting, it so happens that the greatest of the Oxford Joneses—Sir
William Jones, to wit—was not at Jesus, but at University, and that the
most memorable of the Jesus ghosts are not the ghosts of Joneses, but of
a Vaughan, a Nash, a Green, and a Morris, while only one Jones has ever
risen to the dignity of Principal.

So much for statistics. They are very interesting, but they do not carry
us very far. Our next step must be to picture Jesus—not the present
Jesus, of course, but the unreformed Jesus of old times—as a horrible
example of the evil (or perhaps it would be better to say the undesirable
limitations) of what may be called “hole-and-corner” educational
endowments.

Jesus has always been, in a special sense, the Welshman’s college—a Welsh
_enclave_, as it were, in the midst of England. Benefactors made it so
by confining their benefactions to Welshmen; and one may feel that this
was a mistaken policy without speaking disrespectfully of Welshmen—which
has always, since Shakespeare’s time, been a dangerous thing to do. The
results have been somewhat like those which Matthew Arnold deplored in
the case of special schools for the education of the sons of licensed
victuallers and commercial travellers. The Welshmen brought their
own atmosphere to Oxford and formed their own circle there. Their
peculiarities, instead of being toned down, were crystallised; and their
many excellent qualities were consequently lost upon Oxford. Men of other
colleges gazed at them, as it were, across a social gulf, and regarded
them pretty much as they might have regarded Wild Men from Borneo.

Nor did the Welshmen often bridge the social gulf by means of
intellectual achievement. They might have done so if they had been fairly
representative of Wales; but they were not. Jesus suffered more than
almost any other college from the dog-in-the-manger policy of theologians
in high places. While the College was the preserve of Welshmen, the
University was the preserve of members of the Church of England; and
Wales, as all the world knows, is a citadel of Nonconformity. The
intellect of Wales, therefore, was not justly represented at Jesus; while
the intellect of England, Scotland, and Ireland was hardly represented
there at all.

It followed that even the people who regarded the religion at Jesus as
“true” could not allow that the learning there was “sound.” Fellowships
were frequently awarded to men who had taken only third or fourth-class
honours. The scholars could learn no more than the Tutors could teach
them; and the list of _alumni_ is singularly lacking in distinction. A
list of sixteen bishops can, indeed, be made out—with not a Jones among
them; and there have been a good many Cymric lexicographers, Cymric
grammarians, and Cymric antiquaries. But such names as a non-Cymric
public values are very scarce indeed. Archbishop Ussher—he who computed
that the world must have been created in the year 4004 B.C.—had some
connection with the College, though the precise nature of that connection
cannot be discovered; and then comes Henry Vaughan—the poet who called
himself “the Silurist,” because the country in which he lived and worked
was the ancient territory of the Silures.

* * * * *

Henry Vaughan is a charming religious poet, with a vein of mysticism. The
Reverend Alexander Grosart has written his life in a prose style of his
own, which suggests a careful man picking his way across a muddy road in
patent-leather shoes. But the life, when written, amounts to very little.
Hardly anything is known of the poet except that he began to study law,
but afterwards became a country doctor, and practised in Brecknockshire;
and the most interesting statement made concerning him is that, when the
war between King and Parliament broke out, he suffered a short term of
imprisonment as a royalist, but afterwards went home and “followed the
pleasant paths of poetry and philology.”

Some will, no doubt, denounce him, on that account, as a poor,
mean-spirited person; but there are no known facts on which to base the
charge. Fighting, after all, is not an end in itself; and a man may
refrain from fighting, not because he is afraid of being killed, but
because he does not feel strongly enough to desire to kill the people
who do not share his opinions. A mystic, full of the belief that God is
manifested in all His creatures—King’s men and Parliament men alike—might
well sigh for quiet in the midst of civic storms, and prefer to realise
his Pantheism in a lonely place rather than draw the sword and let
himself be carried away by evil passions which his heart told him were
unprofitable and vain.

The Silurist was, we may take it, a “God-intoxicated” man, and one on
whom the intoxication exercised a narcotic rather than an exciting
influence: a man, therefore, not to be roused from meditative torpor by
the thought that the King’s rights or the people’s liberties were in
peril. He could see visions and dream dreams which were worth infinitely
more to him than any of the objects of contention between Cavaliers and
Roundheads. He not only fancied that he could see—he actually saw:

“Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust;
Could man out-look that mark!

“If a star were confin’d into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock’d her up gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere!”

One does not picture the man who wrote those lines galloping about with
a sword in his hand and charging with the drunken troopers who followed
Rupert of the Rhine. One could not so picture him if one would, and
one would not if one could. He was of a finer as well as a more sober
temper than any of those roystering men-at-arms; and in his “Retreate”
he anticipated Wordsworth’s more famous “Intimations of Immortality.”
Perhaps it is not without significance that he and Wordsworth both
divined that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” and that
“Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” in an age in which progress seemed
to have called a halt while wild men cut each other’s throats.

All that, however, has nothing to do with the career of Vaughan the
Silurist at Jesus; and, indeed, there is nothing to be said on that
branch of the subject, except that Vaughan left the University without
taking his degree. The only other Jesus poet worthy of remark—one has
named, of course, Lewis Morris—not only took his degree, but also took
firsts in Moderations and in Greats, and won the Chancellor’s Prize for
an essay on “The greatness and decline of Venice,” and would have been
elected to a fellowship if he had not been disqualified by the possession
of private means. “Perhaps,” writes the official historian of Jesus,
“what the College lost the rest of the world may have gained by this
disqualification.”

It may be so. Yet Sir Lewis Morris has left it on record that he wrote
most of his poetry on the underground railway before it was electrified;
and if the atmosphere of Jesus was less inspiring than that of the
unreformed District Line, it must have been more uninspiring than that of
any of the other colleges. The essential thing is, however, that Morris
did write his poetry, and gained his knighthood, and was at one time a
possible poet laureate.

He had been much admired. His admirers had, at one time, numbered tens,
if not hundreds of thousands; and if the laureateship had fallen vacant
then, it would probably have been given to him amid acclamations. It fell
vacant too late, however, and was allowed to remain vacant too long to
please him. The demand for his poetical services was not vociferous. It
even seemed to him that he was the victim of a conspiracy of silence; and
he said as much to Oscar Wilde.

“Oscar,” he asked, “what would you advise me to do in the face of this
conspiracy of silence?”

“I would advise you to join the conspiracy,” was his brother poet’s cruel
reply.

* * * * *

Another—and one may even venture to say an unexpected—Jesus man was Beau
Nash, the uncrowned King of Bath: the autocratic dandy who directed the
etiquette of the Bath Assembly Rooms, where he ordered Duchesses to
take off their aprons and noblemen to take off their boots. All things
considered, it seems improbable that Beau Nash was very much like the
other Jesus men, or that the other Jesus men were very much like Beau
Nash; and it may be added that the example which he set them was not an
example which it would have been good for them to follow.

The Beau, like the Silurist, left Oxford without a degree, after having
demonstrated, as his biographer, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith of Trinity College,
Dublin, puts it, that “though much might be expected from his genius,
nothing could be hoped from his industry.” And Dr. Goldsmith continues:

“The first method Mr. Nash took to distinguish himself at
college was not by application to study, but by his assiduity
in intrigue. In the neighbourhood of every University there are
girls who, with some beauty, some coquetry, and little fortune,
lie upon the watch for every raw amorous youth more inclined
to make love than to study. Our Hero was quickly caught, and
went through all the mazes of a college intrigue before he was
seventeen; he offered marriage, the offer was accepted, but
the whole affair coming to the knowledge of his tutors, his
happiness, or perhaps his future misery, was prevented, and he
was sent home from college, with necessary advice to him and
proper instructions to his father.”

His case, if correctly reported, is a warning to those young men of the
present day—supposing that there still are such—who listen to the lure of
the siren in the photographer’s shop; but the exactitude of the narrative
has been disputed. A contemporary reviewer of Dr. Goldsmith’s work had
heard from a Fellow of Jesus that “Mr. Nash, being too volatile to relish
the sober rules of a college life, took the opportunity of receiving his
quarter’s returns, and went off, leaving a debt behind him of about three
pounds eighteen shillings, which remains undischarged on the College
books to this day.” Which of the two stories is the true one it is, at
this distance of time, impossible to say; but the records which remain of
the Beau’s volatility do certainly indicate a manner of life for which a
University city was no proper setting.

In the days before he went to Bath and found his _métier_, he earned his
living in very curious ways, but chiefly by undertaking, for a wager,
to do some ridiculous thing. One of his feats, accomplished from this
pecuniary motive, was to strip himself naked and ride through the streets
of a village on the back of a cow. That, it will be generally admitted,
is a thing which it is better to do in the remote country than in the
High, or the Broad, or even the Turl.

* * * * *

Next—and perhaps last—on the roll of Jesus celebrities comes the name of
John Richard Green, the historian of the English People; and his debt to
Jesus—and even to Oxford—does not seem to have been a heavy one.

His place among the historians is undoubtedly better assured than the
place of Lewis Morris among the poets; but as an undergraduate he did
not shape so well. Instead of taking first class honours, he only took
a pass degree; instead of writing a prize essay, he wrote for a local
paper. His tutors thought him idle, and his contemporaries had some
reason to complain of him. He was part author of a satire—the “Gentiad,”
an imitation of the “Dunciad”—which ridiculed some of the characteristics
of Jesus men. This brought him unpopularity, and he passed through Oxford
without making many friends.

One good and great friend, however, he did make, almost by accident; and
that story may be best told in the words of the Life by Leslie Stephen:

“During his University career Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was
Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Green, during his last
term, went accidentally into the lecture-room where Stanley
was discoursing upon the Wesleys. The lecture fascinated him,
and he never missed another. In one lecture Stanley concluded
with the phrase, ‘_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_, words so
great that I could almost prefer them to the motto of our own
University, _Dominus illuminatio mea_.’ As Stanley left the
room, Green, who had been deeply interested, exclaimed, ‘_Magna
est veritas et prævalebit_ is the motto of the town!’ Stanley
was much pleased, invited his young admirer to walk home with
him, and asked him to dinner. The day appointed was early in
November (1859), and the ‘town and gown’ riots of the period
made the passage through the streets rather hazardous. ‘How
could you come at all?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sir,’ replied Green in
the words of Johnson, ‘it is a great honour to dine with the
Canons of Christ Church.’”

The friendship thus formed was of great importance to Green. It put heart
into him, as he afterwards told Stanley, at a time when he “found no help
in Oxford theology,” and was apparently the influence which stimulated
him to the point of taking orders. Afterwards, of course, he found
that Oxford theology was not the only theology which puzzled instead
of satisfying his intelligence. He had very little of the theological
mentality, and he had a severe historical conscience. He could neither
believe what he knew to be untrue, nor could he pretend to believe it;
and consequently—but that has nothing to do with Jesus College.

* * * * *

And so the Jesus pageant passes—a pageant in which, as we see, the
apparently inevitable name of Jones does not appear.

WADHAM COLLEGE

Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of
Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham
Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham
Positivists—“Three Persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte,
Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford
Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.

The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his widow. Nicholas
accumulated the funds, and Dorothy applied them after his death, at her
discretion, in accordance with his wishes. The discreet and delightful
Wadham Gardens are said to have been due to her initiative; and she
also had the happy thought of exempting Fellows of the College from
the disconcerting necessity of taking Holy Orders. Though one knows
little else of her, one cannot but be prepossessed in her favour by the
beautiful euphony of her name. Mistress Dorothy Wadham—it is a name which
falls on the ear like the soft melody of silver bells.

[Illustration: WADHAM COLLEGE.

[To face p. 267.]

The date of the Charter is 1610—an early year in the reign of the comic
King who loved learning almost as much as he hated tobacco. Its Jacobean
architecture is a serene and perfect poem in grey stone, though the
grass in the quadrangle which contrasts so effectively with the grey
was added by one of the Wardens at a later time. It seems natural and
proper that it should have been the College of the two greatest of the
Oxford architects—Sir Christopher Wren and T. G. Jackson. It is also the
College of Admiral Blake, Nicholas Love, the regicide, Thomas Sydenham,
the physician, Speaker Onslow, the “wicked” Earl of Rochester, Lord
Chancellor Westbury, who won his scholarship as a prodigy of fourteen in
“jacket and frills,” Dean Church, who, according to Mark Pattison, was
elected to an Oriel Fellowship on account of his “moral beauty,” Father
Maconochie of Saint Alban’s, Holborn, those great athletes, Messrs. T. A.
Cook (now the editor of the _Field_) and C. B. Fry, Mr. F. E. Smith, and
many other men of note.

It is of the others that we will speak here, prefacing comment with the
remark that Wadham has been successively a Whig College, an Evangelical
College, a Positivist College—and also the College of the man who
launched the latest of the Oxford Movements, and the College which was
the scene of the last of the really historic Oxford “rags.” It may clear
the ground if one begins by saying a word about the “rag.”

* * * * *

The “rag” occurred as recently as 1880; and one must not pretend
to disentangle the rights and wrongs of it with the precision of a
scientific historian. In a general way, however, one may say that it
originated in an attempt on the part of authority to tighten the reins
of discipline at a time when pride at success on the river had made the
College restive. So first there were skirmishes, and then there was a
battle royal.

A bonfire seems, as usual, to have been the first overt act; and the
lighting of a bonfire on the grass—that beautifully kept Wadham grass—is
an act no more to be condoned by the historian than by the dons. The
answer to it—surely a justifiable answer—was the prohibition of the
annual College Concert. But then tempers were lost, and fur began really
to fly. The wrath of the junior members of the College was vented upon
“Unbelieving Dick”—a don so called because he professed himself sceptical
of the articles of the Christian Faith. There was a sudden irruption
of youth, flown with insolence and wine, into Unbelieving Dick’s
apartments at the dead of night. Unbelieving Dick had no power to eject
his visitors, and no time to dress in order to receive them. He fled, it
is related, across the quadrangle in his night-shirt—for none, in those
days, wore pyjamas—pursued with missiles and howls of execration.

Things, it was evident, could not be allowed to rest there. The
ring-leaders must be discovered and an example must be made. An appeal to
them to surrender themselves, however, met with no response; and the dons
presently engaged the services of a detective. The detective was himself
detected, and was severely punished under the pump. It only remained for
the dons to play their last card and send the whole College down. They
did so. Wadham, in the Autumn Term of 1880, was a howling wilderness,
with only a few freshmen in residence—a sorrowful spectacle indeed
for Dorothy Wadham, if she looked down on it from another world. The
rehabilitation of the College, though since fully accomplished, was only
a gradual process.

And now we will leave the rag, and speak of the religious (and
irreligious) history of Wadham.

* * * * *

Religion, as has been said, appears at Wadham chiefly in the form of
Evangelicalism. The College was the stronghold, or the hotbed—whichever
be the better word—of Evangelicalism in the fiery days of the Tractarian
Movement. Warden Symons, who ruled over it from 1831 to 1871, appears
to have conformed, so far as a scholar could, to the type which one
associates with missionary meetings, tea, hassocks, and well buttered
crumpets. His wife held prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and kept a
“missionary cow,” the proceeds of whose milk—supplied to undergraduates
at specially high terms—were allocated to the propagation of the Gospel
in foreign parts. He himself altered the hour of the services in the
Wadham Chapel for the express purpose of preventing his young men from
attending Newman’s sermons at Saint Mary’s. On one occasion he knocked at
the door of Newman’s retreat at Littlemore and asked if he might be shown
over the monastery. “We have no monastery here,” was the reply; and the
door was slammed in his face.

The Warden’s scorn of ceremonial observance was illustrated by his manner
of receiving the contents of the collection plate at the Communion
Service. It was his habit simply to shovel the money into his pocket and
walk off with it; and this brusque and indecorous proceeding naturally
furnished the basis of a legend. The Warden, it was said, had annexed the
offertory as a perquisite of his office, and exhorted undergraduates
to generosity in order to gain his private ends. “Gentlemen,” he was
reported to have said, “must really give a little more liberally; I have
been quite out of pocket by the last two or three collections.” It was
not true, of course; but it served him right. Every Warden becomes the
hero of the myths that he deserves. And, no doubt, it was largely in
consequence of the saponaceous slovenliness of Wadham religion that,
whereas the serious undergraduates of other colleges went over to Rome,
the serious undergraduates of Wadham, and the serious dons too, went over
to Paris and joined Comte in erecting Temples of Humanity on the ruins of
the Temples of God.

* * * * *

Those were the days in which it was said that Wadham was governed by a
Trinity consisting of Three Persons and No God; but the three persons
in question are differently identified by different cynics. The names
of Richard Congreve, Edmund Spencer Beesley, and Mr. Frederic Harrison
are those most commonly mentioned; but Mr. Harrison has stated, in an
autobiographical note, that he did not definitely adopt the Positivist
Religion until some years after he had gone down. It does not matter—or,
at all events, it does not matter very much. Wadham, in fact, has
harboured several generations of Positivists, so that there generally
have been at least three heads there which the caps fitted, right down to
the time of the Unbelieving Dick whose misadventures have been referred
to; and they all acknowledged Richard Congreve as their spiritual father.

He was a Rugby boy who acted, for a time, as a Rugby Master. His case
may be taken as a fresh exemplification of that “moral seriousness” of
which Rugby boasts. The beliefs in which he had been brought up slipped
away from him; but he continued to respect the sacred impulse of the
human heart which impels people to dress in their best and go somewhere
to be edified on Sundays. Just as Comte had arranged for them to do so
in Paris, so he arranged for them to do so in Lamb’s Conduit Street;
and so, at a later date, Mr. Frederic Harrison arranged for them to do
so in Fetter Lane. Really intellectual people, he felt, having passed
beyond theology and beyond metaphysics, might nevertheless kneel to
Humanity—that abstraction of what was noblest in their noblest selves—and
invoke Saints carefully selected from

“The choir invisible
Of the immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence.”

At a later date there was to be trouble among the Positivists—an outburst
of heresy, schism, and dissent. Comte, it turned out, was not the easiest
Master for rational and self-respecting disciples to follow blindly. He
had been in a lunatic asylum and was supported by the voluntary offerings
of the faithful. Fully persuaded that he who preached the gospel was
entitled to live by the gospel, he solicited contributions and quarrelled
with subscribers whose contributions seemed to him inadequate. Moreover,
being separated from his wife, he fell in love with a lady who had been
separated from her husband, and insisted upon incorporating his romance
in his religious system. The worship of Humanity in general might, he
claimed, be most happily symbolised by the specific worship of Clotilde
de Vaux.

His relations with Clotilde de Vaux were, his biographers tell us,
“pure.” No doubt they had his word for it, and perhaps they also had
hers; but that detail cannot have mattered much to any one except the
philosopher and his affinity. To be called upon to worship another man’s
affinity, whatever the precise nature of his relations with his affinity,
is always a strain upon devout allegiance. It proved so in this instance.
There was a split, broadly speaking, between the Positivists who had a
sense of humour and the Positivists who had none; but we need not enter
into the rights and wrongs of the disruption. Enough to note the fact,
and to note also that, so far as England is concerned, Positivism has
been an Oxford Movement which Wadham has practically monopolised.

* * * * *

This brings us to the last of the Oxford Movements, with which Wadham is
also very definitely associated—the Social Movement which succeeded the
Æsthetic Movement, in or about the year 1884.

Something has already been said about it in the Magdalen chapter which
related the æsthetic collapse. The principal thing to be added here is
that the man who had most to do with the launching of it was Barnett
of Wadham, who had taken a Second in History in 1865, and was then the
incumbent of Saint Jude’s, Whitechapel.

Other forces were, indeed, indirectly at work. Sir Walter Besant’s
advocacy of a People’s Palace in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” was
one. Mr. George R. Sims’s tract entitled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast
London” was another. Here, at all events, were the elements of stir, if
not of movement in the narrow sense—the vague suggestion that “something
ought to be done,” and that the people who had culture owed a debt of
some sort to the people who were trying to get along without it. Barnett
of Wadham, with many earnest helpers from other colleges, focussed the
Movement at Oxford in a memorable speech delivered in the Union Debating
Hall.

The only hope for the East End of London, it was then laid down, was for
Oxford men to colonise it. They alone, or almost alone, possessed the
secret of culture. A number of them, therefore, must settle there, and
set good examples, illuminating Whitechapel by their shining influence.
Forthwith they jumped at the idea, and carried it out, almost in the
twinkling of an eye. Toynbee Hall was the result, and Barnett of Wadham,
now Canon Barnett, was its first Warden.

Oxford, in those days, was, it must be admitted, a very serious
University indeed—as serious a University as even the Rugby men could
have wished to see it. Even unbelievers took to going to church, and
gravely envisaged the question whether a lack of belief was really a
sufficient excuse for not taking Holy Orders. The _Oxford Magazine_
became the ponderous organ of the seriously minded, and, for a season,
no sermon was too tedious to be reported verbatim in its columns, until
one day there appeared a protest in the shape of a rhymed letter to the
editor:

“Mr. Editor, surely some lightness of touch
Would be not unbecoming your famed magazine.
Of lectures and sermons you give us too much;
Toynbee Hall gets to pall, and I _loathe_ Bethnal Green.”

The author of those lines was Mr. Quiller Couch of Trinity, whom the
world knows as “Q.” The immediate effect of them was to clear the air at
Oxford; though Mr. Barnett’s Oxonian procession continued to carry the
lamps of culture down the Mile End Road, with results which, according to
the latest reports, are eminently satisfactory.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE

In the eyes of the average visitor to Pembroke, one fact outweighs all
other facts in importance. Pembroke was the college of Dr. Johnson.
It is much more profitable to tell a visitor that than to dwell on
the circumstances in which Pembroke College grew out of the earlier
Broadgates Hall.

Broadgates Hall, it is true, had cut a considerable figure in the early
social history of Oxford. Christ Church men who could not be accommodated
in the House often had rooms there—a fact which the modern Christ Church
men should remember when they are tempted to their traditional gibe:
“Is that Pembroke? I always thought that was where the Christ Church
coals were kept.” John Pym, too, the great Parliamentary leader, was at
Broadgates Hall; and the Hall was “a nest of singing birds” long before
the greatest of her sons claimed that distinction for Pembroke. George
Peele, Francis Beaumont (of the Beaumont and Fletcher combination), and
Sir Fulke Greville were all poets of Broadgates Hall; but it is not easy
to arouse the curiosity of the visitor concerning them. He keeps most of
his curiosity for Dr. Johnson; and if he has any curiosity left over, he
bestows it upon George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher.

Let us consider Dr. Johnson first.

* * * * *

Johnson went up in 1728; but his career was brief—about fourteen months
from start to finish. Carlyle says he was a servitor; but he was, in
fact, a commoner. A friend who offered him financial help did not fulfil
his promise. His father fell into financial difficulties, and he had to
go home, leaving his caution money to defray his dues.

Old Michael Johnson brought him up, and took him to call upon his tutor.
He astonished the common-room, after a modest silence, by interjecting
a quotation from Macrobius, thus proving himself to be precocious and
well-read, though he was not to turn out to be the sort of model scholar
whom the donnish mind approves. Laziness was to be his besetting vice
through life. He was already lazy while an undergraduate; and he shared
with many men of meaner intelligence a disposition to cut his lectures,
and to excuse himself on grounds which the lecturers could not but regard
as inadequate. Of the Christ Church man it has been written by an Oxford
humourist that “he goeth not to lectures, for he saith: ‘How can a man
lecture in bags cut like that?’” Johnson was guilty of a more outspoken
rudeness. Summoned to account for his absence from the classroom, he
explained that he had been skating on Christ Church meadows. Fined
for his neglect of the obligation, he said: “Sir, you have sconced me
twopence for a lecture that was not worth a penny.” And the biography
continues:

“BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.

“JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.”

He was poor; but the picture of his poverty has sometimes been overdrawn.
His account for battells, which remains in the College archives, shows
that he had enough to eat and drink, and that, in that important
respect, at all events, he lived on the same scale as the majority of
his compeers. Nor did his lack of means compel him to an isolated and
unsociable existence. He joined with the other commoners in ragging
the servitors whose duty it was to knock at the doors of commoners and
ascertain whether they were in their own rooms at the appointed hour. He
hunted them down the stairs, it is recorded, “with the noise of pots and
candlesticks”; and there are contemporary recollections which show him to
have been somewhat of a leader of men.

“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his
contemporaries, that he was generally to be seen lounging at
the College Gate with a circle of young students round him,
whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their
studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the
College discipline, which in his maturer years he so much
extolled. He would not let these idlers say ‘prodigious’ or
otherwise misuse the English tongue.”

Dr. Adams, too, then a tutor, and afterwards Master of the College, told
Boswell that Johnson, as an undergraduate, was “a gay and frolicsome
fellow,” and was “caressed and loved by all about him”; but Boswell
proceeds:

“When I mentioned to him this account, he said: ‘Ah, Sir, I
was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for
frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by
my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all
authority.’”

Very likely, however, that recollection was coloured by later memories
of the struggle for bread in Grub Street. Between the manifestations
of bitterness and frolic the average undergraduate can, as a rule,
discriminate; and Pembroke was not a rich man’s college. The pangs of
poverty only became intense when Johnson crossed the road to Christ
Church, to see his friend Taylor. Then contrast made him conscious of his
shabbiness. As Boswell writes:

“Mr. Bateman’s lectures were so excellent that Johnson used
to come and get them at second hand from Taylor, till his
poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and
his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating
circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he
came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody
having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away
with indignation.”

This “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes,” as Boswell
calls it, is the best known of all the stories of Johnson’s Oxford
career; but there is no evidence that the memory of the incident
mortified him in after life. He never vilified Oxford, as did Gibbon
and Adam Smith. On the contrary he was always proud to remember that he
was an Oxford man; he spoke very highly of the tutors whose instruction
he had neglected; and he delighted to revisit the University in his
prosperous and famous period. We have a graphic account of one such visit
from the pen of Hannah More:

“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr
Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine
with what delight he showed me every part of his own College,
nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party.
Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We
spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson
begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one
show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’
Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who have
been of his College, ‘In short,’ he said, ‘we were a nest of
singing-birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’
He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he
passed there.”

That may be, indeed, the language of a man whose undergraduate days
had been passed in poverty; but it assuredly is not the language of a
man whose poverty had made life unbearable in the manner which Carlyle
suggests. Johnson, it is hardly to be doubted, enjoyed himself at Oxford
as much as his constitutional tendency to melancholia ever permitted him
to enjoy himself anywhere; and one may even conjecture that the condition
of his shoe-leather was as much due to untidiness as to indigence.
To find a Pembroke man who was really poor, and really miserable and
morbid, we have to turn to the case of that eminent Methodist divine, the
Reverend George Whitefield.

* * * * *

Whitefield came up just after Johnson had gone down; and there was one
interesting link between them—a link which also associates them with that
eminent Magdalen man, the historian of the Roman Empire. They both read,
and were affected by, Law’s “Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”; and
Law had been tutor to Gibbon’s father and was to end his days as a sort
of domestic chaplain to one of Gibbon’s aunts. It is curious to observe
how differently his exhortations influenced the minds of the three men.

Gibbon devotes a good deal of space, in his Autobiography, to Law’s
“theological writings which our domestic connection has tempted me
to peruse”; and he holds the scales with a rigid impartiality. Law’s
“sallies of religious frenzy,” he says, “must not be allowed to
extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a
scholar.” He thinks that, “had not his vigorous mind been clouded by
enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious
writers of the times.” His conclusion is that:

“If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will
soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow
that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange
contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian
world.”

Gibbon, that is to say, looks at Law solely with the eye of a literary
critic, damns him with faint praise, but leaves his propositions
unexamined as childish conceptions which he has long since put away,
and does not propose to be concerned with any more. His tone is that of
a head-master who praises, while he corrects, a set of Latin verses.
Johnson read the book, expecting it to afford him ribald amusement, but
was “over-matched” by it, and even frightened by it some distance along
the road which leads to religious mania. Whitefield read it with real
Methodistical enthusiasm.

* * * * *

About the Oxford Methodists in general enough has already been said in
the chapter on Lincoln; but Whitefield is of sufficient importance to be
detached from the group and considered separately.

He was not the originator of the movement, though he came to be a force
in it. The Wesleys were several years his seniors, and had set Methodism
going before he came into residence. But though he was their disciple he
was hardly of their type. They were scholars, gentlemen, and organisers.
He was a man of the people, half-educated, brought up in the tap-room
of his mother’s inn, a religious demagogue, a rhetorician, whose mouth,
foaming with sanctimonious phrases, suggests the froth on the tankards
of his mother’s beer. The dignity which compels even those who differ
from the Wesleys to respect them was entirely wanting in Whitefield. He
emerged from his humble station with the defects of his origin clinging
to him, and he never shook them off. It is impossible to think of him
as a man whom one would have liked to know at Oxford. It is, indeed,
difficult to think of him as anything but mad.

His position at Pembroke was that of a servitor; and he was the
exaggerated type of the “pi-man” of his period. He had no joy in his
youth, and no power of concealing his abject terror of hell-fire. He made
himself conspicuous about it; it is not too much to say that he made
himself ridiculous. Here are a few extracts from his own admissions on
the subject:

“I always chose the worst sort of food, though my place
furnished me with variety. I fasted twice a week. My apparel
was mean. I thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair
powdered. I wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty
shoes.”

“Satan used to terrify me much, and threatened to punish me if
I discovered his wiles. It being my duty, as servitor, in my
turn to knock at the gentlemen’s doors by ten at night, to see
who were in their rooms, I thought the devil would appear to me
every stair I went up. And he so troubled me when I lay down to
rest that, for some weeks, I scarce slept above three hours at
a time.... Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate
on the ground and begging for freedom from those proud hellish
thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”

“It was suggested to me that Jesus Christ was among the wild
beasts when He was tempted, and that I ought to follow His
example; and being willing, as I thought, to imitate Jesus
Christ, after supper I went into Christ Church walk, near our
college, and continued in silent prayer under one of the trees
for near two hours, sometimes lying flat on my face, sometimes
kneeling upon my knees, all the while filled with fear and
concern lest some of my brethren should be overwhelmed with
pride. The night being stormy, it gave me awful thoughts of the
day of judgment. I continued, I think, until the great bell
rung for retirement to the College, not without finding some
reluctance in the natural man against staying so long in the
cold.”

And so forth. All things considered, it is not surprising that the
“polite students,” as Whitefield calls them, laughed, and even “threw
dirt,” or that his tutor advised him to take medicine. Academic
authorities are seldom sympathetic towards undergraduates who, as
Whitefield did, neglect their studies for their devotions—presumably
because the religious uneasiness of their pupils seems to them a
reflection on their own assured composure.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College
for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s
Palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote
situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable
Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F.
W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.

The buildings and the site of what is now Worcester College have in their
time played many parts.

First of all, in the very early days, a year after the foundation of
Merton, Gloucester College was instituted there. It was a monastic
establishment for the benefit of Benedictines who wanted to “live
properly” at Oxford, in cells, and with facilities for praise and
prayer, instead of mixing with the common herd in inns or lodgings; but
abuses crept in, and the monks ceased to live as properly as founders
and benefactors could have wished. We read of monks admonished for
“noctivagation,” for the haunting of taverns, for theft, and for assault
and battery, to say nothing of the neglect of the Lenten fast. On one
occasion, it is recorded, “four turbulent Benedictines” tried to kill
the Proctor; and a State Paper of 1539 exposes the fact that another
Benedictine, with a bookseller to help him, got through “twenty legs of
mutton, five rounds of beef, and six capons” between Ash Wednesday and
Good Friday.

[Illustration: WORCESTER COLLEGE.

[To face p. 289.]

The dissolution of the monasteries implied, of course, the dissolution
of Gloucester College as its corollary. It served, for a time, as a
Palace for the Bishop of Oxford, but was afterwards separated from the
see and turned into Gloucester Hall—a Hall in which, at first, not only
students, but also miscellaneous lodgers were allowed to have rooms. Even
women were permitted to reside within its walls; and it had a bad name
as a place of refuge for Papists, open or concealed. It prospered under
these conditions for a season, but, after the Restoration, fell upon evil
days. There came a time when there were absolutely no undergraduates in
residence, when the grass overgrew the paths, when the Principal, sitting
alone in his glory, was distrained upon for arrears of taxes, and when
burglars broke into the Hall and carried off the plate.

In William III.’s reign, however, under the principalship of Benjamin
Woodroffe, the Hall pulled up again. There was an attempt to turn
it into a special college for Greek students from Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—a kind of precedent, though an
imperfect one, for the endowment of the Rhodes Scholars. The experiment
failed—partly for lack of funds, and partly because the Principal
offended his Oriental pupils by trying to proselytise them; but
Gloucester Hall was not involved in the collapse, for Woodroffe had other
irons in the fire. He found a benefactor in Sir Thomas Cookes, who was
proposing to bequeath £10,000 to Oxford; and this £10,000 was devoted,
after long negotiations, to the transformation of Gloucester Hall into
Worcester College in 1714.

* * * * *

If Worcester is more famous for one thing than another, it is for its
remoteness from the centres of academical activity; and there are plenty
of stories bearing on this branch of the subject. Letters have been
addressed to Worcester College, _near_ Oxford; the nickname of Botany
Bay has been bestowed. A member of Gloucester Hall was once excused for
being late at a ceremony at Saint Mary’s “because of the distance, and,
the wind being against him, he could not hear the bell.” A Worcester
Proctor, summoning offending undergraduates to his presence at a later
period, had to find a means of coping with similar excuses. The men whom
he proctorised, and bade call on him, always made a point of asking him
where Worcester was; and when they kept the appointment, they generally
began with: “I’m so sorry, sir. I fear I’m behind my time; but the fact
is I had the greatest difficulty in finding my way. I made ever so many
inquiries, but no one was able to direct me.”

And, if Worcester seems remote now that one can approach it on a tramcar
by way of Beaumont Street, it must have seemed much more remote in the
old days before Beaumont Street was made. A graphic picture has been
preserved of Provost Landon, as Vice-Chancellor, going and coming with
difficulty. Preceded, Coxe tells us, by his bedels with their gold and
silver maces, he proceeded:

“through Gloucester Green, then the acknowledged site of the
pig-market, and down the whole length of Friars’ Entry, at the
risk of being besprinkled by trundled mops in those straits of
Thermopylæ, of stumbling over buckets, knocking over children,
of catching the rinsings of basins, and ducking under linen
lines suspended across from the opposite houses.”

Enough, however, of that ancient gibe. We will next note that Worcester,
the only Oxford college founded in the eighteenth century, is able to
furnish a striking illustration of the academic manners and customs of
that age.

What reading men thought of Oxford, and how they behaved themselves
there, in the eighteenth century, we have already remarked in the cases
of Adam Smith of Balliol, Gibbon of Magdalen, Joseph Butler of Oriel,
and Jeremy Bentham of Queen’s. The attitude and deportment of men of a
different type is illustrated by the career of Foote of Worcester, who
was no other than Samuel Foote the comedian.

His great-grandfather having been the founder’s second cousin, Foote
put in a claim to a scholarship as founder’s kin. The claim, after
consideration, was allowed. He came into residence in 1737, and devoted
the whole of his time to the neglect of his duties and the defiance
of the dons. He acted Punch through the streets of Oxford. Finding a
bell-rope hanging in a church porch which opened on a field in which
cattle were turned out to graze, he tied hay round it, with the result
that a hungry cow, in her attempts to eat the hay, set the bell tolling
at the dead of night, and the Provost, half fearing that supernatural
agencies were at work, sat up, with the sexton, into the small hours, to
solve the mystery.

He solved it, and Oxford laughed at him. He sent for Foote and
reprimanded him; but Foote was insolent, after an ingenious fashion of
his own.

The Provost, Dr. Gower, was a pompous and pedantic person who picked his
words carefully and preferred polysyllabic vocables to any others; and
Foote appeared before him carrying an enormous dictionary under his arm.
The reprimand began; but, as soon as a long word occurred, Foote begged
the Provost to stop.

“One moment, if you please, sir. You said ‘ebullitions,’ I think? It was
‘ebullitions,’ was it not? ‘Ebullitions’ means—ah, yes, I have it. Now,
if you will continue, sir, I am at your service.”

And so forth. As often as the Provost used a word of more than ordinary
length, Foote, with a gravely submissive and apologetic air, arrested the
harangue by pleading ignorance of its meaning, searched for it in the
lexicon, read out the definition, and repeated his formula: “Ah, yes, I
see. That means—— Now I am once more ready, sir, and if you will please
proceed——”

So that the lecture was turned into a farce; and Foote might perfectly
well have been sent down for so transmuting it, though, as a matter of
fact, his disappearance was due to an offence of a different character.

He kept joyous company, and he kept it openly. In fact, he was one day
discovered driving a gay and painted “actress” through the streets of
Oxford, on the box seat of a coach and six—himself attired in garments
so far removed from the “subfusc” that he compelled the attention of all
beholders. It was useless for him, this time, to try to brazen matters
out with the help of a dictionary; and the entry regarding his conduct in
the College Register runs as follows:

“Whereas Samuel Foote, Scholar of Worcester College, by a
long course of ill-behaviour has rendered himself obnoxious
to frequent censures of the society publick and private, and
having whilst he was under censure for lying out of college
insolently and presumptuously withdrawn himself and refused to
answer to several heinous crimes objected to him, though duly
cited by the Provost by an instrument in form, in not appearing
to the said citation for the above-mentioned reasons, his
scholarship is declared void, and he is hereby deprived of all
benefit and advantage of his said scholarship.”

So Samuel Foote departed, though he does not seem to have been actually
expelled, and, in due course, became a public buffoon—which was what
he was most fitted to become; and though one would not venture to say,
with the example of Mr. Arthur Bourchier before one, that Oxford is no
proper place for comedians, it can hardly be denied that Oxford—even
eighteenth-century Oxford—was no proper place for Samuel Foote.

* * * * *

Our next interesting name is that of Thomas de Quincey, essayist and
opium-eater.

His mother sent him up in 1803, with fifty guineas in his pocket, and
liberty to choose his own college. Professor Saintsbury, speaking from
the lofty standpoint of Merton, protests that wise guardians would have
counselled him to go anywhere rather than to Worcester; but one does
not quite know why. He was poor, and Worcester was one of the cheaper
colleges. In the matter of “caution money,” in particular, it let its
members off lightly. That fact appears to have been the determining
consideration; and de Quincey had too many queer experiences behind him
to be likely, in any case, or at any college, to acquire the Oxford
manner, and settle down into a typical Oxonian.

He had run away from school and wandered about Wales, with a duodecimo
Euripides in his pocket, camping out on the hillsides in a tent, which he
carried on his back during the day. He had starved in a Soho lodging and
rubbed shoulders with the submerged tenth. After that, it was hardly to
be expected that he would have either the notions or the behaviour of the
ordinary public schoolboy who blossoms into the average University man.
There were three sets for him to choose among—sets known respectively,
according to the manner of their lives, as the Saints, the Sinners,
and the Smilers; but though he sat with the Smilers—with the men, that
is to say, who affected to be studious without being glum—in hall, his
soul dwelt almost as far apart from them as from the others. “I,” he has
written, “whose disease was to meditate too much and observe too little,
upon my first entrance upon college life, was nearly falling into a deep
melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings I had witnessed in
London.”

It was while at Worcester, too, that de Quincey first took to opium, as
a remedy against neuralgia, and continued to take it because he liked
it, and came to believe that “here was the secret of happiness about
which philosophers had disputed for so many ages.” And the opium habit,
of course, like the more modern morphia habit, tends to make a man
self-sufficing and uncompanionable, and careless of clean collars and
other particularities of the toilet; and there are stories to show that
that was its effect upon de Quincey.

“I neglected my dress habitually,” he says, “and wore my
clothes till they were threadbare, partly under the belief
that my gown would conceal defects, more from indisposition
to bestow on a tailor what I had destined for a bookseller.
At length, however, an official person sent me a message on
the subject. This, however, was disregarded, and one day
I discovered that I had no waistcoat that was not torn or
otherwise dilapidated, whereupon, buttoning my coat to the
throat and drawing my gown close about me, I went into hall.”

And, of course, undergraduate opinion was not going to stand that sort of
thing even from a man of genius. It was an occasion for the Smilers to
smile, and they smiled—and also chaffed. Evidently, they said, de Quincey
had seen the Order in Council, printed in the _Gazette_, interdicting
the use of waistcoats. It would be a good idea if it were followed by
another Order interdicting the use of trousers. Trousers were such costly
garments, and so very troublesome to put on. Et cetera, et cetera, until
de Quincey learnt his lesson.

Most curious also was de Quincey’s conduct when the time came for him
to try to satisfy the examiners. He handed in remarkably good papers.
One of the examiners spoke of him to one of the Worcester tutors as
“the cleverest man I ever met with.” But then, just as he seemed about
to triumph, he “scratched” and disappeared. It has been suggested that
he had some imaginary grudge against the examiners; but it seems more
likely that his nerves gave way before the prospect of the _viva voce_.
It was not in him to face the trial with the theatrical self-assurance of
Sir Robert Peel. He feared that his hair would stand up and his tongue
cleave to the roof of his mouth. So, without saying anything to any one,
he turned and fled; and for that incident also the opium was probably
responsible.

* * * * *

The interest of the remarkable Worcester names which remain to be
mentioned is chiefly theological.

Among novelists, indeed, the College educated Henry Kingsley; but of
him little is recorded except that he was a boating man, and presented
the College with a pair of silver oars, to be competed for. He was by
way of being the bad boy of the Kingsley family, though most critics
incline to think that he was more inspired than his famous and earnest
brother Charles. Among economists, again, the College can boast of both
Bonamy Price, who was Arnold’s favourite pupil at Laleham and one of
his assistant masters at Rugby, and of Thorold Rogers, who quitted Holy
Orders, wrote a “History of Prices,” and was distinguished for his
Aristophanic humour. People are interested in them up to a point; but
they are more interested in F. W. Newman and Dean Burgon.

* * * * *

F. W. Newman, of course, was the famous Cardinal’s brilliant younger
brother—the grave dialectician who shocked the world, at a time when it
was more easily shocked than it is at present, by writing “Phases of
Faith.” He fought his way through theology as grimly as men fight their
way through the “Ethics,” and, starting from the Evangelical standpoint,
ultimately arrived at a creed of which one need say no more than that its
exceeding vagueness did not prevent him from being exceedingly earnest
about it.

How, in the days of his early orthodoxy, he went out, together with a
dentist and a stonemason, as a missionary to Baghdad; how he and the
dentist and the stonemason sang hymns together on the ship which conveyed
them to the scene of their labours; how he was chased by a mob for
distributing copies of the New Testament in a Mohammedan centre; how
he was impressed by the remark of an Aleppo carpenter that the English
people, though skilled in the mechanical arts, were lacking in spiritual
insight; how he came to the conclusion that his hymn-singing was making
him ridiculous; how he found it impossible to speak the evangelical
jargon of his associates; how he quarrelled with the dentist and the
stonemason, and separated from them—all these matters may be studied
by the curious in his biography. It is not on account of any of these
exploits that Worcester is proud of him. Worcester’s pride depends upon
the fact that he is, so far as is known, the only undergraduate to whom
the Public Examiners ever made a present of books in order to testify to
their appreciation of his exceptional attainments.

* * * * *

Similarly with Burgon. Though he was a theologian, his theology has
nothing to do with Worcester, and Worcester has nothing to do with his
theology. His principal contribution to theological thought was his
famous criticism of Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” For his own part, he said,
he was quite content to look for his first parents in the Garden of Eden;
but if his opponents preferred to look for theirs in the Zoological
Gardens, they were perfectly welcome to do so. That is the _mot_ which
people generally have in mind when they say of Burgon that buffoonery was
his forte and piety his foible. Perhaps the one epigram fairly warrants
the other; but the fame of both epigrams is eclipsed by the fame of
Burgon’s Newdigate.

He won that prize for English verse in his last year, having been
beaten in previous years by Matthew Arnold and Principal Shairp; and it
is hardly too much to say that his Newdigate is the best Newdigate ever
written. The one wonderful line which made it famous has already been
quoted in a reference to Newdigates contained in an earlier chapter; but
the present chapter may fairly end with a presentation of the jewel in
its setting:

“Not virgin white—like that old Doric shrine
Where once Athena held her rites divine:
Not saintly grey—like many a minster fane
That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain:
But rosy red—as if the blush of dawn
Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn:
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which men called old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime—
_A red-rose city—half as old as time_.”

It will not be denied that Worcester has every title to be proud of
Burgon for writing that.

HERTFORD COLLEGE

The present Hertford College is the heir and successor of an earlier
Hertford College, and also of Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall; and one
must begin with a word on the strange vicissitudes of these various
foundations.

Hart Hall came first, dating from some time in the thirteenth century;
but the founders of the halls of those days are no more to be
confounded with the benefactors of learning than are the keepers of the
boarding-houses in which the majority of University students reside on
the Continent. They were merely landlords who desired a particular class
of tenant; and the so-called Principal of the Hall was not a person set
in authority over the students, but a student reputed to be solvent
and elected by his fellow students, for that reason, to make himself
responsible to the landlord for the rent. It was not until a later date
that he was nominated from outside and charged to direct the studies and
control the conduct of the inmates.

That was the first stage. The second began with the appointment to the
principalship of Dr. Richard Newton. He was a man of ambition and energy;
and he made it the object of his life to get Hart Hall incorporated as a
College. There was considerable opposition; but, after a long fight, he
got his way; and Hart Hall became Hertford College in 1737.

The College was a success as long as Newton was at the head of it. He
had a reputation as a disciplinarian. Parents heard of him as a Head who
could compel even rich young men to work and to behave themselves. Hence
the College attracted a good many gentlemen-commoners, whose high fees
kept the place going. Two of those gentlemen-commoners were George Selwyn
and Charles James Fox.

By degrees, however, after Newton’s death, the fashion changed, and
gentlemen-commoners went elsewhere. The endowments of the College
were scanty, and it could not stand the stress of evil times. The
fellowships were only worth £15 a year, and nobody wanted them. The
headship itself was only worth about £60 a year, and the day came when
no fit and qualified person would be satisfied with so small a stipend.
So matriculations ceased, and the men who had already matriculated
finished their course and left; and presently there remained nothing
but an empty college building, devoid alike of Principal, tutors, and
undergraduates—devoid of everything except an obstinate elderly gentleman
named Hewitt, who had elected himself to the vice-principalship, and
clamoured to be allowed to die in the enjoyment of that office. And then
a strange thing happened.

A certain solicitor named Roberson, having no house of his own, but
wanting one, boldly, without asking any man’s leave, moved, with his
goods and chattels, into the late Principal’s vacant apartments. To
those who questioned him as to his doings, he said that he had assumed
the office of caretaker of an ancient building which seemed in danger of
falling into ruins. He had, of course, no shadow of a right to be there;
but he knew as a solicitor—a master of useful knowledge—that, unless and
until the extinct corporation was reconstituted, no one would have the
right either to turn him out or to compel him to pay rent.

His example was quickly followed by other people, who argued that a legal
position which was good enough for a solicitor was good enough for
them. Any man who desired to live rent-free proceeded to appoint himself
caretaker of one of the vacant sets of rooms in Hertford College. Before
very long, the whole college was filled with self-appointed caretakers,
who took so little care that, at last, one of the buildings—a lath and
plaster affair containing at least a dozen sets of rooms—collapsed “with
a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.” Then, and not before it was
time, the University took it upon itself to interfere.

A Commission was appointed to envisage the extraordinary situation.
It reported that Hertford College, on a certain date, “became and was
dissolved” and its property escheated to the Crown; and an Act of
Parliament was then obtained, enabling the Crown to grant the escheated
property to the University in trust for Magdalen Hall.

* * * * *

The memory of Magdalen Hall is now principally kept alive by scraps of
humorous rhyme. There is the rhyme which speaks of

“Whiskered Tompkins from the Hall
Of seedy Magdalene.”

There is also the rhyme which celebrates

“A member of Magdalen Hall
Who knew next to nothing at all;
He was fifty-three
When he took his degree,—
Which was youngish for Magdalen Hall.”

The rhymes obviously suggest a Hall populated by the intellectual tagrag
and bobtail of the University—men for whom the obtaining of a pass degree
was the protracted labour of a lifetime; and that was the condition to
which Magdalen Hall tended to lapse as the nineteenth century ran its
course.

It had had, indeed, a distinguished past. Among the great men who took
their degrees, at a much earlier age than fifty-three, from Magdalen Hall
were included Jonathan Swift, William Waller, the poet, Sir Matthew Hale,
the distinguished judge, and Thomas Hobbes, the illustrious philosopher.
But that is ancient—or at all events it is not modern—history. Towards
the end of the eighteenth century Halls went out of fashion. They ceased
to attract in virtue either of the luxury of the life or of the laxity of
the discipline. Men of rank came to prefer Christ Church. Men of brains
were attracted to the Colleges by the scholarships and exhibitions. The
Halls tended more and more to become the refuges of the intellectually
destitute—establishments whose chief claim on the loyalty and gratitude
of their members was that they allowed them to remain in residence as
long as they liked, whether they succeeded in passing their examinations
or not. Their position, therefore, became precarious; and the question
of either merging them in colleges or transforming them into colleges
gradually arose. Thanks to the munificence of Mr. T. C. Baring, M.P., who
provided an ample endowment, Magdalen Hall was transformed into Hertford
College, and so entered upon a new lease of life in 1874.

Such is the story; and it only remains to glance at a select few of the
distinguished names which illustrate it. Two of them have been already
mentioned—George Selwyn and Charles James Fox. A third—the Principal’s
private pupil—was Henry Pelham, the future Prime Minister.

* * * * *

These three young men were young men of pretty much the same sort. If
they had been contemporaries they would doubtless have been found in the
same set. For a picture of the kind of life they lived—a typical picture
of the life of fellow-commoners of the period—we may turn to the record
of the first Lord Malmesbury, who was up at the same time as Fox, though
not at the same college, being, in fact, a Merton man.

“The men,” Lord Malmesbury says, “with whom I lived were very pleasant,
but very idle, fellows. Our life was an imitation of high life in London.
Luckily drinking was not the fashion; but what we did drink was claret,
and we had our regular round of evening card-parties, to the great
annoyance of our finances. It has often been a matter of surprise to me
how so many of us made our way so well in the world and so creditably.”

No doubt the description is faithful enough in a general way—no statement
which connects Fox with cards or with claret is incredible; but, as a
matter of fact, nearly all our detailed information points to him as
having been considerably less idle than his associates. In later life,
as we know, when a friend remarked to him that it would be agreeable to
lie on the grass with a book, he replied that it would be still more
agreeable to lie on the grass without a book; but, in his Oxford days,
his indolence was so coloured by curiosity as to be hardly recognisable
as such.

There is a story to the effect that he once took a “memorable leap” from
an upper window into the street in order to play his part in a town and
gown row; but that story rests upon doubtful evidence. His letters, and
those of his correspondents, show him to have read hard enough—especially
in mathematics, which, strange as it may seem, he found “entertaining”—to
make both his father and his tutor anxious. The former removed him, and
took him abroad; the latter urged him not to trouble about mathematics
until his return.

“As to trigonometry,” he wrote, “it is a matter of entire indifference
to the other geometricians of the college whether they proceed to the
other branches of mathematics immediately, or wait a term or two longer.
You need not, therefore, interrupt your amusements by severe studies, for
it is wholly unnecessary to take a step onwards without you, and there we
shall stop until we have the pleasure of your company.”

And Fox’s own letters from Oxford indicate that he did indeed regard the
University, not as a haunt of dissipation, but as a seat of learning.

“I did not,” he says, “expect my life here could be so pleasant
as I find it; but I really think, to a man who reads a great
deal, there cannot be a more agreeable place.”

If Fox was a credit to the college, however, the same could by no means
be said of George Selwyn, who got into trouble with the Proctors.

George Selwyn, indeed, took Oxford seriously enough to read at the
Bodleian, and to seek the degree of B.C.L.; but the claret which he drank
went to his head, and he behaved unbecomingly in his cups.

He was a leading spirit in a Wine Club—such a society, no doubt, as that
which one remembers at Exeter, roaring out the jovial refrain, with “the
eternal note of sadness” at the end of it:

“Edite, bibite,
Conviviales:
Post multa sæcula,
Pocula nulla.”

One day it came to the ears of the Vice-Chancellor and the Proctors
that, at a meeting of this club in the house of a certain Deverelle, an
“unlicensed seller of wines,” the rite of the administration of the Holy
Communion had been parodied. An actual eucharistic chalice, it was said,
had been procured; Rhine wine had been handed round in it; and George
“did ludicrously and profanely apply the words used by our Saviour at the
said Institution to the intemperate purposes of the said club.”

Deverelle and the waiter were summoned to give evidence; and so were
several of George Selwyn’s boon companions—Lord Harley, and the sons of
Earl Gower and the Earl of Mansfield among them. Drunkenness was the
only possible defence; but the plea was not presented in the shape in
which it might have carried conviction. Instead of deposing that they had
themselves been too drunk to remember what had happened, the revellers
deposed that George Selwyn had been too drunk to know what he was doing;
and one of them even went so far as to try to secure his acquittal by
deposing that he was normally to be found in that condition after dinner.

Whether inebriety is an extenuation or an aggravation of the offence of
blasphemy is a question which might be argued; so also is the question
whether private blasphemy is an offence of which public cognisance should
be taken. Neither of the questions need be argued here, however, for
neither of them was argued at the time. The fact having been established,
the punishment followed as a matter of course; and George Selwyn was
sentenced, in the noble language of the official decree, “to be utterly
expelled and banished from our said University, and never henceforward
to be permitted to enter and reside within the precincts of our said
University.”

* * * * *

So much, then, for the Hertford men of the first foundation. Of the
Hertford men of the second foundation, since it only dates from 1874, it
would be premature to speak, though one of them, Mr. G. H. Thring, is
the Secretary of the Incorporated Society of Authors. But there is just
one of the Magdalen Hall men of the intervening half century of whom one
cannot choose but speak. If Magdalen Hall had done nothing but afford a
shelter to Robert Stephen Hawker, the parson poet of Morwenstow, on the
northern coast of Cornwall, its existence would be amply justified.

His case was curious. In the midst of his career at Oxford, his father
one day informed him that he could not afford to keep him at the
University any longer; but the quick instinct of genius showed the young
man a way out of the difficulty,—he would marry his godmother, a lady
twenty-one years his senior, who had an income of £200 a year. Jumping
on his horse, he rode in hot haste from Stratton to Bude, where the lady
lived, proposed to her, and was accepted. Then he returned to Oxford,
and, as they did not want married undergraduates at Pembroke, which was
his original college, he migrated to Magdalen Hall, where he won the
Newdigate with a poem on “Pompeii.”

That is all that there is to be said of his Oxford days; and of his
marriage there is nothing to be related except that it turned out
happily, and that it was not out of disrespect for his excellent wife’s
memory that he wore a pink hat without a brim at her funeral. He was
always eccentric in his dress; and a pink hat without a brim was, at that
period of his life, his usual headgear. There was precedent for it, he
said, in the Eastern Church, of the ceremonies of which he was always an
earnest student.

For the rest, he became Vicar of Morwenstow, on the rock-bound shore
of the Atlantic, and lived there in complete isolation, five miles from
the nearest butcher’s shop, and more than twenty miles from the nearest
railway station—the hero of many good stories which this is not the place
to relate—the author of much true poetry, composed, it is said, under the
influence of opium, which may be praised here, because praise of it is
nowhere out of place. And, if any reader demands that the praise should
be supported by quotation, then let him read this:

“Forth gleamed the East, and yet it was not day:
A white and glowing steed outrode the dawn;
A youthful rider ruled the bounding rein
And he, in semblance of Sir Galahad shone:
A vase he held on high; one molten gem,
Like massive ruby or the chrysolite:
Thence gushed the light in flakes; and flowing, fell
As though the pavement of the sky brake up,
And stars were shed to sojourn on the hills,
From grey Morwenna’s stone to Michael’s tor,
Until the rocky land was like a heaven.

“Then saw they that the mighty quest was won:
The Sangraal swooned along the golden air:
The sea breathed balsam like Gennesaret:
The streams were touched with supernatural light:
And fonts of Saxon rock stood, full of God.”

That settles it, and we have no need of further evidence. It was a great
poet, and no mere versifier, who wrote those lines; and, in “The Quest
of the Sangraal,” the Newdigate prize-man from Magdalen Hall, who drank
opium and dreamt in the hut of driftwood which he had built himself on
the face of the black cliff looking out across the Atlantic to Labrador,
competed with Tennyson on his own ground and beat him.

KEBLE COLLEGE

The last stage of our pilgrimage leads us away from Oxford to the
flaming bricks of Keble, adjacent to the Parks. It was a Keble man who
once presumed to address a letter to “Worcester College, near Oxford.”
The reply, so the story continues, was addressed to “Keble College,
near Rome,”—and did not go astray. And these things, of course, are an
allegory.

How far the allegory is faithful—to what extent Rome and Keble are in
spiritual proximity—is a debatable question which it shall be left to
others to debate. The College may be regarded, at any rate, as a protest
and a reaction: a sectarian excrescence upon an age which seemed to be
beginning to be liberal. One may regard it, according to one’s point of
view, either as a gaudy monument to a lost cause or as a gaudy temple
erected to celebrate the renascence of a discredited idea.

[Illustration: KEBLE COLLEGE.

[To face p. 316.]

Tractarianism seemed to have had its hour at Oxford. The secession of
the Newmanites had induced many Anglican Catholics to ask themselves
whether they were not living in a fool’s paradise. The Essayists and
Reviewers—the Seven against Christ as the wit of the orthodox party
styled them—had set men reconsidering their theological position. The
tendency of the hour was to look forward instead of backward, to break
down barriers instead of building them, and to get rid of formulæ instead
of offering money prizes to those who would subscribe to them. And
then came Keble, a “throwback,” as it were, announced by a flourish of
Puseyite trumpets.

The College was founded by public subscription as a memorial of the
author of the “Christian Year,” and was designed to combine plain living
with High Church thinking. Self-denying ordinances were to be imposed in
the cause of economy, and the advantages of the institution were to be
confined to members of the Church of England. The central idea of the
College, in short, was to be the government of members of the Church of
England by members of the Church of England for the benefit of the Church
of England. “It is hoped,” ran the appeal for help, “that it will prove,
by God’s blessing, the loyal handmaid of our mother Church, to train up
men who, not in the ministry only, but in the manifold callings of the
Christian life, shall be steadfast in the faith.”

Such was the ideal; and it does not need to be proved that it was an
ideal as narrow as it was lofty, reposing, not only upon piety, but also
upon confusion of thought. Religion being a spiritual experience, and the
Anglican Church being a branch of the Civil Service, it is only by loose
thinkers that the two things can be treated as one and indivisible; and
the implied proposition that Dissenters are poisonous is not a logical
corollary of any exhortation to a devout and holy life. Loose thinking
has, however, in this instance, proved a mainspring of generous giving,
and has resulted in an endowment of learning which is not without value
because it has concurrently endowed the speculative opinions and ritual
practices of a particular school of thought. The endowment of learning
for the exclusive benefit of Churchmen may not have much more _raison
d’être_ than the endowment of learning for the special benefit of
albinoes, or vegetarians, or anti-tobacconists; but it is a vast deal
better than no endowment of learning at all.

* * * * *

Whether the wisdom of the founders and benefactors of Keble has been
justified of its children is a delicate question of which it would at
present be premature to do more than lightly touch the fringe; but
certain generalisations may be hazarded.

In the first place the economical advantages have not been so marked as
to attract a class of men previously excluded from the University. In the
second place the College has never been of the nature of a seminary, and
its particular influences have been largely overshadowed by the general
influences of the University itself. Keble men, that is to say, have been
very much like other Oxford men; and the test of Churchmanship has not
winnowed them to any really noticeable extent. Thought has, in effect,
been as free there as elsewhere, in spite of the nominal restrictions
of orthodox authority. Some of the men have thought as they were told
to think, and others have thought for themselves—encouraged, in some
instances, by unexpectedly latitudinarian dons. The wind has blown where
it listed, with the usual diversified results.

There are those who would say that Keble at its best and most
characteristic is represented by the present Bishop of London: a
high-minded and popular prelate whose portraits—especially the portrait
in which he is to be seen beaming benignantly beside his favourite
crozier—are treasured by almost as many ladies as the portraits of Mr.
George Alexander himself; a prelate also in such a continual hurry to do
good that he too often gives the sober the impression of a man who speaks
before he thinks. But Keble is also the College of Mr. Herbert Trench: a
poet whose visions of the ultimate stand in no perceptible relation to
the metaphysics of the Establishment, and who resembles the author of
“The Christian Year” only in the accidental circumstance that some of his
compositions have been set to music; and it might puzzle the trustees
of Keble, as it would puzzle the writer of these pages, to find the
intellectual common denominator of Dr. Winnington-Ingram and the manager
of the Haymarket Theatre.

EPILOGUE

The pilgrimage is over, and the “dreaming spires” disappear into the
plain as we depart. It is time to say, as Queen Elizabeth said, pausing,
as has been told, on Shotover: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God
bless thee, and increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

In numbers, truly, they have been increased, and are still increasing.
New buildings, seldom as beautiful as the old ones, spring up continually
as witnesses and consequence of the increase. As for holiness and
virtue—well, these are not things which can be weighed or measured; and
as the words mean different things to different preachers, positive
asseveration would be out of place.

Those who associate virtue and holiness with the domination of the Church
of England as by law established have some reason to view the prospect
gloomily. The religious tests have gone—except from Keble; and Oxford
Methodists are no longer liable to be pelted with mud in the High.
Nonconformists of all grades, from Romanists to Unitarians, come to
Oxford in battalions.

A few of them secede. There is a story of a Wesleyan undergraduate, the
son of a Wesleyan minister, whose heart was so touched by the doctrine
of the apostolical succession that whenever, from that time forward,
he corresponded with his father, he refused him on principle the
complimentary title of “Reverend.” But that is an exceptional case. The
majority of the Oxford Dissenters maintain their own point of view, even
when they come into contact with the point of view of the University; and
the profit from the clash of opinions is mutual. Oxford learns something
from the new-comers, even while it keeps up, with proper dignity, the
pretence of having nothing to learn from any one; but Oxford also
influences them, and so indirectly extends its own influence into corners
of the world which previously it could not reach. Even the City Temple
has lately become, by this means, a remarkable centre of illumination.

For, after all, in spite of all that we hear, and say, about Oxford
Schools and Oxford Movements, the secret of Oxford is not wrapped up in
any particular body of opinions; and the attitude of Oxford towards its
Movements may fairly remind one of the French Revolution devouring its
own children. The various Oxford Movements, though they have succeeded,
have not resembled one another. On the contrary, they have clashed
with, and have extinguished, one another. Oxford sent out Wiclif’s
“poor preachers”; but Oxford also burnt more than its fair share of the
Reformers. Oxford bred the Tractarians; but Oxford also confounded the
Tractarians in “Essays and Reviews.” Oxford nurtured the Æsthetes; but
Oxford also put the Æsthetes under the pump.

And so on to the end of the chapter. Action, in Oxford, has always
been followed by reaction, and reformation by counter-reformation. The
bane and the antidote have always grown side by side in the Oxford
meadows; and the survey of Oxford history—the rapid evocation of
typically illustrious Oxford names—gives an impression of a University
as miscellaneously diversified as the Universe itself. And yet, in the
face of all these divergencies, there is a something in the atmosphere
of Oxford which never fails to affect the mentality of all the men who
breathe it.

A part of the secret lies, no doubt, in the beauty of Oxford; a greater
part, perhaps, in the leisure, and the comparative isolation and
disinterestedness of the life. One is in touch with the world there,
without being of it. One is not hustled or hurried. One can acquire
knowledge for its own sake, without considering its immediate practical
application. One can pursue and possess one’s own soul, and face, with
help and sympathy, but undisturbed, all those perplexing problems of
the painful earth which most of those busier men who are bundled from a
school to an office can, as a rule, hardly so much as state. And all that
in the most impressionable years of one’s life.

It is a great privilege—a privilege which it would be impossible to
overvalue. Among those who have enjoyed it—even if they are conscious
of not having made so much of it as they might—a kind of freemasonry
exists, even when they are engaged in confuting each other’s doctrines.
They are, or think they are, the initiated. Hence the reserve, the
aloofness, the air of calm composure, and the refusal to be startled into
emotion or surprise which go to the making of what is commonly called
the “Oxford manner”; and if those characteristics are sometimes too
prominently displayed to give unmixed pleasure in a mixed society, no one
is more ready than the Oxford man to admit in the abstract the truth of
Aristotle’s saying that an excess of virtue is a vice.

And so once more: “Farewell, farewell, dear Oxford! God bless thee, and
increase thy sons in number, holiness, and virtue!”

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=BEWARE OF THE DOG= (Entirely New Long Novel). By MRS. BAILLIE REYNOLDS

=THE DOLLAR PRINCESS= (The Novel of the Play). By HAROLD SIMPSON

=ARSÈNE LUPIN= (The Novel of the Play) By EDGAR JEPSON & MAURICE LEBLANC

=MARY= By WINIFRED GRAHAM

=D’ARCY OF THE GUARDS= (The Novel of the Play). By L. E. SHIPMAN

=FOR CHURCH AND CHIEFTAIN= By MAY WYNNE

=THE LADY CALPHURNIA ROYAL= By ALBERT DORRINGTON and A. G. STEPHENS

=THE VEIL= By E. S. STEVENS

[_June 15_

=THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN JACK= By MAX PEMBERTON

[_July_

=THE END AND THE BEGINNING= By COSMO HAMILTON

[_July_

=SPARROWS: THE STORY OF AN UNPROTECTED GIRL= By HORACE W. C. NEWTE

[_July_

=THE PRODIGAL FATHER= By J. STORER CLOUSTON

[_August_

MILLS & BOON, LTD., 49 WHITCOMB ST., LONDON, W.C.

_MILLS & BOON WILL PUBLISH VERY SHORTLY A REMARKABLE GOLFING BOOK
ENTITLED_

LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER TO HIS GRANDFATHER

Being the Correspondence of

RICHARD ALLINGHAM, Esq.

Arranged by

HENRY LEACH

_WITH A PHOTOGRAVURE PORTRAIT_

Crown 8vo, 6s.

SIX REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD PURCHASE THIS BOOK—

_1. If you are a keen Golfer, then it is invaluable to you._

_2. If you like worldly wisdom and common sense, then you can safely buy
it._

_3. If you admire a charming love story, then be certain to get it._

_4. If you want to improve your game, then you cannot do without it._

_5. If you have a Golfing friend, make him a present of it._

_6. Both sexes will find this Golfing Book a great treat._

A Special Prospectus containing Gems from the Modern Golfer’s Letters
will be sent post-free to any address.

MILLS & BOON, Ltd., 49 Whitcomb Street, London, W.C.

_A Fine Romance of Love and Adventure_

THE

SWORD MAKER

ROBERT BARR

Author of “Cardillac,” “The Countess Tekla,” etc., etc.

_Crown 8vo. 6s._

_Reader’s Report on The Sword Maker._

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_MILLS & BOON, Ltd., 49 WHITCOMB STREET, LONDON, W.C._

MILLS & BOON’S

COMPANION SERIES

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=The Gardener’s Companion.= By SELINA RANDOLPH. With an Introduction by
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=The Six Handicap Golfer’s Companion.= By “TWO OF HIS KIND.” With Chapters
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=The Mother’s Companion.= By Mrs. M. A. CLOUDESLEY BRERETON (Officier
d’Académie). With an Introduction by Sir LAUDER BRUNTON, M.D., F.R.C.P.,
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=The Rifleman’s Companion.= By L. R. TIPPINS. With 6 Illustrations. Crown
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_IN PREPARATION._

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MILLS & BOON, LTD., 49 WHITCOMB STREET, W.C.

A Thrilling Adventure Library Volume

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on the high standard attained in their Thrilling Adventure Library.”

THE KINGDOM OF EARTH

ANTHONY PARTRIDGE

_Crown 8vo. 6s._

_Evening Standard._—“Here is another thundering good story. Here are
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through—the very thing for the holiday mood.”

MILLS & BOON, LTD., 49 WHITCOMB STREET, W.C.

_“A WONDERFUL SHILLINGSWORTH” say the ‘World’ and the ‘Observer.’_

CUMNER’S SON

SIR GILBERT PARKER

Cloth =1s.= net.

_Daily Telegraph._—“Sir Gilbert Parker has been very generous in
presenting this book to the reading public at so cheap a price, for it
contains some of his best work. How good that is we all know. Better
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rough and ready folk who people the islands. It is a charming volume,
full of light and life and colour.”

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_Westminster._—“Heroic.”

_Standard._—“Remarkable.”

_Globe._—“Capital.”

_Scotsman._—“Vivid realism.”

_Daily Express._—“Admirable.”

_Daily Mail._—“Imperial.”

_Birmingham Post._—“Full of incident.”

_Ladies’ Field._—“Fresh.”

MILLS & BOON, LTD., 49 WHITCOMB STREET, W.C.

FIRST LOVE

MARIE VAN VORST

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ardent, strong-willed, reckless, and very attractive. He goes to stay
with two college friends, and the swift growth of his passion for their
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