.. -*- encoding: utf-8 -*-

.. meta::
   :PG.Id: 39525
   :PG.Title: Aspects of Modern Oxford
   :PG.Released: 2012-04-23
   :PG.Rights: Public Domain
   :PG.Producer: Al Haines
   :DC.Creator: \A. \D. Godley
   :MARCREL.ill: \J. \H. Lorimer
   :MARCREL.ill: Lancelot Speed
   :MARCREL.ill: \T. \H. Crawford
   :MARCREL.ill: \E. Stamp
   :DC.Title: Aspects of Modern Oxford
   :DC.Language: en
   :DC.Created: 1894
   :coverpage: images/img-cover.jpg

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   :class: small-caps

========================
ASPECTS OF MODERN OXFORD
========================

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   Cover art

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.. _`IN CORNMARKET STREET.`:

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   :alt: *IN CORNMARKET STREET.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*

   *IN CORNMARKET STREET.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*

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   ASPECTS

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   OF

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   MODERN OXFORD

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   BY

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   A MERE DON

   (A. D. GODLEY)

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   *WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY*

   \J. \H. Lorimer, Lancelot Speed, \T. \H. Crawford,

   and \E. Stamp

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   LONDON

   SEELEY AND CO. LIMITED

   Essex Street, Strand

   1894

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.. contents:: CONTENTS
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   :backlinks: entry

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   LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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   `In Cornmarket Street.`_  *By T. H. Crawford* . . . . . . . . . *Frontispiece*

   `In Christchurch Cathedral.`_  *By J. H. Lorimer*

   `New College, Oxford.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `Corpus Christi College.`_  *By J. H. Lorimer*

   `Smoking-Room at the Union.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `Cricket in the Parks.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Waiting for the Cox.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Ringoal in New College.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Golf at Oxford. The Plateau Hole And Arnold's Tree.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Commemoration: Outside the Sheldonian Theatre.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `In College Rooms.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `A Ball at Christchurch.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `The Deer Park, Magdalen College, Oxford.`_  *By J. H. Lorimer*

   `In Convocation: Conferring a Degree.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `A Lecture-Room in Magdalen College.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `The Library, Merton College.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `Reading the Newdigate.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `A Dance at St. John's.`_  *By T. H. Crawford*

   `The Radcliffe.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `In the Bodleian.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `Sailing on the Upper River.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Porch of St. Mary's.`_  *By J. Pennell*

   `In Exeter College Chapel.`_  *By E. Stamp*

   `Parsons' Pleasure.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Fencing.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Lawn Tennis at Oxford.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Bowls in New College Garden.`_  *By L. Speed*

   `Coaching the Eight.`_  *By J. H. Lorimer*

   `Evening on the River.`_  *By E. Stamp*

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   ASPECTS OF MODERN OXFORD

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I--OF DONS AND COLLEGES
=======================

   |   'We ain't no thin red heroes, nor we ain't no blackguards too,
   |   But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.'
   |                                                  *Rudyard Kipling*.


Fellows of Colleges who travel on the
continent of Europe have, from time to
time, experienced the almost insuperable
difficulty of explaining to the more or less
intelligent foreigner their own reason of existence,
and that of the establishment to which they
are privileged to belong.  It is all the worse
if your neighbour at the *table d'hôte* is
acquainted with the Universities of his own
country, for these offer no parallel at all, and
to attempt to illustrate by means of them is
not only futile but misleading.  Define any
college according to the general scheme
indicated by its founder; when you have made
the situation as intelligible as a limited
knowledge of French or German will allow, the
inquirer will conclude that '*also* it is a monastic
institution,' and that you are wearing a hair
shirt under your tourist tweeds.  Try to
disabuse him of this impression by pointing out
that colleges do not compel to celibacy, and
are intended mainly for the instruction of
youth, and your Continental will go away
with the conviction that an English
University is composed of a conglomeration of
public schools.  If he tries to get further
information from the conversation of a casual
undergraduate, it will appear that a
*Ruderverein* on the Danube offers most points of
comparison.

Fellows themselves fare no better, and are
left in an--if possible--darker obscurity.
That they are in some way connected with
education is tolerably obvious, but the
particular nature of the connexion is unexplained.
Having thoroughly confused the subject by
showing inconclusively that you are neither
a monk, nor a schoolmaster, nor a *Privat
Docent*, you probably acquiesce from sheer
weariness in the title of *Professor*, which,
perhaps, is as convenient as any other; and,
after all, *Professoren* are very different from
Professors.  But all this does nothing to
elucidate the nature of a College.  To do this
abroad is nearly as hard as to define the
function of a University in England.

.. _`IN CHRISTCHURCH CATHEDRAL.`:

.. figure:: images/img-002.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *IN CHRISTCHURCH CATHEDRAL.  By J. H. Lorimer.*

   *IN CHRISTCHURCH CATHEDRAL.  By J. H. Lorimer.*


For even at home the general uneducated
public, taking but a passing interest in
educational details, is apt to be hopelessly at sea
as to the mutual relation of Colleges and
Universities.  In the public mind the College
probably represents the University: an
Oxonian will be sometimes spoken of as
'at College;' University officials are confused
with heads of houses, and Collections with
University examinations.  That foundation
which is consecrated to the education of
Welsh Oxonians is generally referred to in
the remote fastnesses of the Cymru as Oxford
College.  As usual, a concrete material object,
palpable and visible, is preferred before a cold
abstraction like the University.  Explain to
the lay mind that a University is an aggregate
of Colleges: it is not, of course, but the
definition will serve sometimes.  Then how
about the London University, which is an
examining body?  And how does it happen
that there is a University College in Oxford,
not to mention another in Gower Street? and
that Trinity College across the water is often
called Dublin University?  All these problems
are calculated to leave the inquirer very much
where he was at first, and in him who tries
to explain them to shake the firm foundations
of Reason.

It may be a truism, but it is nevertheless
true--according to a phrase which has done
duty in the Schools ere now--that the history
of the University is, and has been for the last
five hundred years, the history of its Colleges;
and it is also true that the interweaving of
Collegiate with University life has very much
complicated the question of the student's reason
of existence.  We do not, of course, know
what may have been the various motives which
prompted the bold baron, or squire, or yeoman
of the twelfth or thirteenth century to send
the most clerkly or least muscular of his sons
to herd with his fellows in the crowded streets
or the mean hostelries of pre-collegiate Oxford;
nor have we very definite data as to the kind
of life which the scholar of the family lived
when he got there.  Perhaps he resided in a
'hall;' according to some authorities there
were as many as three hundred halls in the
days of Edward I.; perhaps he was master
of his own destinies, like the free and
independent unattached student of modern
days--minus a Censor to watch over the use of his
liberties.  But what is tolerably certain is that
he did not then come to Oxford so much with
the intention of 'having a good time' as with
the desire of improving his mind, or, at least,
in some way or other taking part in the
intellectual life of the period, which then centred
in the University.  It might be that among
the throngs of boys and young men who
crowded the straitened limits of mediaeval
Oxford, there were many who supported the
obscure tenets of their particular Doctor
Perspicuus against their opponents' Doctor
Inexplicabilis rather with bills and bows than with
disputations in the Schools; but every Oxonian
was in some way vowed to the advancement
of learning--at least, it is hard to see
what other inducement there was to face
what must have been, even with all due
allowance made, the exceptional hardships of a
student's life.  Then came the
Colleges--University dating from unknown antiquity,
although the legend which connects its
foundation with Alfred has now shared the fate of
most legends; Balliol and Merton, at the end of
the thirteenth century; and the succeeding
centuries were fruitful in the establishment of
many other now venerable foundations, taking
example and encouragement from the success
and reputation of their earlier compeers.  In
their original form colleges were probably
intended to be places of quiet retirement and
study, where the earnest scholar might
peacefully pursue his researches without fear of
disturbance by the wilder spirits who roamed
the streets and carried on the traditional feuds
of Town and Gown or of North and South.

.. _`NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD.`:

.. figure:: images/img-006.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*

   *NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*


By a curious reverse of circumstances the
collegian and the '*scholaris nulli collegio vel
aulae ascriptus*' of modern days seem to have
changed characters.  For I have heard it said
by those who have to do with college
discipline that their *alumni* are no longer
invariably distinguished by 'a gentle nature
and studious habits'--qualities for which, as
the Warden of Merton says, colleges were
originally intended to provide a welcome haven
of rest, and which are now the especial and
gratifying characteristics of that whilom
roisterer and boon companion, the Unattached
Student.

We have it on the authority of historians
that the original collegiate design was,
properly speaking, a kind of model lodging-house;
an improved, enlarged, and strictly supervised
edition of the many hostels where the primitive
undergraduate did mostly congregate.  Fellows
and scholars alike were to be studious and
discreet persons; the seniors were to devote
themselves to research, and to stand in a
quasi-parental or elder-brotherly relation to the
juniors who had not yet attained to the grade
of a Baccalaureus.  Very strict rules--probably
based on those of monastic institutions--governed
the whole body: rules, however,
which are not unnecessarily severe when we
consider the fashion of the age and the
comparative youth of both fellows and scholars.
Many scholars must have been little more
than children, and the junior don of the
fifteenth century may often have been young
enough to receive that corporal punishment
which our rude forefathers inflicted even on
the gentler sex.

   |   'Solomon said, in accents mild,
   |   Spare the rod and spoil the child;
   |   Be they man or be they maid,
   |   Whip 'em and wallop 'em, Solomon said'

--and the sage's advice was certainly followed
in the case of scholars, who were birched for
offences which in these latter days would
call down a 'gate,' a fine, or an imposition.
Authorities tell us that the early fellow might
even in certain cases be mulcted of his dress,
a penalty which is now reserved for Irish
patriots in gaol; and it would seem that his
consumption of beer was limited by regulations
which would now be intolerable to his
scout.  Some of the details respecting crime
and punishment, which have been preserved
in ancient records, are of the most remarkable
description.  A former Fellow of Corpus (so
we are informed by Dr. Fowler's History
of that College) who had been proved guilty
of an over-susceptibility to the charms of
beauty, was condemned as a penance to preach
eight sermons in the Church of St. Peter-in-the-East.
Such was the inscrutable wisdom
of a bygone age.

Details have altered since then, but the
general scheme of college discipline remains
much the same.  Even in the days when
practice was slackest, theory retained its ancient
stringency.  When Mr. Gibbon of Magdalen
absented himself from his lectures, his excuses
were received 'with an indulgent smile;' when
he desired to leave Oxford for a few days, he
appears to have done so without let or
hindrance; but both residence and attendance at
lectures were theoretically necessary.  The
compromise was hardly satisfactory, but as the
scholars' age increased and the disciplinary
rule meant for fourteen had to be applied to
eighteen, what was to be done?  So, too, we
are informed that in the days of our fathers
undergraduates endured a Procrustean tyranny.
So many chapel services you must attend; so
many lectures you must hear, connected or
not with your particular studies; and there
was no relaxation of the rule; no excuse
even of 'urgent business' would serve the pale
student who wanted to follow the hounds or
play in a cricket match.  Things, in fact, would
have been at a deadlock had not the authorities
recognised the superiority of expediency
to mere morality, and invariably accepted
without question the plea of ill-health.  To
'put on an *aeger*' when in the enjoyment
of robust health was after all as justifiable
a fiction as the 'not at home' of ordinary
society.  You announced yourself as too ill to
go to a lecture, and then rode with the
Bicester or played cricket to your heart's
content.  This remarkable system is now
practically obsolete; perhaps we are more moral.

.. _`CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-010.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.  Drawn by F. H. Lorimer.*

   *CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE.  Drawn by F. H. Lorimer.*


Modern collegiate discipline is a parlous
matter.  There are still the old problems to
be faced--the difficulty of adapting old rules
to new conditions--the danger on the one
hand of treating boys too much like men,
and on the other of treating men too much
like boys.  Hence college authorities
generally fall back on some system of more or
less ingenious compromise--a course which
is no doubt prudent in the long run, and shows
a laudable desire for the attainment of the
Aristotelian 'mean,' but which, like most
compromises, manages to secure the disapproval
alike of all shades of outside opinion.  We
live with the fear of the evening papers
before our eyes, and an erring undergraduate
who has been sent down may quite possibly
be avenged by a newspaper column reflecting
on college discipline in general, and the dons
who sent him down in particular.  Every
day martinets tell us that the University is
going to the dogs from excess of leniency;
while critics of the 'Boys-will-be-boys' school
point out the extreme danger of sitting
permanently on the safety valve, and dancing
on the edge of an active volcano.

In recent years most of the 'Halls' have
been practically extinguished, and thereby
certain eccentricities of administration removed
from our midst.  It was perhaps as well;
some of these ancient and honourable
establishments having during the present century
rather fallen from their former reputation,
from their readiness to receive into the fold
incapables or minor criminals to whom the
moral or intellectual atmosphere of a college
was uncongenial.  This was a very convenient
system for colleges, who could thus get rid
of an idle or stupid man without the
responsibility of blighting his University career
and his prospects in general; but the Halls,
which were thus turned into a kind of sink,
became rather curious and undesirable
abiding-places in consequence.  They were inhabited
by grave and reverend seniors who couldn't,
and by distinguished athletes who wouldn't,
pass Smalls, much less Mods.  At one time
'Charsley's' was said to be able to play
the 'Varsity Eleven.  These mixed multitudes
appear to have been governed on very various
and remarkable principles.  At one establishment
it was considered a breach of courtesy if
you did not, when going to London, give
the authorities some idea of the *probable* length
of your absence.  'The way to govern a
college,' the venerated head of this institution is
reported to have said, 'is this--*to keep one eye
shut*,' presumably the optic on the side of the
offender.  Yet it is curious that while most of
the Halls appear to have been ruled rather
by the *gant de velours* than the *main de fer*,
one of them is currently reported to have been
the scene of an attempt to inflict corporal
punishment.  This heroic endeavour to restore
the customs of the ancients was not crowned
with immediate success, and he who should
have been beaten with stripes fled for justice
to the Vice-Chancellor's Court.

.. _`SMOKING-ROOM AT THE UNION.`:

.. figure:: images/img-014.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *SMOKING-ROOM AT THE UNION.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*

   *SMOKING-ROOM AT THE UNION.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*


Casual visitors to Oxford who are acquainted
with the statutes of the University will no
doubt have observed that it has been found
unnecessary to insist on exact obedience to all
the rules which were framed for the student
of four hundred years ago.  For instance, boots
are generally worn; undergraduates are not
prohibited from riding horses, nor even from
carrying lethal weapons; the *herba nicotiana
sive Tobacco* is in common use; and, especially
in summer, garments are not so 'subfusc' as
the strict letter of the law requires.
Perhaps, too, the wearing of the academic cap
and gown is not so universally necessary as
it was heretofore.  All these are matters for
the jurisdiction of the Proctors, who rightly
lay more stress on the real order and good
behaviour of their realm.  And whatever evils
civilisation may bring in the train, there can
be no doubt that the task of these officials
is far less dangerous than of old, as their
subjects are less turbulent.  They have no
longer to interfere in the faction fights
of Northern and Southern students.  It is
unusual for a Proctor to carry a pole-axe,
even when he is 'drawing' the most
dangerous of billiard-rooms.  The Town
and Gown rows which used to provide so
attractive a picture for the novelist--where
the hero used to stand pale and determined,
defying a crowd of infuriated bargemen--are
extinct and forgotten these last ten years.
Altogether the streets are quieter; models,
in fact, of peace and good order: when the
anarchical element is loose it seems to prefer
the interior of Colleges.  Various reasons might
be assigned for this: sometimes the presence
of too easily defied authority gives a piquancy
to crime; or it is the place itself which is
the incentive.  The open space of a
quadrangle is found to be a convenient stage for
the performance of the midnight reveller.  He
is watched from the windows by a ring of
admiring friends, and the surrounding walls
are a kind of sounding-board which enhances
the natural beauty of 'Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay'
(with an accompaniment of tea-tray and poker
*obbligato*).  Every one has his own ideal of
an enjoyable evening.




II--OF UNDERGRADUATES
=====================

   |   'In the sad and sodden street
   |           To and fro
   |   Flit the feverstricken feet
   |   Of the Freshers, as they meet,
   |           Come and go.'
   |                              *Q*


Whatever the theory of their
founders, it is at no late period in
the history of colleges that we begin to trace
the development of the modern undergraduate.
It was only natural that the 'gentle natures
and studious habits' of a select band of learners
should undergo some modification as college
after college was founded, and comparative
frivolity would from time to time obtain
admission to the sacred precincts.  The
University became the resort of wealth and rank,
as well as of mere intellect, and the gradual
influx of commoners--still more, of
'gentlemen commoners'--once for all determined
the character of colleges as places of serious
and uninterrupted study.  Probably the Civil
War, bringing the Court to Oxford, was a
potent factor in relaxation of the older academic
discipline; deans or sub-wardens of the period
doubtless finding some difficulty in adapting
their rules to the requirements of
undergraduates who might from time to time absent
themselves from chapel or lecture in order to
raid a Parliamentary outpost.

But perhaps the most instructive picture of
the seventeenth-century undergraduate is to be
found in the account-book of one Wilding, of
Wadham (published by the Oxford Historical
Society), apparently a reading man and a
scholar of his college, destined for Holy
Orders.  The number of his books (he gives
a list of them) shows him to have been
something of a student, while repeated entries of
large sums paid for 'Wiggs' (on one occasion
as much as 14*s*--more than his 'Battles' for
the quarter!) would seem to suggest something
of the habits of the 'gay young sparks'
alluded to by Hearne in the next century.
On the whole, Master Wilding appears to
have been a virtuous and studious young
gentleman.  Now and then the natural man
asserts himself, and he treats his friends to
wine or 'coffea,' or even makes an excursion
to 'Abbington' (4*s.*!).  Towards the end of
his career a 'gaudy' costs 2*s.* 6*d.*, after which
comes the too-suggestive entry, 'For a purge,
1*s.*'  Then comes the close: outstanding bills
are paid to the alarming extent of 7*s.* 8*d.*;
a 'wigg,' which originally cost 14*s.*, is
disposed of at a ruinous reduction for 6*s.*--the
prudent man does not give it away to his
scout--and J. Wilding, B.A., e. Coll., Wadh.,
retires to his country parsonage--having first
invested sixpence in a sermon.  Evidently a
person of methodical habits and punctual
payments; that had two wigs, and everything
handsome about him; and that probably
grumbled quite as much at the 10*s.* fee for
his tutor as his modern successor does at his
8*l.* 6*s.* 8*d.*  But, on the whole, collegiate and
university fees seem to have been small.

After this description of the *vie intime* of
an undergraduate at Wadham, history is
reserved on the subject of the junior members
of the University; which is the more
disappointing, as the historic Muse is not only
garrulous, but exceedingly scandalous in
recounting the virtues and the aberrations of
eighteenth-century dons.  Here and there we
find an occasional notice of the ways of
undergraduates--here a private memoir, there an
academic *brochure*.  We learn, incidentally, how
Mr. John Potenger, of New College, made
'theams in prose and verse,' and eventually
'came to a tollerable proficiency in colloquial
Latin;' how Mr. Meadowcourt, of Merton,
got into serious trouble--was prevented, in
fact, from taking his degree--for drinking the
health of His Majesty King George the First;
and how Mr. Carty, of University College,
suffered a similar fate 'for prophaning, with
mad intemperance, that day, on which he
ought, with sober chearfulness, to have
commemorated the restoration of King Charles
the Second' (this was in 1716); how
Mr. Shenstone found, at Pembroke College, both
sober men 'who amused themselves in the
evening with reading Greek and drinking
water,' and also 'a set of jolly sprightly
young fellows .... who drank ale, smoked
tobacco,' and even 'punned;' and how Lord
Shelburne had a 'narrow-minded tutor.'  From
which we may gather, that University
life was not so very different from what it
is now: our forefathers were more exercised
about politics, for which we have now
substituted a perhaps extreme devotion to
athletics.  But for the most part, the
undergraduate is not prominent in history--seeming,
in fact, to be regarded as the least important
element in the University.  On the other
hand, his successor of the present century--the
era of the Examination Schools--occupies
so prominent a place in the eyes of the public
that it is difficult to speak of him, lest haply
one should be accused of frivolity or want of
reverence for the *raison d'être* of all academic
institutions.

.. _`CRICKET IN THE PARKS.`:

.. figure:: images/img-022.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *CRICKET IN THE PARKS.  By Launcelot Speed.*

   *CRICKET IN THE PARKS.  By Launcelot Speed.*


His own reason of existence is not so
obvious.  It was, as we have said, tolerably
clear that the mediaeval student came to
Oxford primarily for the love of learning
something, at any rate; but the student *fin de
siècle* is one of the most labyrinthine parts of
a complex civilisation.  Of the hundreds of
boys who are shot on the G.W.R. platform
every October to be caressed or kicked by
Alma Mater, and returned in due time full or
empty, it is only an insignificant minority who
come up with the ostensible purpose of learning.
Their reasons are as many as the colours of
their portmanteaus.  Brown has come up
because he is in the sixth form at school, and
was sent in for a scholarship by a head-master
desiring an advertisement; Jones, because it is
thought by his friends that he might get into
the 'Varsity eleven; Robinson, because his
father considers a University career to be a
stepping-stone to the professions--which it
fortunately is not as yet.  Mr. Sangazur is,
going to St. Boniface because his father was
there; and Mr. J. Sangazur Smith--well,
probably because *his* father wasn't.  Altogether
they are a motley crew, and it is not the least
achievement of the University that she does
somehow or other manage to impress a certain
stamp on so many different kinds of metal.
But in this she is only an instrument in the
hands of modern civilisation, which is always
extinguishing eccentricities and abnormal types;
and even Oxford, while her sons are getting
rid of those interesting individualities which
used to distinguish them from each other, is
fast losing many of the peculiarities which used
to distinguish it from the rest of the world.
It is an age of monotony.  Even the Freshman,
that delightful creation of a bygone age, is
not by any means what he was.  He is still
young, but no longer innocent; the bloom is
off his credulity; you cannot play practical
jokes upon him any more.  Now and then a
young man will present himself to his college
authorities in a gown of which the superfluous
dimensions and unusual embroidery betray the
handiwork of the provincial tailor; two or
three neophytes may annually be seen
perambulating the High in academic dress with
a walking-stick; but these are only survivals.
Senior men have no longer their old privileges
of 'ragging' the freshman.  In ancient times,
as we are informed by the historian of Merton
College, 'Freshmen were expected to sit on a
form, and make jokes for the amusement of
their companions, on pain of being "tucked,"
or scarified by the thumb-nail applied under
the lip.  The first Earl of Shaftesbury
describes in detail this rather barbarous jest
as practised at Exeter College, and relates
how, aided by some freshmen of unusual size
and strength, he himself headed a mutiny
which led to the eventual abolition of
'tucking.'  Again, on Candlemas Day every
freshman received notice to prepare a speech
to be delivered on the following Shrove
Tuesday, when they were compelled to declaim
in undress from a form placed on the high
table, being rewarded with "cawdel" if the
performances were good, with cawdel and salted
drink if it were indifferent, and with salted
drink and "tucks" if it were dull.  This is
what American students call 'hazing,' and
the German *Fuchs* is subjected to similar
ordeals.  But we have changed all that, and
treat the 'fresher' now with the respect he
deserves.

Possibly the undergraduate of fiction and
the drama may have been once a living
reality.  But he is so no more, and modern
realistic novelists will have to imagine some hero
less crude in colouring and more in harmony
with the compromises and neutral tints of the
latter half of the nineteenth century.  The
young Oxonian or Cantab of fifty years
back, as represented by contemporary or
nearly contemporary writers, was always in
extremes:--

   |   'When he was good he was very, very good;
   |     But when he was bad he was horrid,'

like the little girl of the poet.  He was either
an inimitable example of improbable virtue, or
abnormally vicious.  The bad undergraduate
defied the Ten Commandments, all and
severally, with the ease and success of the
villain of transpontine melodrama.  Nothing
came amiss to him, from forgery to screwing
up the Dean and letting it be understood
that some one else had done it; but retribution
generally came at last, and this compound of
manifold vices was detected and rusticated;
and it was understood that from rustication to
the gallows was the shortest and easiest of
transitions.  The virtuous undergraduate wore
trousers too short for him and supported his
relations.  He did not generally join in any
athletic pastimes, but when the stroke of his
college eight fainted from excitement just
before the start, the neglected sizar threw off
his threadbare coat, leapt into the vacant seat,
and won his crew at once the proud position
of head of the river by the simple process of
making four bumps on the same night,
explaining afterwards that he had practised in a
dingey and saw how it could be done.  Then
there was the Admirable Crichton of University
life, perhaps the commonest type among these
heroes of romance.  He was invariably at
Christ Church, and very often had a
background of more or less tragic memories from
the far-away days of his *jeunesse orageuse*.
Nevertheless he unbent so far as to do nothing
much during the first three and a half years
of his academic career, except to go to a good
many wine parties, where he always wore his
cap and gown (especially in female fiction),
and drank more than any one else.  Then,
when every one supposed he must be ploughed
in Greats, he sat up so late for a week, and
wore so many wet towels, that eventually he
was announced at the Encaenia, amid the
plaudits of his friends and the approving
smiles of the Vice-Chancellor, as the winner
of a Double-First, several University prizes,
and a Fellowship; after which it was only
right and natural that the recipient of so many
coveted distinctions should lead the heroine of
the piece to the altar.

.. _`WAITING FOR THE COX.`:

.. figure:: images/img-026.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *WAITING FOR THE COX.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*

   *WAITING FOR THE COX.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*


Possibly the Oxford of a bygone generation
may have furnished models for these brilliantly
coloured pictures; or, as is more probable,
they were created by the licence of fiction.
At any rate the 'man' of modern times is a
far less picturesque person--unpicturesque
even to the verge of becoming ordinary.  He
is seldom eccentric or *outré* in externals.  His
manners are such as he has learnt at school,
and his customs those of the world he lives in.
His dress would excite no remark in Piccadilly.
The gorgeous waistcoats of Leech's pencil and
Calverley's '*crurum non enarrabile tegmen*'
belong to ancient history.  He is, on the
whole, inexpensive in his habits, as it is now
the fashion to be poor; he no longer orders
in a tailor's whole shop, and his clubs are
generally managed with economy and prudence.
If, however, the undergraduate occasionally
displays the virtues of maturer age, there are
certain indications that he is less of a
grown-up person than he was in the brave days of
old.  It takes him a long time to forget his
school-days.  Only exceptionally untrammelled
spirits regard independent reading as more
important than the ministrations of their tutor.
Pass-men have been known to speak of their
work for the schools as 'lessons,' and, in their
first term, to call the head of the College the
head-master.  Naturally, too, school-life has
imbued both Pass and Class men with an
enduring passion for games--probably rather
a good thing in itself, although inadequate
as the be-all and end-all of youthful energy.
Even those who do not play them can talk
about them.  Cricket and football are always
as prolific a topic as the weather, and nearly
as interesting, as many a perfunctory 'Fresher's
breakfast' can testify.

.. _`RINGOAL IN NEW COLLEGE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-028.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *RINGOAL IN NEW COLLEGE.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*

   *RINGOAL IN NEW COLLEGE.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*


The undergraduate, in these as in other
things, is like the young of his species, with
whom, after all, he has a good deal in
common.  Take, in short, the ordinary
provincial young man; add a dash of the
schoolboy and just a touch of the *Bursch*, and you
have what Mr. Hardy calls the 'Normal
Undergraduate.'


.. figure:: images/img-029.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: Ringoal

   Ringoal


It used to be the custom to draw a very
hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the
rowing and the reading man--rowing being
taken as a type of athletics in general, and
indeed being the only form of physical exercise
which possessed a regular organization.  Rumour
has it that a certain tutor (now defunct) laid so
much emphasis on this distinction that men
whose circumstances permitted them to be idle
were regarded with disfavour if they took to
reading.  He docketed freshmen as reading or
non-reading men, and would not allow either
kind to stray into the domain of the other.
However, the general fusion of classes and
professions has levelled these boundaries now.
The rowing man reads to a certain extent, and
the reading man has very often pretensions to
athletic eminence; it is in fact highly desirable
that he should, now that a 'Varsity 'blue'
provides an assistant master in a school with at
least as good a salary as does a brilliant
degree.  Yet, although the great majority of
men belong to the intermediate class of those
who take life as they find it, and make no
one occupation the object of their exclusive
devotion, it is hardly necessary to say that
there are still extremes--the Brutal Athlete
at one end of the line and the bookish recluse
(often, though wrongly, identified with the
'Smug') at the other.  The existence of the
first is encouraged by the modern tendency
to professionalism in athletics.  Mere amateurs
who regard games as an amusement can never
hope to do anything; a thing must be taken
seriously.  Every schoolboy who wishes to
obtain renown in the columns of sporting
papers has his 'record,' and comes up to Oxford
with the express intention of 'cutting'
somebody else's, and the athletic authorities of the
University know all about Jones's bowling
average at Eton, or Brown's form as
three-quarter-back at Rugby, long before these
distinguished persons have matriculated.  Nor
is it only cricket, football, and rowing that
are the objects of our worship.  Even so staid
and contemplative a pastime as golf ranks
among 'athletics;' and perhaps in time the
authorities will be asked to give a 'Blue' for
croquet.  These things being so, on the whole,
perhaps, we should be grateful to the eminent
athlete for the comparative affability of his
demeanour, so long as he is not seriously
contradicted.  He is great, but he is generally
merciful.

Thews and sinews have probably as much
admiration as is good for them, and nearly as
much as they want.  On the other hand, the
practice of reading has undoubtedly been
popularised.  It is no longer a clique of students
who seek honours; public opinion in and
outside the University demands of an
increasing majority of men that they should appear
to be improving their minds.  The Pass-man
pure and simple diminishes in numbers
annually; no doubt in time he will be a kind of
pariah.  Colleges compete with each other in
the Schools.  Evening papers prove by statistics
the immorality of an establishment where a
scholar who obtains a second is allowed to
remain in residence.  The stress and strain
of the system would be hardly bearable were
it not decidedly less difficult to obtain a class
in honours than it used to be--not, perhaps,
a First, or even a Second; but certainly the
lower grades are easier of attainment.  Then
the variety of subjects is such as to appeal
to every one: history, law, theology, natural
science (in all its branches), mathematics, all
invite the ambitious student whose relations
wish him to take honours, and will be quite
satisfied with a Fourth; and eminent specialists
compete for the privilege of instructing him.
The tutor who complained to the undergraduate
that he had sixteen pupils was met
by the just retort that the undergraduate had
sixteen tutors.

.. _`GOLF AT OXFORD.  THE PLATEAU HOLE AND ARNOLD'S TREE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-032.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *GOLF AT OXFORD.  THE PLATEAU HOLE AND ARNOLD'S TREE.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*

   *GOLF AT OXFORD.  THE PLATEAU HOLE AND ARNOLD'S TREE.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*


The relation of the University to the
undergraduate is twofold; it is 'kept'--as a
witty scholar of Dublin is fabled to have
inscribed over the door of his Dean, 'for his
amusement and instruction'--and if the latter
is frequently formal, it is still more often and
in a great variety of ways 'informal,' and
not communicated through his tutor.  Not to
mention the many college literary societies--every
college has one at least, and they are
all ready to discuss any topic, from the Origin
of Evil to bimetallism--there are now in the
University various learned societies, modelled
and sometimes called after the German *Seminar*,
which are intended to supplement the
deficiencies of tuition, and to keep the serious
student abreast of the newest erudition which
has been 'made in Germany,' or anywhere
else on the Continent.  Then there is the
Union as a school of eloquence for the political
aspirant; or the 'private business' of his
college debating society, where a vote of
censure on Ministers is sometimes emphasised
by their ejection into the quadrangle, may
qualify him for the possible methods of a
future House of Commons.




III--OF SIGHTSEERS
==================

   |   'The women longed to go and see the *college* and the *tutour*.'
   |           *'The Guardian's Instruction' by Stephen Penton.*


When the late Mr. Bright asserted
that the tone of Oxford life and
thought was 'provincial with a difference,'
great indignation was aroused in the breasts of
all Oxford men--residents, at least; whether
it was the provincialism or the 'difference'
wherein lay the sting of the taunt.  Probably
it was the first.  For, although it is a tenable
hypothesis that *Kleinstädtigkeit* has really been
a potent factor in the production of much
that is best in art and literature, still nobody
likes to be called provincial by those whose
business is in the metropolis.  Caesar said
that he would rather be a great man at
Gabii, or whatever was the Little Pedlington
of Italy, than an ordinary person at Rome;
but the modern Little Pedlingtonian would
seldom confess to so grovelling an ambition,
whatever might be his real feelings.  He
would much sooner be one of the crowd in
London than mayor of his native city: so
at least he says.  And so he is very angry
if you call him provincial, and venture to
insinuate that his views of life are limited by
the jurisdiction of his Local Board or City
Council; and thus the University of Oxford
refused for a long time to forgive John
Bright, and did not quite forget his strictures
even when it gave him an honorary degree
and called him 'patriae et libertatis
amantissimus.'  And yet the authorities had done
what they could to keep the University
provincial.  It was only after many and deep
searchings of heart that the Hebdomadal
Council consented to countenance the advent
of the Great Western Railway; while the
ten miles which separate Oxford from Steventon
preserved undergraduates from the contaminating
contact of the metropolis there was
still hope, but many venerable Tories held
that University discipline was past praying for
when a three-hours' run would bring you into
the heart of the dissipation of London.  Some
there were who could not even imagine that
so terrible a change had really taken place; it
is said that Dr. Routh, the President of
Magdalen, who attained the respectable age
of ninety-nine in the year 1855 (he was
elected towards the close of the last century
as a *warming-pan*, being then of a delicate
constitution and not supposed likely to live!),
persistently ignored the development of
railways altogether; when undergraduates came
up late at the beginning of the winter term,
he would excuse them on the ground of the
badness of the roads.

We have changed all that, like other
provincial centres; and undergraduates who want
to 'see their dentist'--a venerable and
time-honoured plea which we have heard
expressed by the delicate-minded as 'the necessity
for keeping a dental engagement'--may now
run up to town and back between lunch and
'hall;' the latter function having also
marched with the times, and even six-o'clock
dinner being now almost a thing of the past.
Not so long ago five was the regular hour.
In the early seventies seven-o'clock dinner
was regarded as a doubtful innovation; and
there we have stopped for the present.  But
the fashionable world outside the colleges
imitates London customs--always keeping a
little way behind the age--and what has
been called the 'Parks System' actually dines
as late as 7.45 when it is determined to
be *très chic*.  It is only one sign of the
influx of metropolitan ideas; but there
are many others.  Oxford tradesmen have
learnt by bitter experience that the modern
undergraduate is not an exclusive
preserve for them like his father.  That
respected county magnate, when he was at
Oriel, bought his coats from an Oxford tailor
and his wine from an Oxford wine-merchant,
to whom--being an honest man--he paid
about half as much again as he would have
paid anywhere in London, thereby recouping
the men of coats or of wines for the many
bad debts made by dealing with the transitory
and impecunious undergraduate.  But his son
gets his clothes in London, and his wine
from the college, which deals directly with
Bordeaux.  And the tone and subject of
conversation is changed too.  Oxford is
thoroughly up to date, and knows all about the
latest play at the Criterion and the latest
scandal in the inner circle of London society--or
thinks it does, at any rate: there is no
one who knows so much about London as
the man who does not live there.

.. _`COMMEMORATION: OUTSIDE THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-038.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *COMMEMORATION: OUTSIDE THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*

   *COMMEMORATION: OUTSIDE THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*


But if Oxford goes to London, so does
London come to Oxford.  Whether it be
fitting or not that the site of a theoretically
learned University should be in summer a
sort of people's park or recreation-ground
for the jaded Londoner, the fact is so: the
classes and the masses are always with us in
one form or another.  It has become a
common and laudable practice for East-end
clergymen and the staff of Toynbee Hall
and the Oxford House to bring down their
flocks on Whit-Monday or other appropriate
occasions; and one may constantly see high
academic dignitaries piloting an unwieldy train
of excursionists, and trying to compress
University history into a small compass, or to
explain the nature of a college (of all
phenomena most unexplainable to the lay mind) to
an audience which has never seen any other
place of education than a Board school.  As
for the classes, they have raised the Eights and
'Commem.' to the rank of regular engagements
in a London season, and they go through
both with that unflinching heroism which
the English public invariably display in the
performance of a social duty: they shiver in
summer frocks on the barges, despite the hail
and snowstorms of what is ironically described
as the 'Summer' term; and after a hard day's
sightseeing they enjoy a well-earned repose
by going to Commemoration balls, where you
really do dance, not for a perfunctory two
hours or so, but from 8.30 to 6.30 a.m.  In
spite of these hardships it is gratifying to
observe that, whether or not the University
succeeds in its educational mission, it appears to
leave nothing to be desired as a place of
amusement for the jaded pleasure-seeker.
People who go to sleep at a farce have been
known to smile at the (to a resident) dullest
and least impressive University function.
Ladies appear to take an especial delight
in penetrating the mysteries of College life.
Perhaps the female mind is piqued by a subdued
flavour of impropriety, dating from a period
when colleges were not what they are; or
more probably they find it gratifying to
the self-respect of a superior sex to observe
and to pity the notoriously ineffectual
attempts of mere bachelors to render existence
bearable.  So much for the term; and when
the vacation begins Oxford is generally
inundated by a swarm of heterogeneous
tourists--Americans, who come here on their way
between Paris and Stratford-on-Avon;
Germans, distinguished by a white umbrella and a
red 'Baedeker,' trying to realise that here,
too, is a University, despite the absence of
students with slashed noses and the altogether
different quality of the beer.  Then with
August come the Extension students; the more
frivolous to picnic at Nuneham and Islip,
the seriously-minded to attend lectures which
compress all knowledge into a fortnight's
course, and to speculate on the future when
they--the real University, as they say--will
succeed to the inheritance of an
unenlightened generation which is wasting its
great opportunities.

.. _`IN COLLEGE ROOMS.`:

.. figure:: images/img-040.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *IN COLLEGE ROOMS.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*

   *IN COLLEGE ROOMS.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford.*


At Commemoration a general sense of
lobster salad pervades the atmosphere, and
the natural beauties of colleges are concealed
or enhanced by a profusion of planking and
red cloth; the architectural merit of a hall
is as nothing compared to the elasticity of
its floor.  The Eights, again, provide
attractions of their own, not especially academic.
The truly judicious sightseer will avoid both
of these festive seasons, and will choose some
time when there is less to interfere with his
own proper pursuit--the week after the Eights,
perhaps, or the beginning of the October
term, when the red Virginia creeper makes
a pleasing contrast with the grey collegiate
walls.  Nor will he, if he is wise, allow
himself to be 'rushed' through the various
objects of interest: there are, it is believed,
local guides who profess to show the whole
of Oxford in two hours; but rumour asserts
that the feat is accomplished by making the
several quadrangles of one college do duty for
a corresponding number of separate
establishments, so that the credulous visitor leaves
Christ Church with the impression that he has
seen not only 'The House,' but also several
other foundations, all curiously enough
communicating with each other.  And in any
case, after a mere scamper through the
colleges, nothing remains in the mind but a
vague and inaccurate reminiscence, combining
in one the characteristics of all; the jaded
sightseer goes back to London with a
fortunately soon-to-be-forgotten idea that Keble
was founded by Alfred the Great, and that
Tom Quad is a nickname for the Vice-Chancellor.
Samuel Pepys seems to have been
to a certain extent the prototype of this kind
of curiosity or antiquity hunter, and paid a
'shilling to a boy that showed me the Colleges
before dinner.'  (Curiously enough, 'after
dinner' the honorarium to 'one that showed
us the schools and library' was 10*s.*!)

.. _`A BALL AT CHRISTCHURCH.`:

.. figure:: images/img-042.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *A BALL AT CHRIST CHURCH.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford*

   *A BALL AT CHRIST CHURCH.  Drawn by T. H. Crawford*


He who is responsible for the proper
conduct of a gang of relations or friends will
not treat them in this way.  He will
endeavour, so far as possible, to confine them
within the limits of his own college, where he
is on his native heath, and, if he is not an
antiquarian, can at least animate the venerable
buildings with details of contemporary history.
He will point out his Dons (like the great
French nation, 'objects of hatred or admiration,
but never of indifference') with such derision
or reverence as they may deserve, and affix to
them ancient anecdotes whereby their
personality may be remembered.  He will show
to an admiring circle the statue which was
painted green, the pinnacle climbed by a friend
in the confidence of inebriation, and the marks
of the bonfire which the Dean did not succeed
in putting out.  Even the most ignorant and
frivolous-minded person can make his own
college interesting.  When he has succeeded
in impressing upon his friends the true
character of a college as a place of religion and
sound learning, he may be permitted to show
them such external objects as form a part of
every one's education, and which no one (for
the very shame of confessing it) can pretermit
unseen, such as the gardens of New College or
St. John's, the 'Nose' of B.N.C, the
Burne-Jones tapestry at Exeter, or the picture of
Mr. Gladstone in the hall of Christ Church.
Those who absolutely insist on a more
comprehensive view of the University and City
may be allowed to make the ascent of some
convenient point of view--Magdalen Tower,
for instance; it is a stiff climb, but the view
from the top will repay your exertions.  This
is where, as since the appearance of
Mr. Holman Hunt's picture everybody is probably
aware, the choir of the college annually salute
the rising sun from the top of the tower by
singing a Latin hymn on May morning--while
the youth of the city, for reasons certainly not
known to themselves, make morning hideous
with blowing of unmelodious horns in the
street below.  At all times--even at sunrise
on a rainy May morning--it is a noble
prospect.  The unlovely red-brick suburbs of
the north are hidden from sight by the
intervening towers and pinnacles of the real
Oxford; immediately below the High Street
winds westwards, flanked by colleges and
churches, of which the prevailing grey is
relieved by the green trees of those many
gardens and unexplored nooks of verdure with
which Oxford abounds; to the south there
are glimpses of the river flowing towards the
dim grey line of the distant Berkshire downs.
To the historically-minded the outlook may
suggest many a picture of bygone times--scenes
of brawling in the noisy High Street,
when the old battle of Town and Gown
was fought with cold steel, and blood flowed
freely on both sides--in the days when the
maltreated townsman appealing to the Proctor
could get no satisfaction but a 'thrust at him
with his poleaxe!'  Down the street which
lies below passed Queen Elizabeth--'Virgo
Pia Docta Felix'--after being royally
entertained with sumptuous pageants and the play
of 'Palamon and Arcyte' in the Christ Church
hall.  Over the Cherwell, in the troublous
times of the Civil Wars, rode the Royalist
horse to beat up the Parliamentary quarters
below the Chiltern hills and among the woods
of the Buckinghamshire border--enterprising
undergraduates perhaps taking an *exeat* to
accompany them.  Here it was that certain
scholars of Magdalen, having a quarrel with
Lord Norreys by reason of deer-stealing, 'went
up privately to the top of their tower, and
waiting till he should pass by towards Ricot'
(Rycote) 'sent down a shower of stones upon
him and his retinew, wounding some and
endangering others of their lives'--and worse
might have happened had not the 'retinew'
taken the precaution, foreseeing the assault,
to put boards or tables on their heads.  At
a later day Pope entered Oxford by this road,
and there is a pretty description of the scene
in one of his letters--it will no doubt appeal
to the nineteenth-century visitor who departs
through slums to the architecturally
unimpressive station of the Great Western.  'The
shades of the evening overtook me.  The
moon rose in the clearest sky I ever saw, by
whose solemn light I paced on slowly, without
company, or any interruption to the range of
my own thoughts.  About a mile before I
reached Oxford all the bells tolled in different
notes, the clocks of every college answered one
another, and sounded forth (some in a deeper,
some in a softer tone) that it was eleven at
night.  All this was no ill preparation to the
life I have led since among those old walls,
venerable galleries, stone porticos, studious
walks, and solitary scenes of the
University.'  Jerry-built rows of lodging-houses rather
militate against the romance of the Iffley Road as
we know it now.

.. _`THE DEER PARK, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD.`:

.. figure:: images/img-046.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *THE DEER PARK, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD.  By J. H. Lorimer.*

   *THE DEER PARK, MAGDALEN COLLEGE, OXFORD.  By J. H. Lorimer.*


But, after all, the majority of sightseers
are not given to historical reflections.  What
most people want is something that 'palpitates
with actuality;' they want to see the machine
working.  They are temporarily happy if they
can see a Proctor in his robes of office, and
rise to the enthusiasm of 'never having had
such a delightful day' if the Proctor happens
to 'proctorise' an undergraduate within the
ken of their vision.  'It was all so *delightful*
and mediaeval, and all that kind of thing, don't
you know?  Poor young man--simply for not
wearing one of those horrid caps and gowns!
*I* call it a shame.'  This is the reason why a
Degree Day is so wonderfully popular a
ceremony.  There is a sense of attractive mystery
about it all--the Vice-Chancellor throned in
the Theatre or Convocation House, discoursing
in unintelligible scraps of Latin like the
refrain of a song, and the Proctors doing their
quarter-deck walk--although the dignity of the
function be rather marred by the undergraduates
who jostle and giggle in the background
forgetting that they are assisting at a
ceremony which is, after all, one of the
University's reasons of existence.  It is the same
kind of curiosity which causes the lecturer to
become suddenly conscious that he is being
watched with intense interest--an interest to
which he is altogether unaccustomed--by 'only
a face at the window' of his lecture-room, to
his own confusion and the undisguised
amusement of his audience.

.. _`IN CONVOCATION: CONFERRING A DEGREE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-048.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *IN CONVOCATION: CONFERRING A DEGREE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*

   *IN CONVOCATION: CONFERRING A DEGREE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*


Such are sightseers: yet every man to his
taste.  When Samuel Pepys came over from
Abingdon to see the sights of the University
town, it is gratifying and rather surprising to
learn that what most impressed him was the
small price paid for creature comforts: 'Oxford
mighty fine place,' such is the diarist's
reflection, 'and *cheap entertainment*.'




IV--OF EXAMINATIONS
===================

   |   'Thinketh one made them in a fit of the blues.'
   |                                              *Q*


If there is one subject on which the
professedly non-reading undergraduate is
nearly always eloquent it is the aggravation
of his naturally hard lot by the examination
system; that is, not only 'The Schools'
themselves, but the ancillary organization of
lectures, 'collections,' and college tuition in
general; all which machinery, being intended
to save him from himself and enable him to
accomplish the ostensible purpose of his
residence at the University, he very properly
regards as an entirely unnecessary instrument
of torture, designed and perfected by the
gratuitous and malignant ingenuity of Dons,
whose sole object is the oppression of
undergraduates in general and himself in particular.
He is obliged to attend lectures, at least
occasionally.  His tutors compel him to attempt
to pass his University examination at a definite
date; and then--adding insult to
injury--actually reproach him or even send him
down for his ill success, just as if he had not
always demonstrated to them by repeated
statements and constant proofs of incapacity
that he had not the smallest intention of
getting through!  Small wonder, perhaps, that
on returning from a highly unsatisfactory
interview with the University examiners to a
yet more exasperating colloquy with the
authorities of his college, he should wish that
fate had not matched him with the 'cosmic
process' of the nineteenth century; and that
it had been his happier lot to come up to
Oxford in the days when examinations were
not, and his remote ancestors got their degrees
without any vain display of mere intellectual
proficiency, or went down without them if
they chose.

.. _`A LECTURE-ROOM IN MAGDALEN COLLEGE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-052.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *A LECTURE-ROOM IN MAGDALEN COLLEGE.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*

   *A LECTURE-ROOM IN MAGDALEN COLLEGE.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*


And yet, should the modern undergraduate
take the trouble (which of course he never
does) to acquaint himself with the statutes
and ordinances which governed his University
in the pre-examination period, he would find
that even then the rose was not wholly devoid
of thorns.  Even then the powers that be had
decreed that life should not be completely
beer, nor altogether skittles.  It is true that
the student was probably less molested by his
college; but the regulations of the University
dealt far more hardly with him than they
do at present.  Under the statutes of
Archbishop Laud, the University exercised those
functions of teaching and general supervision
which it has since in great part surrendered
to its component colleges; and in theory the
University was a hard task-mistress.

Attendance at professorial lectures was
theoretically obligatory, and 'since not only
reading and thought, but practice also, is of
the greatest avail towards proficiency in
learning,' it was required that the candidate for a
degree should 'dispute' in the Schools at stated
and frequent times during the whole course
of his academic career.  Beginning by
listening to the disputations of his seniors
(a custom which perhaps survives in the
modern fashion which sometimes provides
a 'gallery' at the ceremony of *viva voce*),
he was as time went on required himself to
maintain and publicly defend doctrines in a
manner which would be highly embarrassing
to his modern successor--'responding' at first
to the arguments of the stater of a theory,
and with riper wisdom being promoted to
the position of Opponent.'  This opposing
and responding was termed 'doing
generals.'  'Argufying' was the business of the University
in the seventeenth century, and had been so
for a long time.

On the memorable occasion of Queen
Elizabeth's visit to Oxford in the year 1566,
Her Majesty was entertained intermittently
with disputations on the moon's influence
on the tides, and the right of rebellion
against bad government.  Thus, Archbishop
Laud required of the seventeenth-century
undergraduate so many disputations before
he became a *sophista*, and so many again
before he could be admitted to the degree
of Bachelor; and if the system had worked
in practice as it was intended to do in
theory, young Oxford would not have had
an easy time of it.  In the days of Antony
Wood's undergraduate career exercises in the
'Schooles' were 'very good.'  'Philosophy
disputations in Lent time, frequent in the
Greek tongue; *coursing* very much, ending
alwaies in blowes,' which Wood considers
scandalous; but at least it shows the serious
spirit of the disputants.  But a University can
always be trusted to temper the biting wind
of oppressive regulations to its shorn
alumni; and there can be no doubt that
the comparative slackness and sleepiness
of the eighteenth century--a somnolence
which it is easy to exaggerate, but
impossible altogether to deny--must have
tended to wear the sharp corners off
the academic curriculum.  Indications that
this was so are not wanting.  After all,
there must have been many ways of avoiding
originality in a disputation.  A writer
in 'Terrae Filius' (1720) states the case as follows:--

.. vspace:: 2

'All students in the University who are above
one year's standing, and have not taken their
batchelor' (of arts) 'degree, are required by statute
to be present at this awful solemnity' (disputation
for a degree), 'which is designed for a public proof
of the progress he has made in the art of reasoning;
tho' in fact it is no more than a formal repetition of
a set of syllogisms upon some ridiculous question in
logick, which they get by rote, or, perhaps, only
read out of their caps, which lie before them with
their notes in them.  These commodious sets of
syllogisms are call'd strings, and descend from
undergraduate to undergraduate, in regular succession; so
that, when any candidate for a degree is to exercise
his talent in argumentation, he has nothing else to
do but to enquire amongst his friends for a string
upon such-and-such a question.'

.. vspace:: 2

So, even in the early part of the present
century, reverend persons proceeding to the
degree of D.D. have been known to avail
themselves of a thesis (or written harangue on
some point of theology) not compiled by their
unaided exertions, but kept among the archives
of their college and passed round as occasion
might require.  If mature theologians have
reconciled this with their consciences in the
nineteenth, what may not have been possible
to an undergraduate in the eighteenth century?
Also, the functionary who stood in the place
of the modern examiner was a very different
kind of person from his successor--that
incarnation of cold and impassive criticism;
collusion between 'opponent' and 'respondent'
must have been possible and frequent; and
so far had things gone that the candidate for
a degree was permitted to choose the 'Master'
who was to examine him, and it appears to
have been customary to invite your Master
to dinner on the night preceding the final
disputation.  Witness 'Terrae Filius 'once more:--

.. vspace:: 2

'Most candidates get leave .... to chuse their
own examiners, who never fail to be their old
cronies and toping companions....  It is also well
known to be the custom for the candidates either
to present their examiners with a piece of gold,
or to give them a handsome entertainment, and
make them drunk, which they commonly do the
night before examination, and some times keep them
till morning, and so adjourn, cheek by jowl, from
their drinking-room to the school, where they are to
be examined.'

.. vspace:: 2

The same author adds: 'This to me seems
the great business of *determination*: to pay
money and get drunk.'

Vicesimus Knox, who took his B.A. degree
in 1775, is at pains to represent the whole
process of so-called examination as an elaborate
farce.  'Every candidate,' he says, 'is obliged
to be examined in the whole circle of the
sciences by three masters of arts, of his own
choice.'  Naturally, the temptation is too much
for poor humanity.  'It is reckoned good
management to get acquainted with two or
three jolly young masters and supply them
well with port previously to the examination.'  *Viva
voce* once put on this convivial footing, it
is not surprising that 'the examiners and the
candidate often converse on the last drinking
bout, or on horses, or read the newspapers, or
a novel, or divert themselves as well as they
can till the clock strikes eleven, when all
parties descend, and the *testimonium* is signed
by the masters.'  Under such circumstances it
is obvious that the provisions of Archbishop
Laud might be shorn of half their terrors.
Even at an earlier period other methods of
evasion were not wanting.  As early as 1656,
orders were made 'abolishing' the custom of
candidates standing treat to examiners.  In
the statute which still prescribes the duties
of the *clericus universitatis*, there is a clause
threatening him with severe penalties--to the
extent of paying a fine of ten shillings--should
he so far misuse his especial charge, the
University clock, as to 'retard and presently
precipitate the course' of that venerable
time-piece, 'in such a manner that the hours
appointed for public exercises be unjustly
shortened, to the harm and prejudice of the
studious.'  Moreover, we read in Wood that
notice of examination was given by 'tickets
stuck up on certaine public corners, which
would be suddenly after taken downe' by the
candidate's friends.  To such straits and to
such unworthy shifts could disputants be
reduced by mere inability to find matter.

It has been said that attendance at professorial
lectures was theoretically obligatory; but
it is hardly necessary to point out that even
serious students have occasionally dispensed
with the duty of attending lectures; and it is
more than whispered there have been occasions
in recent centuries when it was not an audience
only that was wanting.  There are, of course,
instances of both extremes.  Rumour tells of
a certain professor of anatomy, who, lacking
a quorum, bade his servant 'bring out the
skeleton, in order that I may be able to address
you as "gentle*men*;"' but all professors have
not been so conscientious.  Gibbon goes so
far as to assert that 'in the University of
Oxford, the greater part of the public professors
have for these many years given up altogether
the pretence of teaching,' and the Reverend
James Hurdie does not much improve the
matter, when he prepares to refute the
historian's charge in his 'Vindication of Magdalen
College.'  So far as the College is concerned,
the reverend gentleman has something of a
case; but his defence of the University is not
altogether satisfying.  Some of the professors,
no doubt, do lecture in a statutable manner.
But 'the late noble but unfortunate Professor
of Civil Law began his office with reading
lectures, and only desisted for want of an
audience' (a plausible excuse, were it not that
some lecturers seem to have entertained
peculiar ideas as to the constitution of an
audience).  'Terrae Filius' has a story of a
Professor of Divinity who came to his
lecture-room, found to his surprise and displeasure,
a band of intending hearers, and dismissed
them straightway with the summary remark:
'Domini, vos non estis idonei auditores!'  'The
present Professor, newly appointed (the
author has heard it from the highest authority),
means to read.'  Moreover, 'the late
Professor of Botany at one time *did* read.'  In
fact, as the 'Oxford Spy' observes in 1818:--

   |   'Yet here the rays of Modern Science spread:
   |   Professors are appointed, lectures read.
   |   If none attend, or hear: not ours the blame,
   |   Theirs is the folly--and be theirs the shame.'

It is evident that professorial lectures were not
a wholly unbearable burden.

'It is recorded in the veracious chronicle
of Herodotus that Sandoces, a Persian judge,
had been crucified by Darius, on the charge of
taking a bribe to determine a cause wrongly;
but while he yet hung on the cross, Darius
found by calculation that the good deeds of
Sandoces towards the king's house were more
numerous than his evil deeds, and so, confessing
that he had acted with more haste than
wisdom, he ordered him to be taken down and
set at large.'

.. _`THE LIBRARY, MERTON COLLEGE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-062.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *THE LIBRARY, MERTON COLLEGE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*

   *THE LIBRARY, MERTON COLLEGE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*


So when the Universities are at last
confronted with that great Day of Reckoning
which is continually held over their heads
by external enemies, and which timorous friends
are always trying to stave off by grudging
concessions and half-hearted sympathy with
Movements; when we are brought to the bar
of that grand and final commission, which is
once for all to purge Oxford and Cambridge
of their last remnants of mediaevalism, and
bring them into line with the marching columns
of modern Democracy; when the judgment
is set and the books are opened, we may hope
that some extenuating circumstances may be
found to set against the long enumeration of
academic crimes.  There will be no denying
that Oxford has been the home of dead
languages and undying prejudice.  It will be
admitted as only too true that Natural Science
students were for many years compelled to learn
a little Greek, and that colleges have not been
prepared to sacrifice the greater part of their
immoral revenues to the furtherance of
University Extension; and we shall have to plead
guilty to the damning charge of having
returned two Tory members to several
successive Parliaments.  All this Oxford has done,
and more; there is no getting out of it.
Yet her counsel will be able to plead in
her favour that once at least she has been
found not retarding the rear, but actually
leading the van of nineteenth-century
progress; for it will hardly be denied that if the
Universities did not invent the Examination
System, at least they were among the first to
welcome and to adapt it; and that if it had
not been for the development of examinations,
qualifying and competitive, at Oxford and
Cambridge, the ranks of the Civil Service would
have continued for many years longer to be
recruited by the bad old method of nomination
(commonly called jobbery and nepotism by
the excluded), and society would, perhaps,
never have realised that a knowledge of
Chaucer is among the most desirable qualifications
for an officer in Her Majesty's Army.
Here, at least, the Universities have been
privileged to set an example.

The Oxford examination system is practically
contemporaneous with the century; the
first regular class list having been published
in 1807.  The change was long in coming,
and when it did come the face of the
University was not revolutionised; if the
alteration contained, as it undoubtedly did, the germs
of a revolution which was to extend far
beyond academic boundaries, it bore the aspect
of a most desirable but most moderate
reform.  Instead of obtaining a degree by the
obsolete process of perfunctory disputation,
ambitious men were invited to offer certain
books (classical works for the most part), and
in these to undergo the ordeal of a written
and oral examination; the oral part being at
that time probably as important as the other.
Sudden and violent changes are repugnant to
all Englishmen, and more especially to the
rulers of Universities, those homes of ancient
tradition; and just as early railways found it
difficult to escape from the form of the
stage-coach and the old nomenclature of the road,
so the new Final Honour School took over
(so to speak) the plant of a system which it
superseded.  *Viva voce* was still (and is to the
present day) important, because it was the
direct successor of oral disputation.  The
candidate for a degree had obtained that
distinction by a theoretical argument with three
'opponents' in the Schools; so now the
opponents were represented by a nearly
corresponding number of examiners, and the *viva
voce* part of the examination was for a long
time regarded as a contest of wit between the
candidate and the questioner.  Nor did the
race for honours affect the great majority of
the University as it does at present.  It was
intended for the talented few: it was not a
matter of course that Tom, Dick, and Harry
should go in for honours because their friends
wished it, or because their college tutor
wished to keep his college out of the evening
papers.  Candidates for honours were regarded
as rather exceptional persons, and a brilliant
performance in the Schools was regarded as
a tolerably sure augury of success in life: a
belief which was, perhaps, justified by facts
then, but which--like most beliefs, dying hard--has
unfortunately survived into a state of
society where it is impossible to provide the
assurance of a successful career for all and
each of the eighty or hundred 'first-class' men
whom the University annually presents to an
unwelcoming world.

.. _`READING THE NEWDIGATE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-066.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *READING THE NEWDIGATE.  Drawn by T, H. Crawford.*

   *READING THE NEWDIGATE.  Drawn by T, H. Crawford.*


However small its beginnings it was
inevitable that the recognition of intellect should
exercise the greatest influence--though not
immediately and obviously--on the future of
the University.  *La carrière* once *ouverte aux
talents*--the fact being established and
recognised that one man was intellectually not
only as good as another, but a deal better--colleges
could not help following the example
set them; the first stirrings of 'inter-collegiate
competition' began to be felt, and after forty
years or so (for colleges generally proceed in
these and similar matters with commendable
caution, and it was only the earlier part of
the nineteenth century after all) began the
gradual abolition of 'close' scholarships and
fellowships--those admirable endowments
whereby the native of some specified county
or town was provided with a competence for
life, solely in virtue of the happy accident of
birth.  To disregard talent openly placarded
and certificated was no longer possible.  The
most steady-going and venerable institutions
began to be reanimated by the infusion of
new blood, and to be pervaded by the newest
and most 'dangerous' ideas.

Nor were the outside public slow to avail
themselves after their manner of the changed
state of things.  The possessor of a University
degree has at all times been regarded by less
fortunate persons with a kind of superstitious
awe, as one who has lived in mysterious
precincts and practised curious (if not always
useful) arts, and at first the title of
'Honourman,' implying that the holder belonged to a
privileged few--*élite* of the *élites*--whom a
University, itself learned, had delighted to
honour for their learning, could inspire nothing
less than reverence.  Also the distinction was a
very convenient one.  The public is naturally
only too glad to have any ready and
satisfactory testimonial which may help as a method
of selection among the host of applicants
for its various employments; and here was a
diploma signed by competent authorities and
bearing no suspicion of fear or favour.
Presently the public began to follow the lead of
Oxford and Cambridge, and examine for itself,
but that is another story: schoolmasters more
especially have always kept a keen eye on
the class list.  So an intellectual distinction
comes in time to have a commercial price,
and this no doubt has had something (though,
we will hope, not everything) to do with the
increase in the number of 'Schools' and the
growing facilities for obtaining so-called
honours.  But it is needless to observe that the
multiplication of the article tends to the
depreciation of its value.  The First-class man,
who was a potential Cabinet Minister or an
embryo Archbishop at the beginning of the
century, is now capable of descending to all
kinds of employments.  He does not indeed--being
perhaps conscious of incapacity--serve as
a waiter in a hotel, after the fashion of
American students in the vacation, but he has been
known to accept gratefully a post in a private
school where his tenure of office depends
largely on the form he shows in bowling to
the second eleven.

Here in Oxford, though we still respect a
'First,' and though perhaps the greater part
of our available educational capacity is devoted
to the conversion of passmen into honourmen,
there are signs that examinations are no
longer quite regarded as the highest good
and the chief object of existence.  It is an
age of specialism, and yet it is hard to mould
the whole University system to suit the
particular studies of every specialist.  Multiply
Final Schools as you will, 'the genuine student'
with one engrossing interest will multiply far
more quickly; and just as the athlete and
non-reading man complains that the schools
interrupt his amusements, the man who specialises
on the pips of an orange, or who regards
nothing in history worth reading except a period
of two years and six months in the later
Byzantine empire, will pathetically lament that
examinations are interrupting his real work.
Are men made for the Schools, or the Schools
for men?  It is a continual problem; perhaps
examinations are only a *pis aller*, and we must
be content to wait till science instructs us how
to gauge mental faculty by experiment without
subjecting the philosopher to the ordeal of Latin
Prose, and the 'pure scholar' to the test of a
possibly useless acquaintance with the true
inwardness of Hegelianism.  After all it is the
greatest happiness of the greatest number that
has to be considered, and the majority as yet
are not special students.  Moreover, there are
various kinds of specialists.  If 'general
knowledge' (as has been said) is too often
synonymous with 'particular ignorance,' it is equally
true that specialism in one branch is
sometimes not wholly unconnected with failure in
another.

.. _`A DANCE AT ST. JOHN'S.`:

.. figure:: images/img-072.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *A DANCE AT ST. JOHN'S.  Drawn by T. Hamilton Crawford, R.W.S.*

   *A DANCE AT ST. JOHN'S.  Drawn by T. Hamilton Crawford, R.W.S.*


It was the severance of another link with
the past when the scene of examinations was
transferred from the 'Old Schools'--the
purlieus of the Sheldonian and the Bodleian--to
a new and perhaps unnecessarily palatial
building in the High Street, which is as little in
keeping with the dark, crumbling walls of its
neighbour, University College, as the motley
throng of examinees (*pueri innuptaeque puellae*)
is out of harmony with the traditions of an
age which did not recognise the necessity of
female education.  We have changed all that,
and possibly the change is for the better, for
while the atmosphere which pervaded the
ancient dens now appropriated to the use of
the great library was certainly academic, and
was sometimes cool and pleasant in summer,
the conditions of the game became almost
intolerable in winter.  Unless he would die under
the process of examinations like the Chinese
of story, the candidate must provide himself
with greatcoats and rugs enough (it was said)
to hide a 'crib,' or even a Liddell and Scott,
for the proximity of the Bodleian forbade any
lighting or warming apparatus.  But in the new
examination schools comfort and luxury reign;
rare marbles adorn even the least conspicuous
corners, and the only survivals of antiquity are
the ancient tables, which are popularly supposed
to be contemporaneous with the examination
system, and are bescrawled and bescratched
with every possible variety of inscription and
hieroglyphic--from adaptations of verses in
the Psalms to a list of possible Derby
winners--from a caricature of the 'invigilating'
examiner to a sentimental but unflattering
reminiscence of one's partner at last night's
dance.  Here they sit, a remarkable medley,
all sorts, conditions, and even ages of men,
herded together as they probably never will
be again in after-life: undeserving talent cheek
by jowl with meritorious dulness; callow
youth fresh from the rod of the schoolmaster,
and mature age with a family waiting anxiously
outside; and a minority of the fairer sex,
whose presence is rather embarrassing to
examiners who do not see their way to
dealing with possible hysteria.  And in the
evening they will return--if it is
Commemoration week; the venerable tables will be
cleared away, and the 'Scholae Magnae Borealis
et Australis' will be used for the more
desirable purpose of dancing.  Is it merely soft
nothings that the Christ Church undergraduate
is whispering to that young lady from
Somerville Hall, as they 'sit out' the lancers
in the romantic light of several hundred
Chinese lanterns?  Not at all; they are
comparing notes about their *viva voce* in history.




V--UNIVERSITY JOURNALISM
========================

   |   'I only wish my critics had to write
   |     A High-class Paper!'
   |                        *Anon.*


The business of those who teach in the
Universities is to criticise mistakes,
and criticism of style has two results for the
master and the scholar.  It may produce that
straining after correctness in small matters
which the cold world calls pedantry; and in
the case of those who are not content only to
observe, but are afflicted with a desire to
produce, criticism of style takes the form of
parody or imitation; for a good parody or
a good imitation of an author's manner is an
object-lesson in criticism.  Hence it is that
that same intolerance of error which makes
members of a University slow in the
production of really great works stimulates the
genesis of ephemeral and mostly imitative
literature.  The more Oxford concerns herself
with literary style, the more she is likely in
her less serious moods to ape the manner of
contemporary literature.  It all comes, in the
first instance, of being taught to copy Sophocles
and travesty Virgil.  Ephemeral literature,
then, at the Universities has always been
essentially imitative.  In the last century, when
it was the fashion to be classical--and when
as in the earlier poems of Mr. Barry Lyndon,
'Sol bedecked the verdant mead, or pallid
Luna shed her ray'--Oxonian minor poets
imitated the London wits and sang the charms
of the local belles under the sobriquets of
Chloe and Delia, and academic essayists copied
the manner of the 'Spectator,' and hit off
the weaknesses of their friends, Androtion and
Clearchus; and now that the world has come
to be ruled by newspapers, it is only natural
that the style and the methods of the daily
and weekly press should in some degree affect
the lighter literature of Universities, and that
not only undergraduates, who are naturally
imitative, but even dons, who might be
supposed to know better, should find themselves
contributing to and redacting publications
which are conducted more or less on the lines
of the 'new journalism.'

.. _`THE RADCLIFFE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-076.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *THE RADCLIFFE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*

   *THE RADCLIFFE.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*


Oxford has been slow to develop in this
particular direction, and the reasons are not far
to seek.  The conditions just now are
exceptionally favourable--that is, a *cacoëthes
scribendi* has coincided with abundance of
matter to write about, but the organs of the
great external world naturally provide a model
for the writer.  But it is only recently that
these causes have been all together present
and operative, and the absence of one or
more of them has at different times been as
effectual as the absence of all.  In the early
part of the present century there can have been
no lack of matter: University reform was at
least in the air, athletics were developing, the
examination system was already in full swing.
But for some reason the tendency of the
University was not in the direction of the
production of ephemeral or at least frivolous
literature.  The pompous Toryism of
University authorities seventy years ago did not
encourage any intellectual activity unconnected
with the regular curriculum of the student,
and when intellectual activity began to develop,
it was rather on the lines of theological
discussion--the subjects were hardly fitted for
the columns of a newspaper.  At an earlier
date the Vice-Chancellor was interviewed by
the delegate of an aspiring clique of
undergraduates, who wished to form a literary club
and to obtain the sanction of authority for its
formation.  He refused to grant the society any
formal recognition, on the ground that while it
was true that the statutes did not absolutely
forbid such things, they certainly did not
specifically mention them; and the members of
the club--when it was eventually founded
independent of the Vice-Chancellarial auspices--were
known among their friends as the 'Lunatics.'  Such
was the somewhat obscurantist temper of
the University about the year 1820; and we can
imagine that the Vice-Chancellor, who could find
nothing in the statutes encouraging a debating
society, would not have looked with enthusiastic
approbation on a newspaper designed to discuss
University matters without respect for authority.
Even if he had, it would have been hard to
appeal to all sections of the community; though
there was certainly more general activity in the
University than formerly, the *gaudia* and
*discursus* of undergraduates were matters of
comparatively small importance to their friends, and
of none at all to their pastors and masters.

In the earlier part of the eighteenth century
the conditions were exactly reversed.  To judge
from the specimens that have survived to the
present day (and how much of our own lighter
literature will be in evidence 170 years hence?)
there must have been plenty of 'available
talent.'  It was an age of essayists.  Addison
and Steele set the fashion for the metropolis:
and as has been said before, Oxford satirists
followed at some distance in the wake of these
giants.  The form of 'Terrae Filius' is that
of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator,' and the 'Oxford
Magazine' of that day is largely composed of
essays on men, women, and manners; many
are still quite readable, and most have been
recognised as remarkably smart in their day.
Nor is it only in professed and formal satire
that the talent of the time displays itself.
Thomas Hearne of the Bodleian was careful
to keep a voluminous note-book, chronicling
not only the 'plums' extracted by his daily
researches from the dark recesses of the library,
but also various anecdotes, scandalous or
respectable, of his contemporaries; and one is
tempted to regret that so admirable a talent for
bepraising his friends and libelling his enemies
should be comparatively *perdu* among extracts
from 'Schoppius de Arte Critica,' copies of
church brasses, and such-like antiquarian lumber--the
whole forming a 'Collection' only recently
published for the world's edification by the
Oxford Historical Society.  His 'appreciations'
would have made the fortune of any paper
relying for its main interest on personalities,
after the fashion which we are learning from
the Americans.  'Descriptions of his friends
and enemies, such as 'An extravagant, haughty,
loose man,' 'a Dull, Stupid, whiggish
Companion,' are frequent and free; and anecdotes
of obscure college scandal abound.  We read
how the 'Snivelling, conceited, and ignorant,
as well as Fanatical Vice-Principal of
St. Edmund Hall .... *sconc'd* two gentlemen,
which is a Plain Indication of his Furious
Temper;' and how 'Mr. ---- of *Christ
Church* last *Easter-day*, under pretence of
being ill, desired one of the other chaplains
to read Prayers for him: which accordingly
was done.  Yet such was the impudence of
the man that he appeared in the Hall at dinner!'

.. _`IN THE BODLEIAN.`:

.. figure:: images/img-080.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *IN THE BODLEIAN.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*

   *IN THE BODLEIAN.  Drawn by Ernest Stamp.*


As it was, however, those very collections
which exhibit Hearne's peculiar genius show
us at the same time how impossible, even
granting the supposition to be not altogether
anachronistic, a regular University 'News-letter'
would have been.  We talk now in a vague
and, perhaps, rather unintelligible fashion of
'University politics,' and in some way contrive
to identify Gladstonianism with a susceptibility
to the claims of a school of English literature,
or whatever is the latest phrase of progress--mixing
up internal legislation with the external
politics of the great world.  But in Hearne's
time there were no University politics to
discuss.  'Their toasts,' says Gibbon of the
Fellows of Magdalen College, 'were not
expressive of the most lively loyalty to the
House of Hanover,' and Hearne's interest in
politics has nothing to do with the Hebdomadal
Council.  When he speaks of 'our white-liver'd
Professor, Dr. ----,' or describes the
highest official in the University as 'old
Smooth-boots, the Vice-Chancellor,' it is generally for
the very sufficient reason that the person in
question is what Dr. Johnson called a 'vile
Whig.'  But Tory politics and common-room
scandal and jobbery apart, the University
would appear to have slept the sleep of the
unjust.  'Terrae Filius' grumbles at the corrupt
method of 'examination,' and 'The Student' is
lively and satirical on the peccadilloes and
escapades of various members of society.  But
your prose essayist is apt to be intermittent,
and the publication that relies mainly on him
leans on a breaking reed; so that we can
hardly be surprised that the last-named
periodical should eke out its pages with
imitations of Tibullus, to the first of which
the Editor appends the encouraging note, 'If
this is approved by the publick, the Author
will occasionally oblige us with more *Elegies*
in the same style and manner.'

Now that every one is anxious to see his
own name and his friend's name in print, and
that the general public takes, or pretends to
take, a keen interest in the details of every
cricket-match and boat-race, a paper chronicling
University matters cannot complain of the
smallness of its *clientèle*.  Every one wants
news.  The undergraduate who has made a
speech at the Union, or a century for his
college second eleven, wants a printed
certificate of his glorious achievements.  Dons, and
undergraduates too, for that matter, are
anxious to read about the last hint of a
possible Commission or the newest thing in
University Extension.  Men who have gone
down but a short time ago are still interested
in the doings of the (of course degenerate)
remnant who are left; and even the
non-academic Oxford residents, a large and
increasing class, are on the watch for some glimpse
of University doings, and some distant echo
of common-room gossip.  Modern journalism
appeals more or less to all these classes; it
cannot complain of the want of an audience,
nor, on the whole, of a want of news to satisfy
it, and certainly an Oxford organ cannot lack
models for imitation, or awful examples to
avoid.  It is, in fact, the very multiplicity of
contemporary periodicals that is the source of
difficulty.  A paper conducted in the provinces
by amateurs--that is, by persons who have also
other things to do--is always on its probation.
The fierce light of the opinion of a limited
public is continually beating on it.  Its
contributors should do everything a little better
than the hirelings of the merely professional
organs of the unlearned metropolis; its leaders
must be more judicious than those of the
'Times,' its occasional notes a little more spicy
than Mr. Labouchere's, and its reviews a little
more learned than those of the 'Journal of
Philology.'  Should it fall short of perfection
in any of these branches, it 'has no reason
for existence,' and is in fact described as
'probably moribund.'  Yet another terror is added
to the life of an Oxford editor: he *must* be
at least often 'funny;' he must endeavour in
some sort to carry out the great traditions of
the 'Oxford Spectator' and the 'Shotover
Papers;' and as the English public is generally
best amused by personalities, he must be
careful to observe the almost invisible line which
separates the justifiable skit from the offensive
attack.  Now, the undergraduate contributor
to the press is seldom successful as a humourist.
He is occasionally violent and he is often--more
especially after the festive season of
Christmas--addicted to sentimental verse; but
for mere frivolity and 'lightness of touch' it
is safer to apply to his tutor.

It is a rather remarkable fact that almost
all University papers--certainly all that have
succeeded under the trying conditions of the
game--have been managed and for the most
part written, not by the exuberant vitality of
undergraduate youth, but by the less interesting
prudence of graduate maturity.  It is
remarkable, but not surprising.  Undergraduate talent
is occasionally brilliant, but is naturally
transient.  Generations succeed each other with such
rapidity that the most capable editorial staff is
vanishing into thin air just at the moment when
a journal has reached the highest pitch of
popularity.  Moreover, amateur talent is always hard
to deal with, as organizers of private theatricals
know to their cost; and there is no member of
society more capable of disappointing his friends
at a critical moment than the amateur contributor
to the press.  Should the spirit move him,
he will send four columns when the editor wants
one; but if he is not in the vein, or happens
to have something else to do, there is no
promise so sacred and no threat so terrible as to
persuade him to put pen to paper.  If these
are statements of general application, they are
doubly true of undergraduates, who are always
distracted by a too great diversity of
occupations: Jones, whose power of intermittent satire
has made him the terror of his Dons, has
unaccountably taken to reading for the Schools;
the poet, Smith, has gone into training for the
Torpids; and Brown, whose '*Voces Populi* in a
Ladies' College' were to have been something
quite too excruciatingly funny, has fallen in
love in the vacation and will write nothing but
bad poetry.  Such are the trials of the editor
who drives an undergraduate team; and hence
it comes about that the steady-going periodicals
for which the public can pay a yearly
subscription in advance, with the prospect of
seeing at any rate half the value of its money,
are principally controlled by graduates.  No
doubt they sometimes preserve a certain
appearance of youthful vigour by worshipping
undergraduate talent, and using the word
'Donnish' as often and as contemptuously as
possible.

.. _`SAILING ON THE UPPER RIVER.`:

.. figure:: images/img-086.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *SAILING ON THE UPPER RIVER.  Drawn by L. Speed.*

   *SAILING ON THE UPPER RIVER.  Drawn by L. Speed.*


Nevertheless, there appear from time to
time various ephemeral and meteoric
publications, edited by junior members of the
University.  They waste the editor's valuable
time, no doubt; and yet he is learning a lesson
which may, perhaps, be useful to him in after-life;
for it is said that until he is undeceived
by hard experience, every man is born with
the conviction that he can do three things--drive
a dog-cart, sail a boat, and edit a paper.




VI--THE UNIVERSITY AS SEEN FROM OUTSIDE.
========================================

   |   'A man must serve his time to every trade
   |   Save censure--critics all are ready made.'
   |                                        *Byron.*


It has been said that the function of a
University is to criticise; but the
proposition is at least equally true that Oxford
and Cambridge are continually conjugating
the verb in the passive.  We--and more
especially we who live in Oxford, for the
sister University apparently is either more
virtuous or more skilful in concealing her
peccadilloes from the public eye--enjoy the
priceless advantage of possessing innumerable
friends whose good nature is equalled by
their frankness; and if we do not learn
wisdom, that is not because the opportunity
is not offered to us.  It is true that our
great governing body, the Hebdomadal Council,
has hitherto preserved its independence by a
prudent concealment of its deliberations: no
reporter has ever as yet penetrated into
that august assemblage; but whatever emerges
to the light of day is seized upon with avidity.
Debates in Convocation or even in Congregation
(the latter body including only the
resident Masters of Arts), although the subject
may have been somewhat remote from the
interests of the general public, and the
number of the voters perhaps considerably
increased by the frivolous reason that it was
a wet afternoon, when there was nothing
else to do than to govern the University--debates
on every conceivable subject blush
to find themselves reported the next morning
almost in the greatest of daily papers; and
perhaps the result of a division on the
addition of one more Oriental language to
Responsions, or one more crocket to a new
pinnacle of St. Mary's Church, is even
honoured by a leading article.  This is highly
gratifying to residents in the precincts of the
University, but even to them it is now and
then not altogether comprehensible.  Nor is
it only questions concerning the University as
a whole which appeal to the external public;
even college business and college scandal
sometimes assume an unnatural importance.  Years
ago one of the tutors of a certain college was
subjected to the venerable and now almost
obsolete process of 'screwing up,' and some
young gentlemen were rusticated for complicity
in the offence.  Even in academic circles the
crime and its punishment were not supposed
to be likely to interfere with the customary
revolution of the solar system; but the editor
of a London daily paper--and one, too, which
was supposed to be more especially in touch
with that great heart of the people which
is well known to hold Universities in
contempt--considered the incident so important
as to publish a leading article with the
remarkable exordium, 'Every one knew
that Mr. ----, of ---- College, would be
screwed up some day!'  Most of the *abonnés*
of this journal must, it is to be feared, have
blushed for their discreditable ignorance of
Mr. ----'s existence, not to mention that
leaden-footed retribution which was dogging
him to a merited doom.

.. _`PORCH OF ST. MARY'S.`:

.. figure:: images/img-090.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *PORCH OF ST. MARY'S.  Drawn by J. Pennell.*

   *PORCH OF ST. MARY'S.  Drawn by J. Pennell.*


It is hardly necessary to say that in
nine cases out of ten comment on the
proceedings of a learned University takes the
form of censure: nor are censors far to
seek.  There are always plenty of young
men more or less connected with the Press
who have wrongs to avenge; who are only
too glad to have an opportunity of 'scoring
off' the college authority which did its
best--perhaps unsuccessfully, but still with a
manifest intention--to embitter their
academic existence; or of branding once for
all as reactionary and obscurantist the
hide-bound regulations of a University which
did not accord them the highest honours.
In these cases accuracy of facts and statistics
is seldom a matter of much importance.
Generally speaking, you can say what you
like about a college, or the University,
without much fear of contradiction--provided
that you abstain from mere personalities.
For one thing, the cap is always
fitted on some one else's head.  It is not
the business of St. Botolph's to concern itself
with an attack which is obviously meant for
St. Boniface: it is darkly whispered in the
St. Boniface common-room that after all no
one knows what actually *does* go on in
St. Botolph's: and obviously neither of these
venerable foundations can have anything to
do with answering impeachments of the
University and its financial system.
Moreover, even if the Dons should rouse
themselves from their usual torpor and attempt
a defence, it is not very likely that the
public will listen to them: any statement
proceeding from an academic source being
always regarded with the gravest suspicion.
That is why 'any stick is good enough
to beat the Universities,' and there are
always plenty of sticks who are quite ready
to perform the necessary castigation.

Moreover, these writers generally deal
with a subject which is always interesting,
because it is one on which every one has an
opinion, and an opinion which is entitled to
respect--the education of youth.  Any one
can pick holes in the University system of
teaching and examination--'can strike a finger
on the place, and say, "Thou ailest here and
here,"'--or construct schemes of reform: more
especially young men who have recently quitted
their Alma Mater, and are therefore qualified
to assert (as they do, and at times not
without a certain plausibility) that she has failed
to teach them anything.

That the British public, with so much to
think about, should find time to be diverted
by abuse of its seats of learning, is at first
a little surprising; but there is no doubt
that such satire has an agreeable piquancy, and
for tolerably obvious reasons.  English humour
is generally of the personal kind, and needs a
butt; a capacity in which all persons
connected with education have from time
immemorial been qualified to perform, *ex officio*
(education being generally considered as an
imparting of unnecessary and even harmful
knowledge, and obviously dissociated from the
pursuit of financial prosperity, both as regards
the teachers and the taught): Shakespeare set
the fashion, and Dickens and Thackeray have
settled the hash of schoolmasters and college
tutors for the next fifty years, at any rate.
Schoolmasters, indeed, are becoming so
important and prosperous a part of the community
that they will probably be the first to
reinstate themselves in the respect of the public;
but Dons have more difficulties to contend
against.  They have seldom any prospect of
opulence.  Then, again, they suffer from the
quasi-monastic character of colleges; they have
inherited some of the railing accusations which
used to be brought against monasteries.  The
voice of scandal--especially feminine scandal--is
not likely to be long silent about celibate
societies, and no Rudyard Kipling has yet
arisen to plead on behalf of Fellows that they

   |           'aren't no blackguards too,
   |   But single men in barracks, most remarkable like you.'

Altogether the legend of 'monks,' 'port wine
and prejudice,' 'dull and deep potations,' and
all the rest of it, still damages Dons in the
eyes of the general public.  'That's ----
College,' says the local guide to his sightseers,
'and there they sits, on their Turkey carpets,
a-drinking of their Madeira, and Burgundy,
and Tokay.'  Such is, apparently, the
impression still entertained by Society.  And no
doubt successive generations of Fellows who
hunted four days a week, or, being in Orders,
'thanked Heaven that no one ever took *them*
for parsons,' did to a certain extent
perpetuate the traditions of 'Bolton Abbey in the
olden time.'  Well, their day is over now.
If the Fellow *fin de siècle* should ever
venture to indulge in the sports of the field,
he must pretend that he has met the hounds
by accident; and even then he risks his reputation.

.. _`IN EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL.`:

.. figure:: images/img-094.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *IN EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*

   *IN EXETER COLLEGE CHAPEL.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*


It is always pleasant, too, to be wiser than
one's erstwhile pastors and masters.  The
pupil goes out into the great world; the
teacher remains behind, and continues
apparently to go on in his old and crusted errors.
Outwardly the Universities do not change
much, and it is easy to assume that the
habits and ideas of their denizens do not
change either.  Thus it is that the young
men of the 'National Observer,' coming back
from a Saturday-to-Monday visit to a
university which they never respected and are
now entitled to despise, are moved to declare
to the world the complete inutility of what
they call the Futile Don.  'He is dead,'
they say, 'quite dead;' and if he is, might
not the poor relic of mortality be allowed in
mere charity to lie peacefully entombed in his
collegiate cloisters?  Yet, after all, it is only
among the great Anglo-Saxon race that the
profession of teaching is without honour;
and even among us it may be allowed that
it is a mode of earning a pittance as decent
and comparatively innocuous as another.  We
cannot, all of us, taste the fierce joys of
writing for the daily or weekly press, and
the barrister's 'crowded hours of glorious
life' in the law courts would be more
overcrowded than ever were not a few *fainéants*
suffered to moulder in the retirement of a
university.  Seriously, it was all very well for
the young lions of the Press to denounce the
torpor of Dons in the bad old days when
colleges were close corporations--when
Fellows inherited their bloated revenues
without competition, and simply because they
happened to be born in a particular corner
of some rural district.  But now that nearly
every First-class man has the chance of election
and would be a Fellow if he could, one is
tempted to recall the ancient fable of the sour
grapes.  Or at least the *esprits forts* whom
the University has reluctantly driven out
into the great world might be grateful to
her for saving them in spite of themselves
from an existence of futile incapacity.

Probably as long as colleges exist in something
like their present form--until the People
takes a short way with them, abolishes
common rooms and the Long Vacation, and pays
college tutors by a system of 'results fees'--these
things will continue to be said.  Deans
and Senior Tutors will never escape the
stigma of torpor or incapacity.  That quite
respectable rhymester, Mr. Robert Montgomery
(who, had he not been unlucky enough to
cross the path of Lord Macaulay, might
have lived and died and been forgotten as
the author of metrical works not worse than
many that have escaped the lash), has left
to the world a long poem--of which the
sentiments are always, and the rhymes usually,
correct--entitled 'Oxford.'  He has taken all
Oxford life for his subject, Dons included;
and this is how he describes the fate of
College Tutors:--

   |   'The dunce, the drone, the freshman or the fool,
   |   'Tis theirs to counsel, teach, o'erawe, and rule!
   |   Their only meed--some execrating word
   |   To blight the hour when first their voice was heard.'

To a certain extent this is true in all ages.
But there are worse things than mere sloth:
this is not the measure of the crimes
charged against college authorities.  They--even
such contemptible beings as they--are
said to have the audacity to neglect
untitled merit, and to truckle to the
aristocracy.  Every one knows Thackeray's terrible
indictment of University snobs: Crump, the
pompous dignitary (who, to do him justice,
seriously thinks himself greater than the Czar
of All the Russias), and Hugby, the tutor
grovelling before the lordling who has played
him a practical joke.  Every one remembers
how even the late Laureate gibbeted his
Dons--how

   |                    'One
   |   Discussed his tutor, rough to common men.
   |   But honeying at the whisper of a lord:
   |   And one the Master, as a rogue in grain,
   |   Veneer'd with sanctimonious theory.'


No doubt Universities are not immaculate.
There have been Tartuffes and tuft-hunters
there, as in the great world.  No doubt,
too, it was very wrong to allow noblemen
to wear badges of their rank, and take their
degrees without examination (although the
crime was a lesser one in the days before
class-lists were, when even the untitled
commoner became a Bachelor by dark and
disreputable methods); but these things are
not done any more.  At this day there are
probably few places where a title is less
regarded than at Oxford or Cambridge.  It
is true that rumour asserts the existence of
certain circles where, *ceteris paribus*, the
virtuous proprietor of wealth and a handle to
his name is welcomed with more effusion
than the equally respectable, but less fortunate,
holder of an eleemosynary exhibition.  But,
after all, even external Society, which regards
tuft-hunting with just displeasure, does--it is
said--continue to maintain these invidious
distinctions when it is sending out invitations
to dinner.  The fact is that there are a
great many peccadilloes in London which
become crimes at the University.

Satire, however, does not confine itself to
Dons: undergraduates come in for a share
of it too, though in a different way.  When
the novelist condescends to depict the Fellow
of a college, it is usually as a person more
or less feeble, futile, and generally *manqué*.
The Don can never be a hero, but neither
is he qualified to play the part of villain;
his virtues and his vices are all alike
inadequate.  If he is bad, his badness is rarely
more than contemptible; if he is good, it is
in a negative and passionless way, and the
great rewards of life are, as a rule,
considered as being out of his reach.  But with
the undergraduate the case is different.  He--as
we have said--is always in extremes:
literature gives him the premier *rôle* either
as hero or villain; but it is as the villain
that he is the most interesting and picturesque.
Satire and fiction generally describe
him as an adept in vicious habits.  So
sings Mr. Robert Montgomery, with admirable
propriety:--

   |   'In Oxford see the Reprobate appear!
   |   Big with the promise of a mad career:
   |   With cash and consequence to lead the way,
   |   A fool by night and more than fop by day!'

Over and over again we have the old picture
of the Rake's Progress which the world has
learnt to know so well: the youth absents
himself from his lectures, perhaps even goes
to Woodstock (horrid thought!)--'Woodstock
rattles with eternal wheels' is the
elegant phrase of Mr. Montgomery--and, in
short, plays the fool generally:--

   |   'Till night advance, whose reign divine
   |   Is chastely dedicate to cards and wine.'

.. _`PARSONS' PLEASURE.`:

.. figure:: images/img-102.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *PARSON'S PLEASURE.  Drawn by L. Speed.*

   *PARSON'S PLEASURE.  Drawn by L. Speed.*


The specimen student of the nineteenth
century will probably survive in history
as represented in these remarkable colours,
and the virtuous youth of a hundred years
hence will shudder to think of a generation
so completely given over to drunkenness,
debauchery, and neglect of the Higher Life
generally.  There is a *naïveté* and directness
about undergraduate error which is the easy
prey of any satirist; and curiously enough
the public, and even that large class which
sends its sons to the Universities, apparently
likes to pretend a belief that youth is really
brought up in an atmosphere of open and
unchecked deviation from the paths of
discipline and morality.  If Paterfamilias seriously
believed that the academic types presented to
him in literature were genuine and frequent
phenomena, he would probably send his
offspring in for the London Matriculation.  But
he knows pretty well that the University
is really not rotten to the core, and that
colleges are not always ruled by incapables,
nor college opinion mainly formed by rakes
and spendthrifts; and at the same time it
gives the British Public a certain pleasure to
imagine that it too has heard the chimes at
midnight, although it now goes to bed at
half-past ten--that it has been a devil of
a fellow in its youth.  This fancy is always
piquant, and raises a man in his own
estimation and that of his friends.

.. _`Fencing.`:

.. figure:: images/img-103.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: Fencing

   Fencing


These little inconsistences are of a piece
with the whole attitude of the unacademic
world towards the Universities.  Men come
down from London to rest, perhaps, for a
day or two from the labours of the Session.
They are inspired with a transient enthusiasm
for antiquity.  They praise academic calm:
they affect to wish that they, too, were
privileged to live that life of learned leisure
which is commonly supposed to be the lot of
all Fellows and Tutors.  Then they go away,
and vote for a new University Commission.




VII--DIARY OF A DON
===================

   |   'Collegiate life next opens on thy way,
   |   Begins at morn and mingles with the day.'
   |                                      *R. Montgomery.*


Half-past seven A.M.: enter my
scout, noisily, as one who is accustomed
to wake undergraduates.  He throws
my bath violently on the floor and fills it
with ice-cold water.  'What kind of a
morning is it?'  No better than usual: rain,
east wind, occasional snow.  *Must* get up
nevertheless: haven't superintended a roll-call
for three days, and the thing will become a
scandal.  Never mind: one more snooze....
There are the bells (Oh, those bells!) ringing
for a quarter to eight.  Ugh!

Dress in the dark, imperfectly: no time to
shave.  Cap and gown apparently lost.  Where
the ----  Oh, here they are, under the table.
Must try to develop habits of neatness.
Somebody else's cap: too big.

Roll-call in full swing in Hall: that is,
the college porter is there, ticking off
undergraduates' names as they come in.  Hall very
cold and untidy: college cat scavenging
remnants of last night's dinner.  Portrait of
the Founder looking as if he never expected
the college to come to this kind of thing.
Men appear in various stages of dishabille.
Must make an example of some one: 'Really
Mr. Tinkler, I must ask you to put on something
besides an ulster.'  Tinkler explains that
he is fully dressed, opening his ulster and
disclosing an elaborate toilet: unfortunate--have
to apologise.  During the incident several men
without caps and gowns succeed in making
their escape.

Back in my rooms: finish dressing.  Fire
out, no hot water.  This is what they call
the luxurious existence of a College Fellow.
Post arrives: chiefly bills and circulars: several
notes from undergraduates.  'Dear Sir,--May
I go to London for the day in order to keep
an important engagement.'  Dentist, I suppose.
'Dear Mr. ----,--I am sorry that I was
absent from your valuable lecture yesterday, as
I was not aware you would do so.'  'Dear
Sir,--I shall be much obliged if I may have
leave off my lecture this morning, as I wish to
go out hunting.'  Candid, at any rate.  'Mr. ----
presents his compliments to Mr. ---- and
regrets that he is compelled to be absent from
his Latin Prose lecture, because I cannot
come.'  Simple and convincing.  Whip from the
Secretary of the Non-Placet Society: urgent request
to attend in Convocation and oppose nefarious
attempt to insert 'and' in the wording of
Stat. Tit. Cap. LXX. 18.  Never heard of the
statute before.  Breakfast.

College cook apparently thinks that a
hitherto unimpaired appetite can be satisfied
by what seems to be a cold chaffinch on toast.
'Take it away, please, and get me an egg.'  Egg
arrives: not so old as chaffinch, but
nearly: didn't say I wanted a chicken.  Scout
apologises: must have brought me an undergraduate's
egg by mistake.  Never mind; plain
living and high thinking.  Two college
servants come to report men absent last night
from their rooms.  Must have given them leave
to go down: can't remember it, though.  Matter
for investigation.  Porter reports gentleman
coming into college at 12.10 last night.  All
right: 'The Dean's compliment's to Mr. ----,
and will he please to call upon him at once.
'Mr. ----'s compliments to the Dean, and he
has given orders not to be awakened till ten,
but will come when he is dressed.'  Obliging.

Lecture to be delivered at ten o'clock to
Honours men, on point of ancient custom:
very interesting: Time of Roman Dinner,
whether at 2.30 or 2.45.  Have got copious
notes on the subject somewhere: must read
them up before lecture, as it never looks well
to be in difficulties with your own MS.--looks
as if you hadn't the subject at your
fingers' ends.  Notes can't be found.  Know
I saw them on my table three weeks ago,
and table can't have been dusted since then.
Oh, here they are: illegible.  Wonder what
I meant by all these abbreviations.  Never
mind: can leave that part out.  Five minutes
past ten.

Lecture-room pretty full: two or three
scholars, with air of superior intelligence:
remainder commoners, in attitudes more or
less expressive of distracted attention.  One
man from another college, looking rather *de
trop*.  Had two out-college men last time:
different men, too: disappointing.  Begin my
dissertation and try to make abstruse subject
attractive: 'learning put lightly, like powder
in jam.'  Wish that scholar No. 1 wouldn't
check my remarks by reference to the authority
from whom my notes are copied.  Why do
they teach men German?  Second scholar has
last number of the 'Classical Review' open
before him.  Why?  Appears afterwards that
the 'Review' contains final and satisfying
*reductio ad absurdum* of my theory.  Man
from another college asks if he may go away.
Certainly, if he wishes.  Explains that he
thought this was Mr. ----'s Theology lecture.
Seems to have taken twenty minutes to find
out his mistake.  Wish that two of the
commoners could learn to take notes intelligently,
and not take down nothing except the
unimportant points.  Hope they won't reproduce
them next week in the schools.

Ten fifty-five: peroration.  Interrupted
by entrance of lecturer for next hour.  Begs
pardon: sorry to have interrupted: doesn't
go, however.  Peroration spoilt.  Lecture over:
general sense of relief.  Go out with the
audience, and overhear one of them tell his
friend that, after all, it wasn't so bad as last
time.  Mem., not to go out with audience in
future.

Eleven o'clock: lecture for Passmen.
Twelve or fifteen young gentlemen all
irreproachably dressed in latest style of
undergraduate fashion--Norfolk jacket and brown
boots indispensable--and all inclined to be
cheerfully tolerant of the lecturer's presence
*quand même*, regarding him as a necessary
nuisance and part of college system.  After
all there isn't so much to do between eleven
and twelve.  Some of them can construe,
but consider it unbecoming to make any
ostentation of knowledge.  Conversation at times
animated.  'Really, gentlemen, you might keep
something to talk about at the next lecture.'  Two
men appear at 11.25, noisily.  Very
sorry: have been at another lecture: couldn't
get away.  General smile of incredulity, joined
in by the new arrivals as they find a place in
the most crowded part of lecture-room.  Every
one takes notes diligently, and is careful to
burn them at the end of the hour.  Translation
proceeds rather slowly.  Try it myself:
difficult to translate Latin comedy with dignity.
Give it up and let myself go--play to the
gallery.  Gallery evidently considers that
frivolity on the lecturer's part is inappropriate
to the situation.  11.55: 'Won't keep you
longer, gentlemen.'

Twelve: time to do a little quiet work
before lunch.  Gentleman who was out after
twelve last night comes to explain.  Was
detained in a friend's room (reading) and did
not know how late it was.  In any case is
certain he was in before twelve, because he
looked at his watch, and is almost sure his
watch is fast.  Fined and warned not to do it
again: exit grumbling.  No more interruptions,
I hope.....  Boy from the Clarendon Press:
editor wants something for the 'Oxford
Magazine,' at once: not less than a column:
messenger will wait while I write it.  Very
considerate.  Try to write something: presence of
boy embarrassing.  Ask him to go outside and
wait on the staircase.  Does so, and continues
to whistle 'Daisy Bell,' with accompaniment on
the banisters *obbligato*.  Composition difficult
and result not satisfactory: hope no one will
read it.  Column nearly finished: man comes to
explain why he wants to be absent during three
weeks of next term.  *Would* he mind going
away and calling some other time?  Very well:
when?  Oh, any time, only not now.  This is
what they call the leisure and philosophic calm
of collegiate life.

Lunch in Common Room: cold, clammy,
and generally unappetising.  Guest who is
apparently an old member of the college greets
me and says he supposes I've forgotten him.
'Not at all: remember you quite well: glad to
meet you again.'  Haven't the faintest idea what
his name is: awkward.  Appears in course of
conversation to be ex-undergraduate whom I
knew very well and did not like.  Evidently
regards me as a venerable fossil: he himself has
grown bald and fat and looks fifty, more or less:
suppose I must be about seventy or eighty.
Vice-Principal wants to know if I will play
fives at two: yes, if he likes.  No, by the way,
can't; have got to go and vote in Convocation.
Don't know what it is about, but promised to
go: can't think why.  Time to go.

In the Convocation House.  Very few
people there, nobody at all interested.  Borrow
Gazette and study list of agenda.  Question on
which I promised to vote comes on late, all
sorts of uninteresting matters to be settled first:
mostly small money grants for scientific
purposes: pleasant way of wasting three-quarters
of an hour.  My question here at last: prepare
to die in last ditch in defence of original form
of statute.  Member of Hebdomadal Council
makes inaudible speech, apparently on the
subject.  No one else has anything to say:
Council's proposal, whatever it is, carried
*nem. con*.  No voting: might as well have played
fives after all: next time shall.

Time for walk round the Parks: rain and
mud.  Worst of the Parks is, you always meet
people of houses where you ought to have called
and haven't.  Free fight under Rugby rules going
on between University and somewhere else.
Watch it: don't understand game: try to feel
patriotic: can't......  Meeting at four to
oppose introduction of Hawaiian as an optional
language in Responsions.  Not select:
imprudent for a caucus to transact business by inviting
its opponents: people of all sorts of opinions
present.  Head of House makes highly
respectable speech, explaining that while qualified
support of reform is conceivable and even under
possible circumstances advisable, premature
action is rarely consistent with mature
deliberation.  Nobody seems to have anything definite
to suggest: most people move amendments.
Safe to vote against all of them: difficult to
know how you are voting, however: wording
of amendments so confusing.  All of them
negatived: substantive motion proposed: lost
as well.  Question referred to a Committee:
ought to have been done at first.  Hour and a
half wasted.  Remember that I have cut my
five-o'clock pupil for second time running.  Am
offered afternoon tea: thirsty, but must be off:
man at half-past five.  On the way back meet
resident sportsman in the High.  Has been out
with hounds and had best twenty-five minutes
of the season, in the afternoon, three miles off.
Might have been there myself if it hadn't been
for Convocation: hang Convocation!  Never
mind; satisfaction of a good conscience: shall
always be able to say that I lost best run of
season through devotion to duty.

.. _`LAWN TENNIS AT OXFORD.`:

.. figure:: images/img-114.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *LAWN TENNIS AT OXFORD.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*

   *LAWN TENNIS AT OXFORD.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*


Six forty-five: pupils gone; dress for
seven-o'clock dinner with friend at St. Anselm's.  Man
comes to ask why he has been gated: explain:
man not satisfied.  Gone, at any rate.  Another
man, asking leave to be out after twelve.  Five
minutes to dress and walk a quarter of a mile.
Wish men wouldn't choose this time for coming
to see one.  Very late: dinner already begun:
no soup, thanks.  Meaty atmosphere: noisy
atmosphere at lower end of Hall:
undergraduates throw bread about.  No one in
evening dress but myself.  Distinguished guest
in shape of eminent German Professor: have
got next him somehow: wish I hadn't: wears
flannel shirt and evidently regards me as a
mere butterfly of fashion.  Speaks hardly any
English: try him in German: replies after an
unusual effort on my part, 'Ich spreche nur
Deutsch.'  My command of the language
evidently less complete than I thought: or
perhaps he only speaks his own patois.  Man
opposite me Demonstrator at the Museum, who
considers that the University and the world in
general was made for physiologists.

Small party in Common Room, most of
diners having to see pupils or attend meetings.
Will I have any wine?  No one else drinks
any and my host is a teetotaller: 'No, thanks--never
drink wine after dinner.'  Truth only a
conventional virtue after all.  Eminent Teuton
would like more beer, but has been long enough
in England to know better than to ask for it.
Am put next to Demonstrator, who endeavours
to give general ideas of digestive organs of a
frog, interpreting occasionally in German for
Professor's benefit: illustrates with fragments
of dessert: most interesting, I am sure.
Nothing like the really good talk of an Oxford
Common Room, after all.  Senior Fellow drinks
whisky and water and goes to sleep.  Coffee
and cigarettes: or will I have a weed?
'Thanks, but must be off: man at nine...'  Back
in college: rooms dark: can't find my
matches and fall over furniture.

Man comes to read me an essay.  Know
nothing about the subject: thought he was
going to write on something else.  Essay
finished: must say something: try to find
fault with his facts.  Man confronts me with
array of statistics, apparently genuine: if so
nothing more to say.  Criticise his grammar:
man offended.  Interview rather painful, till
concluded by entrance of nine-thirty man with Latin
prose.  Rather superior young man, who
considers himself a scholar.  Suggest that part of his
vocabulary is not according to classical usage:
proves me wrong by reference to dictionary.
Is not surprised to find me mistaken.  Wish
that Higher Education had stopped in Board
Schools and not got down to undergraduates.

Man at ten, with a desire to learn.  Stays
till near eleven discussing his chances in the
schools at great length.  Presently comes to
his prospects in life.  Would send me to sleep
if he wouldn't ask me questions.

Eleven: no more men, thank goodness.
Tobacco and my lecture for to-morrow....
Never could understand why a gentleman being
neither intoxicated nor in the society of his
friends, cannot cross the quadrangle without a
view-halloo...  There he is again: must go
out and see what is going on.  Quadrangle
very cold, raining.  Group of men playing
football in the corner: friends look on and
encourage them from windows above.  As I
come on the scene all disappear, with shouts:
none identified: saves future trouble, at all
events.  More tobacco and period of comparative
peace.  Bedtime.

Wish my scout wouldn't hide hard things
under the mattress.

Noise in quadrangle renewed: 'Daddy
wouldn't buy me a Bow-wow,' with variations....
Some one's oak apparently battered
with a poker.  *Ought* to get up and go out
to stop it....




VIII--THE UNIVERSITY AS A PLACE OF LEARNED LEISURE.
===================================================

   |   'I had been used for thirty years to no interruption
   |   save the tinkling of the dinner-bell and the chapel-bell.'
   |                            *Essays of Vicesimus Knox.*


Standing with one foot in the Middle
Ages and the other in a luxuriously
furnished 'Common Room'--such is Oxford life
as summarised by a German visitor, who
appears to have been a good deal perplexed,
like the outer world in general, by the
academic mixture of things ancient and
modern, and a host who wore a cap and
gown over his evening dress.  Certainly the
University is a strange medley of contraries.
It never seems to be quite clear whether
we are going too fast or too slow.  We are
always reforming something, yet are
continually reproached with irrational
conservatism.  Change and permanence are side by
side--permanence that looks as if it could
defy time:

   |   'The form remains, the function never dies,'

and yet all the while the change is rapid and
complete.  Men go down, and are as if they
had never been: as is the race of leaves so
is that of undergraduates; and so transiently
are they linked with the enduring existence
of their University, that, except in the case
of the minority who have done great deeds
on the river or the cricket-field, they either
pass immediately out of recollection or else
remain only as a dim and distant tradition of
bygone ages.  An undergraduate's memory is
very short.  For him the history of the
University is comprised in the three or four
years of his own residence.  Those who
came before him and those who come after
are alike separated from him by a great
gulf; his predecessors are infinitely older,
and his successors immeasurably younger.  It
makes no difference what his relations to
them may be in after-life.  Jones, who went
down in '74, may be an undistinguished
country parson or a struggling junior at the
Bar; and Brown, who came up in '75, may
be a bishop or a Q.C. with his fortune made;
but all the same Brown will always regard
Jones as belonging to the almost forgotten
heroic period before he came up, and Jones,
whatever may be his respect for Brown's
undoubted talents, must always to a certain
extent feel the paternal interest of a veteran
watching the development of youthful promise.
So complete is the severance of successive
generations, that it is hard to see how
undergraduate custom and tradition and College
characteristics should have a chance of
surviving; yet somehow they do manage to
preserve an unbroken continuity.  Once give
a College a good or a bad name, and that
name will stick to it.  Plant a custom and
it will flourish, defying statutes and Royal
Commissions.  Conservatism is in the air;
even convinced Radicals (in politics) cannot
escape from it, and are sometimes Tories in
matters relating to their University.  They
will change the constitution of the realm, but
will not stand any tampering with the
Hebdomadal Council.  Whatever be the reason--whether
it be Environment or Heredity--Universities
go on doing the same things,
only in different ways; they retain that
indefinable habit of thought which seems to
cling to old grey walls and the shade
of ancient elms, which the public calls
'academic' when it is only contemptuous,
explaining the word as meaning 'provincial
with a difference' when it is angry.

.. _`BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN.`:

.. figure:: images/img-120.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*

   *BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN.  Drawn by Lancelot Speed.*


There is the same kind of unalterableness
about the few favoured individuals to whom
the spirit of the age has allowed a secure
and permanent residence in Oxford; a happy
class which is now almost limited to Heads
of Houses and College servants.  You
scarcely ever see a scout bearing the
outward and visible signs of advancing years;
age cannot wither them, nor (it should be
added) can custom stale their infinite variety
of mis-serving their masters.  Perhaps it is
they who are the repositories of tradition.
And even Fellows contrive to retain some of
the characteristics of their more permanent
predecessors, whom we have now learnt to
regard as abuses.  Hard-worked though they
are, and precarious of tenure, they are,
nevertheless, in some sort imbued with that flavour
of humanity and *dolce far niente* which
continues to haunt even a Common Room
where Fellows drink nothing but water, and
only dine together once a fortnight.

For times are sadly changed now, and a
fellowship is far from being the haven of
rest which it once was, and still is to a few.
Look at that old Fellow pacing with slow
and leisurely steps beneath Magdalen or
Christchurch elms: regard him well, for he is
an interesting survival, and presently he and
his kind will be nothing but a memory, and
probably the progressive spirit of democracy
will hold him up as an awful example.  He is
a link with a practically extinct period.  When
he was first elected *verus et perpetuus socius* of
his college--without examination--the
University of Oxford was in a parlous state.
Reform was as yet unheard of, or only loomed
dimly in the distance.  Noblemen still wore
tufts--think how that would scandalise us
now!--and 'gentlemen commoners' came up
with the declared and recognised intention of
living as gentlemen commoners should.  Except
for the invention of the examination system--and
the demon of the schools was satisfied
with only a mouthful of victims then--Oxford
of the forties had not substantially changed
since the last century--since the days when
Mr. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner at
Magdalen College, where his excuses for
cutting his lectures in the morning were
'received with a smile,' and where he found
himself horribly bored by the 'private scandal'
and 'dull and deep potations' of the seniors
with whom he was invited to associate in the
evening.  Not much had changed since those
days: lectures were still disciplinary exercises
rather than vehicles of instruction, and the
vespertinal port was rarely if ever interrupted
in its circulation by 'the man who comes at
nine.'  Many holders of fellowships scarcely
came near the University; those who did
reside were often not much concerned about
the instruction of undergraduates, and still
less with 'intercollegiate competition.'  Perhaps
it was not their life's work: a fellowship
might be only a stepping-stone to a
college living, when a sufficiently fat benefice
should fall vacant and allow the dean or
sub-warden to marry and retire into the country;
and even the don who meant to be a don all
his days put study or learned leisure first and
instruction second, the world not yet believing
in the 'spoon-feeding' of youth.  Very often,
of course, they did nothing.  After all, when
you pay a man for exercising no particular
functions, you can scarcely blame him for
strictly fulfilling the conditions under which
he was elected.  'But what do they do?'
inquired--quite recently--a tourist, pointing
to the fellows' buildings of a certain college.
'Do?!!' replied the Oxford cicerone--'do? ... why
them's fellows!'  But if there was
inactivity, it is only the more credit to the
minority who really did interest themselves in
the work of their pupils.  Not that the relation
of authorities to undergraduates was ever then
what it has since become--whether the change
be for the better or the worse.  Few attempts
were made to bridge the chasm which must
always yawn between the life of teacher and
taught.  Perhaps now the attempt is a little
over-emphasised; certainly things are done
which would have made each particular hair
to stand on end on the head of a Fellow of
the old school.  In his solemn and formal way
he winked at rowing, considering it rather
fast and on the whole an inevitable sign of
declining morals.  He wore his cap and gown
with the anachronistic persistency of Mr. Toole
in 'The Don,' and sighed over the levity of
a colleague who occasionally sported a blue
coat with brass buttons.  Had you told him
that within the present century College Tutors
would be seen in flannels, and that a Head
of a House could actually row on the river
in an eight--albeit the ship in question
be manned by comparatively grave and
reverend seniors, yclept the Ancient
Mariners--he would probably have replied in the
formula ascribed to Dr. Johnson: 'Let me
tell you, sir, that in order to be what you
consider humorous it is not necessary that you
should be also indecent!'  But there is a
lower depth still; and grave dignitaries of
the University have been seen riding bicycles.

All this would have been quite unintelligible
to the youthful days of our friend,
whom we see leisurely approaching the evening
of his days in the midst of a generation that
does not know him indeed, but which is
certainly benefited by his presence and the
picture of academic repose which he displays
to his much-troubled and harassed successors:
a peaceful, cloistered life; soon to leave
nothing behind it but a brass in the College
chapel, a few Common Room anecdotes, and
a vague tradition, perhaps, of a ghost on
the old familiar staircase.  Far different is
the lot of the Fellow *fin de siècle*; 'by
many names men know him,' whether he be
the holder of an 'official' Fellowship, or a
'Prize Fellow' who is entitled to his
emoluments only for the paltry period of seven
years.  And what emoluments!  Verily the
mouth of Democracy must water at the
thought of the annual 'division of the spoils'
which used to take place under the old
*régime*: spoils which were worth dividing, too,
in the days when rents were paid without a
murmur, and colleges had not as yet to allow
tenants to hold at half-a-crown an acre, lest
the farm should be unlet altogether.  But now
if a Prize Fellow receives his 200*l.* a year
he may consider himself lucky; and remember
that if he is not blessed with this world's
goods, the grim humours of the last
Commission at least allowed him the inestimable
privilege of marrying--on 200*l.* a year.  After
all, it is not every one who receives even that
salary for doing nothing.

The 'official' variety of Fellow, or the
Prize Fellow who chooses to be a College
Tutor, is a schoolmaster, with a difference.
He has rather longer holidays--if he can
afford to enjoy them-and a considerably
shorter purse than the instructors of youth
at some great schools.  He is so far unfortunate
in his predecessors, that he has inherited
the reputation of the Fellows of old time.
Everybody else is working: the Fellow is
still a useless drone.  As a matter of fact,
the unfortunate man is always doing
something--working vehemently with a laudable
desire to get that into eight weeks which
should properly take twelve; or taking his
recreation violently, riding forty miles on a
bicycle, with a spurt at the finish so as not
to miss his five-o'clock pupil; sitting on
interminable committees--everything in Oxford
is managed by a committee, partly, perhaps,
because 'Boards are very often screens;' or
sitting upon a disorderly undergraduate.  On
the whole, the kicks are many, and the
halfpence comparatively few.  He has the
Long Vacation, of course, but then he is
always employed in writing his lectures for next
term, or compiling a school edition, or a
handbook, or an abridgment of somebody
else's school edition or handbook, in order to
keep the pot boiling--more especially if he
has fallen a victim to matrimony, and established
himself in the red-brick part of Oxford.
It is true that there is the prospect--on paper--of
a pension when he is past his work, but in
the present state of College finances that is
not exactly a vista of leisured opulence.
Altogether there is not very much repose
about *him*.  College Tutors in these days are
expected to work.  It is on record that a
tourist from a manufacturing district on seeing
four tutors snatching a brief hour at lawn-tennis,
remarked, 'I suppose there's *another shift*
working inside?'  Such are the requirements
of the age and the manufacturing districts.

Nor are beer and skittles unadulterated
the lot of the undergraduate either--whatever
the impression that his sisters and
cousins may derive from the gaieties of the
Eights and 'Commem.'  For the spirit of
the century and the 'Sturm und Drang' of
a restless world has got hold of the 'Man,'
too, and will not suffer him to live quite so
peacefully as the Verdant Greens and Bouncers
of old.  Everybody must do something; they
must be 'up and doing,' or else they have a
good chance of finding themselves 'sent
down.'  I do not speak of the reading man,
who naturally finds his vocation in a period
of activity--but rather of the man who is by
nature non-reading, and has to sacrifice his
natural desires to the pressure of public
opinion acting through his tutor.  Perhaps
he is made to go in for honours; but even
if he reads only for a pass, the schools are
always with him--he is always being pulled
up to see how he is growing; or at least he
must be serving his College in one way or
another--if not by winning distinction in
the schools, by toiling on the river or
the cricket-field.  Then he is expected to
interest himself in all the movements of the
last quarter of the nineteenth century; he
must belong to several societies; he cannot even
be properly idle without forming himself into
an association for the purpose.  If he wants
to make a practice of picnicing on the
Cherwell he founds a 'Cherwell Lunch Club,'
with meetings, no doubt, and possibly an
'organ' to advocate his highly meritorious
views.  An excellent and a healthy life, no
doubt! but yet one is tempted sometimes to
fear that the loafer may become extinct; and
then where are our poets to come from?
For it is a great thing to be able to loaf
well: it softens the manners and does not
allow them to be fierce; and there is no
place for it like the streams and gardens of
an ancient University.  If a man does not
learn the great art of doing nothing there,
he will never acquire it anywhere else; and
it is there, and in the summer term, that
this laudable practice will probably survive
when it is unknown even in Government Offices.

.. _`COACHING THE EIGHT.`:

.. figure:: images/img-132.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *COACHING THE EIGHT.  By J. H. Lorimer.*

   *COACHING THE EIGHT.  By J. H. Lorimer.*


For there is a season of the year when
even the sternest scholar or athlete and the
most earnest promoter of Movements yields to
the *genius loci*; when the summer term is
drawing to a close, and the May east winds
have yielded to the warmth of June, and the
lilacs and laburnums are blossoming in College
gardens; when the shouting and the glory
and the bonfires of the Eights are over, and
the invasion of Commemoration has not yet
begun.  Then, if ever, is the time for doing
nothing.  Then the unwilling victim of lectures
shakes off his chains and revels in a temporary
freedom, not unconnected with the fact that
his tutor has gone for a picnic to Nuneham.
Perhaps he has been rowing in his College
Eight, and is entitled to repose on the laurels
of 'six bumps;' perhaps he is not in the
schools himself, and can afford to pity the
unfortunates who are.  And how many are
the delightful ways of loafing!  You may
propel the object of your affections--if she
is up, as she very often is at this time--in
a punt on that most academic stream, the
Cherwell, while Charles (your friend) escorts
the chaperon in a dingey some little
distance in front; you may lie lazily in the
sun in Worcester or St. John's gardens, with
a novel, or a friend, or both; you may search
Bagley and Powderhill for late bluebells, and
fancy that you have found 'high on its heathy
ridge' the tree known to Arnold and Clough.
Or if you are more enterprising you may
travel further afield and explore the high beech
woods of the Chiltern slopes and the bare,
breezy uplands of the Berkshire downs; but
this, perhaps, demands more energy than
belongs to the truly conscientious loafer.

.. _`EVENING ON THE RIVER.`:

.. figure:: images/img-134.jpg
   :align: center
   :alt: *EVENING ON THE RIVER.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*

   *EVENING ON THE RIVER.  Drawn by E. Stamp.*


Well, let the idle undergraduate make the
most of his time now; it is not likely that
he will be able to loaf in after-life.  Nor (for
the matter of that) will his successors be allowed
to take their ease here in Oxford even in the
summer, in those happy days when the
University is to be turned into an industrial
school, and a place for the education no
longer of the English gentleman but the
British citizen.  Will that day ever come?
The spirit of the age is determined that it
shall.  But perhaps the spirit of the place
may be too much for it yet.

.. vspace:: 4

.. class:: center small

   *London: Strangeways, Printers.*

.. vspace:: 4

.. pgfooter::