The romance of the Oxford colleges

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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

The Romance of the Oxford Colleges — UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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:

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

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.

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.

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:

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

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.

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:

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:

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, 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.

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:

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

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:

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

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

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.

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 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

“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.”

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

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?

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:—

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:

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

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.”

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 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.

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:

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:

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:

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

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.

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,

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.

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

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:

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

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.

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

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:

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

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.

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:

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

There is also the rhyme which celebrates

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:

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:

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.

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 — A SELECTION FROM MILLS & BOON’S LIST OF GENERAL LITERATURE — THE EDUCATION OF JACQUELINE — A GOLDEN STRAW — CALICO JACK — THROUGH THE LOOPHOLES OF RETREAT — THE RAJAH’S PEOPLE — MILLS & BOON’S NET SHILLING NOVELS — LETTERS OF A MODERN GOLFER TO HIS GRANDFATHER — THE SWORD MAKER — MILLS & BOON’S COMPANION SERIES — THE KINGDOM OF EARTH — CUMNER’S SON — FIRST LOVE

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!”

UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON.