_Oxford_.
IMPRIMIS! we put up at the Mitre Tavern in Oxford.
Nota Bene: never to do it again.
It is an interesting rookery to look at—and to leave. Stuffiness and
extortion were words that borrowed new and pregnant meaning from
our sojourn in what we were recommended to try, as “a chawming old
place. Best of service and cookery, you know, thoroughly respectable
and—ah—historic and arntique, and all that, you know!”
Dux, who had noted down the recommendation, proposed at our departure,
to add: “Mem.: Never to stop again at a hotel where illuminated texts
are hung in _every_ bed-room.”
Opposite the bed allotted to me, who am obliged continually to stay
my fearsome soul upon the wholesome promises of daily grace for daily
need, upon exhortations to be careful for nothing, and with the day’s
sufficiency of evil to cease anxious thought for morrows as rife with
trouble,—opposite my bed, where my waking eyes must meet it, was a red
blister-plaster:
“_Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may
bring forth._”
In the adjacent closet, allotted to Prima, the only ornamental object,
besides a wash-bowl so huge she had to call in her father to lift
and empty it into the tiniest slop-jar ever made, was the reminder in
brimstone-blues, “_The wages of sin is Death!_” One of our collegians
was admonished that the “wrath of God abideth upon him,” and the
other had a mutilated doctrinal text signifying quite another thing
when read in the proper connection. Caput, in his character as Mentor
and balance-wheel, checked the boys’ disposition to detect, in the
lavishment of Scriptural instruction, a disposition to establish an
honest equilibrium with the weighty bills. Extras in one direction,
they reasoned, should be met by extras in another.
“All Scripture is profitable,” he reminded the jesters. “It is only
by misuse it can be made, for a moment, to appear common, much less,
absurd. _Therefore_,” emphatically, “I object to texts upon hotel
walls!”
We were not tempted by in-door luxuries to waste in sleep or sloth
the daylight hours, but gave these to very industrious sight-seeing.
Yet we came away with appetites whetted, not satisfied by what we had
beheld. The very air of the place is redolent of learning and honorable
antiquity. Each of the twenty colleges composing the University had a
valid and distinctive claim upon our notice. To name the attractions of
one—say, Christ Church, or Balliol, would be to fill this chapter with
a catalogue of MSS. books, pictures, dates and titles. It is a queer,
fascinating, incomparable old city. Few of the streets are broad, none
straight. The shops are small, usually ill-lighted and devoted to the
needs and tastes of the students. The haberdashers are “gentlemen’s
furnishers,” the booksellers’ windows full of text-books in all known
tongues, interspersed by the far-famed Oxford Editions of Bibles and
Prayer-books. Pastry-cooks are prominent and many. The colleges are
imposing in dimensions, some magnificent in architecture. University,
the oldest, is said to have been founded by the Great Alfred. Restored
in 1229. All are so blackened and battered that the youngest looks
at least a century older than the Roman Pantheon. Ancient edifices
in the drier, hotter air of Southern Europe have been worn by the
friction of ages. The Oxford Colleges are gnawed as by iron teeth.
“Worm-eaten,” is the first epithet that comes to the tongue at sight
of them. From cornice, walls and sculptures, the stone has been picked
away, a grain at a time, until the surface is honeycombed, and to the
inexperienced eye, disintegration of the whole seems inevitable. The
lugubrious effect of age and seeming dilapidation is sensibly relieved
by the reaches of turf, often bordered by gay flowers, forming the
quadrangles, or court-yards, enclosed by the buildings.
The quadrangle of Christ Church College was laid out by Cardinal
Wolsey, the founder and patron. It is almost square, measuring 264 feet
by 261. “Great Tom,” the biggest bell in England—the custodian says,
in the world,—hangs in the cupola over the gateway. It weighs 17,000
pounds, and at ten minutes past nine P.M. strikes one hundred and ten
times, the number of students “on the foundation.” The pride of this
college is the immense refectory, or dining-hall. The ceiling, fifty
feet in height, is of solid oak elaborately carved, with graceful
pendants, also elegantly wrought. Among the decorations of this roof
are the armorial bearings and badges of Henry VIII. and Wolsey. Two
rows, a hundred feet in length, of portraits of renowned patrons,
graduates and professors of Oxford are set high upon the side-walls. At
the upper end of the hall hangs Holbein’s full-length portrait of Henry
VIII. The swinish eyes, pendulous cheeks, pursed-up mouth and double
chin would be easily caught by any caricaturist, and are as familiar to
us as the jaunty set of his flat cap upon the side of his head.
Holbein was a courtier, likewise an artist, who never stooped to
caricature. This, the most celebrated likeness of his master, was said
to be true to life, yet so ingeniously flattered as to find favor
in the sight of the original. Holbein was a master of this species
of delicate homage where the rank of the subject made the exercise
of it politic. He practised the accomplishment once too often when
he painted the miniature of Anne of Cleves. Keeping these things
in mind, we saw a bulky trunk capped by the head I have described,
one short arm akimbo, the hand resting on his sword-belt, the feet
planted far apart to maintain the balance of the bloated column and
display the legs he never wearied of praising and stroking. He wears
a laced doublet and trunk-hose; a short cloak, lined with ermine,
falls back from his shoulders. The portrait-galleries of nations may
be safely challenged to furnish a parallel in bestiality and swagger
with this figure. Yet the widow of a good man, herself a refined and
pious gentlewoman, became without coercion, his sixth queen, and
colored with pleasure when, in the view of the court, he paid her the
distinguished compliment of laying his ulcerous leg across her lap!
Such reminiscences are not sovereign cures for Republicanism.
On one side of Henry hangs the daughter who proved her inheritance
of his coarse nature and callous sensibilities, by vaunting her
relationship to him who had disgraced and murdered her mother, and
declared herself, by act of Parliament, illegitimate. Much is made
in Elizabeth’s portraits of her ruff and tower of red hair, of her
satin robe “set all over with aglets of two sorts,” of “pearl-work and
tassels of gold,” of “costly lace and knotted buttons,” and very little
of the pale, high-nosed face. Her eyes are small and black; her mouth
has the “purse” of her father’s, her features are expressionless. At
the other hand of King Henry is the butcher’s son, created by him
Lord Cardinal, cozened, in a playfully rapacious humor, out of Hampton
Palace, and cast off like a vile slug from the royal hand when he had
had his day and served his monarch’s ends. Wolsey’s portraits are
always taken in profile, to conceal the cast in the eye, which was his
thorn in the flesh. It is a triumvirate that may well chain feet, eyes,
and thought for a much longer time than we could spare for the whole
college.
Across this end of the room runs a platform, raised a foot or two
from the hall floor. A table, surrounded by chairs, is upon it. Here
dine the titled students of Christ Church College (established by the
butcher’s boy!)—the _élite_ who sport the proverbial “tufts” upon
their Oxford caps. Privileged “dons” preside at their meals, and Bluff
King Hal swaggers in such divinity as doth hedge in a king—and his
nobles—over their heads. The gentlemen-commoners are so fortunate as to
sit nearest this hallowed dais, although upon the lower level of the
refectory. The common_est_ drink small-beer from pewter tankards in the
draughts and dimness (social) of the end nearest the door.
Lex’s handsome face was a study when the fitness and beauty of class
distinctions in the halls of learning was made patent to him by
the civil guide. By the way, he wore a student’s gown, and was, we
surmised, a servitor of the college.
“How much light these entertaining items cast upon quotations we have
heard, all our lives, without comprehending,” said the audacious
youth, eying the informant with ingenuous admiration. “‘High life
_and_ below stairs!’ ‘Briton’s sons shall ne’er be slaves!’ ‘Free-born
Englishmen’—and the rest of it! There’s nothing else like an old-world
education, after all, for adjusting society. Under professors like
the Tudors and Stuarts, of course! Why, do you know, we ignoramuses
over the water would set Bright and Gladstone at the same table with
the most empty-pated lord of the lot, and never suspect that we were
insulting one of them?”
Caput pulled him away.
“You rascal!” he said, as we followed the servitor to the kitchen. “How
dare you make fun of the man to his face?”
“He never guessed it,” replied the other coolly. “It takes a drill and
a blast of powder to get a joke into an English skull.”
The kitchen is a vast vault, planned also by Wolsey, whose antecedents
should have made him an authority in the culinary kingdom in an era
when loins were knighted and _entrées_ an unknown quantity in the
composition of good men’s feasts. The high priest of the savory
mysteries met us upon the threshold, the grandest specimen, physically,
of a man we saw abroad. Herculean in stature and girth, he had a noble
head and face, was straight as a Norway pine, and was robed in a
voluminous white bib-apron. His voice was singularly deep and musical,
his carriage majestic. I wish I could add that he was as conversant
with the natural history and rights of the letter H as with the details
of his profession and the story of his realm from 1520 downward. He
exhibited the Brobdingnagian gridiron used in the time of James I., on
which an hundred steaks could be broiled at one and the same time, and
enlarged upon the improvements that had superseded the rusty bars and
smoky jacks, kept now as curiosities. In one pantry was a vast vessel
of ripe apricots, ready-sugared for jam; a huge pasty, hot and fragrant
from the oven, stood upon a dresser, encircled by a cohort of tarts.
“H’out h’of term-time we ’ave comparatively little to do,” said the
splendid giant. “Therefore I ’ave given most h’of my h’employees a
vacation. But there h’are a few h’undergraduates and a tutor h’or
two ’ere still, and”—apologetically for mortal frailty—“the h’inner
man, h’even h’of scholars must be h’entertained. ’Ence these”—waving a
mighty arm toward the pastry.
He pleased us prodigiously, even to the sublime graciousness with
which he accepted a douceur at parting. We turned at the end of the
passage to look at him—a white-robed Colossus, in the dusky arch of the
kitchen doorway. The light from a window touched his hoary hair and the
jet-black brows that darkened the full, serious eyes. He was gazing
after us, too, and bowed gravely without changing his place.
“Are there photographs of _him_ for sale?” asked we of our guide.
“Surely he is one of the college lions?”
“I beg your pardon!”
We directed his attention to the statuesque Anak.
“Oh! _he_ is the cook!” with never a gleam of amusement or surprise.
“Artistically considered,” pursued Prima, with another lingering look,
“he is magnificent.”
This time the black-gown was slightly—never so slightly, bewildered.
“He is the cook,” he said.
“’Twas throwing words away, for still
The little man would have his will,
And answered—‘’Tis the cook!’”
parodied Dux. “Wordsworth was an Englishman and ‘knew how it was
himself.’”
We spent four hours in the Bodleian Library, Museum, and Picture
Gallery, leaving them then reluctantly. It was “realizing our history”
in earnest to see the portrait of William Prynne, carefully executed,
even to Archbishop Laud’s scarlet ear-mark. The clipped organ is turned
to the spectator ostentatiously, one fancies, until he bethinks
himself that the uncompromising Puritan received the loving admonition
of Church and State in both ears, and upon separate occasions. The
miniatures of James III. and his wife are here given an honorable
position. Some years since the words, “The Pretender,” were scratched
by an unknown Jacobite from the gilded frame of the uncrowned king’s
picture. The custodian pointed out the erasure with a smile indulgent
of the harmless, if petulant freak. It is odd who do such things,
and when, so vigilant is the watch kept over visitors. Three of the
delicate fingers are gone from the hands of Marie Stuart in Westminster
Abbey, and, if I remember aright, as many from the effigy of Elizabeth
in the same place.
We paused long at one small faded portrait, far inferior in artistic
merit to those about it—the first picture we had seen of Lady Jane
Grey. She has a sickly, chalky complexion that might match an American
school-girl’s. This may have been caused by the severity of her home
discipline and Master Roger Ascham’s much Latin and more Greek. She
toiled for him cheerfully, she says, “since he was the first person who
ever spake kindly to her.” She was the mistress of five languages and
a frightful number of arts and sciences, and married a sour-tempered
man, chosen by her father and his, when she was seventeen years old.
The lineaments are unformed and redeemed from plainness by large
brown eyes. They have an appealing, hunted look that was not all in
our fancy. A “slip of a girl” compassionate mothers would name her;
frightened at life, or what it was made to be to her by her natural
guardians.
Across the gallery are two portraits of Marie Stuart, one of which was
painted over the other upon the same canvas. This was discovered by an
artist, who then obtained permission from the owners to copy and erase
the upper painting. He succeeded in both tasks. The outermost portrait
wears a projecting headdress, all buckram, lace, and pearls, and a more
ornate robe than the other. A casual glance would incline one to the
belief that the faces are likewise dissimilar, but examination shows
that they are alike in line and color, the difference in expression
being the work of the tawdry coiffure. The lower likeness is so lovely
in its thoughtful sweetness as to kindle indignation with astonishment
that it should have been so foolishly disfigured. The story is a
strange one, but true.
We recognized Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s picture, from its
resemblance to the effigy upon his tomb, and liked it less than that.
The opened eyes are fine in shape and color, but sleepy and sinister,
the complexion more sanguine than suits a carpet-knight. There is more
of the hunting-squire than the polished courtier in it. Close by is the
pleasing face of the royal coquette’s later favorite, Robert Devereux,
Earl of Essex. Another profile of Wolsey is not far off. A nobler trio
are Erasmus, Hugo Grotius and Thomas Cranmer pendent upon the same side
of the gallery.
I once read in a provincial journal a burlesque list of the curiosities
in Barnum’s Museum. One item was, “a cup of cream from the milky
way—slightly curdled.” Another—“a block from the marble hall the
Bohemian girl dreamed she dwelt in.” The nonsense recurred to me when
we bent over a glass containing Guy Fawkes’ lantern, “slightly” rusted.
In fact, it is riddled by rust, and so far as apparent antiquity goes,
might have belonged to Diogenes. The various parts—candle-holder,
iron cylinder and cover, lie apart, and with them certificates to the
genuineness of the relic. There is the original letter of warning to
Lord Mounteagle not to go to the House at the opening of Parliament,
“since GOD and man have conspired to punish the wickedness of the
times.” “Parliament shall receive a terrible blow and yet shall not see
who hurt them,” is the sentence that led to the search in the cellar
and the capture of Fawkes.
Queen Elizabeth’s fruit-plates are upon exhibition here. They are very
like the little wooden _plaques_ we now paint for card-receivers and
hang about our rooms. The edges are carved and painted, and in the
centre of each are four lines of rhyme, usually a caustic fling at
matrimony and married people.
The wealth of the Bodleian Library consists in its collection of
valuable old books and MSS. In the number and rarity of the latter it
disputes the palm with the British Museum. I should not know where to
stop were I to begin the enumeration of treasures over which we hung
in breathless delight, each one brought forward seeming more wonderful
than the last. The illuminated volumes,—written and painted upon such
parchment as one must see to believe in, so fine is its texture and
so clear the page,—are enough to make a bibliomaniac of the soberest
book-lover. A thousand years have not sufficed to dim tints and
gilding. Queen Elizabeth, as Princess, “did” Solomon’s Proverbs upon
vellum in letters of various styles, all daintily neat. In looking at
her Latin exercises and counting up Lady Jane Grey’s acquirements,
we cease to boast of the superior educational advantages of the girl
of the period. It is experiences such as were ours that morning in
the Bodleian Library and during our three days in Oxford that are
pin-pricks to the balloon of national and intellectual conceit, not the
survey of foreign governments and the study of foreign laws and manner.
If the patient and candid sight-seer do not come home a humbler and a
wiser man, he had best never stir again beyond the corporate limits of
his own little Utica, and pursue contentedly the _rôle_ of the marble
in a peck-measure.
Before seeing the “Martyrs’ Monument,” we went to St. Mary’s Church
in which Cranmer recanted his recantation. The places of pulpit and
reading-desk have been changed since the Archbishop was brought forth
from prison and bidden by Dr. Cole, an eminent Oxford divine, make
public confession of his faith before the waiting congregation. The
church was packed with soldiers, ecclesiastics and the populace. All
had heard that the deposed prelate had been persuaded by argument and
soothing wiles and the cruel bondage of the fear of death to return to
the bosom of Holy Mother Church. Cole had said mass and preached the
sermon.
“Dr. Cranmer will now read his confession,” he said and sat down.
“I _will_ make profession of my faith,” said Cranmer, “and with a good
will, too!”
We saw the site of the old pulpit in which he arose in saying this; the
walls that had given back the tones of a voice that trembled no longer
as he proclaimed his late recantation null and void, “inasmuch as he
had been wrought upon by the fear of burning to sign them. He believed
in the Bible and all the doctrines taught therein which he had wickedly
renounced. As for the Pope, he did refuse him and denounce him as the
enemy of Heaven.”
“Smite him upon the mouth; and take him away!” roared Cole.
We would presently see where he was chained to the stake and helped
tear off his upper garments, as fearing he might again grow cowardly
before the burning began. From a different motive,—namely, the dread
that his bald head and silvery beard might move the people to rescue,
the Lord Overseer of the butchery ordered the firemen to make haste.
“The unworthy hand” was burned first. His heart was left whole in the
ashes.
“That was the Oxford spirit, three hundred and twenty years ago!”
mused Caput, aloud. “Within fifty years, John Henry Newman,—now a
Cardinal—was incumbent of St Mary’s.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the pew-opener (with a bonnet on,) who showed the
church. “He was one of the first Puseyites.”
“I know!” turning again toward the site of the old pulpit.
A small square of marble, no bigger than a tile, let into the chancel
floor, records that in a vault beneath lies “Amy Robsart, first wife of
Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.” Her remains were brought hither
from Cumnor Hall, which was but three miles from Oxford, and decently
interred in a brick grave under the church. Other monument than this
insignificant morsel of stone she has none.
The Martyrs’ Memorial is a handsome Gothic structure of magnesian
limestone, hexagonal and three-storied, rising into a pinnacle
surmounted by a cross. It is in a conspicuous quarter of the city, in
the centre of an open square. In arched niches, facing different ways,
are Cranmer, in his prelatical robes, Ridley, and Latimer.
“This place hath long groaned for me!” said Latimer, passing through
Smithfield, on his way to the tower after his arrest.
But they brought him to Oxford to die.
We checked the carriage and alighted opposite Balliol College. The
street is closely built up on both sides, and in the middle, upon one
of the paving-stones, is cut a deep cross. This is the true Martyrs’
Memorial. There, Ridley and Latimer “lighted such a candle by the
grace of GOD as shall never be put out.” The much-abused phrase,
“baptism of fire,” grows sublime when we read that Latimer was “seen to
make motions with his hands as if washing them in the flames, and to
stroke his aged face with them.”
Said an American clergyman—and inferentially, a defender of the
Faith—“I have no sympathy with those old martyrs. The most charitable
of us must confess that they were frightfully and disgustingly
_obstinate_!”
We may forgive them for failing to win the approbation of latter-day
sentimentalists when we reflect that but for this, their unamiable
idiosyncrasy, neither Protestant England nor Protestant America
would to-day exist, even in name. Not very long since, excavations
under the sidewalk nearest to the cross-mark in this street revealed
the existence here—as a similar accident had in front of St.
Bartholomew-the-Great, in London—of a thick stratum of ashes. “Human
ashes mixed with wood,” says the report of the discovery printed by
an Antiquarian Society—“establishing beyond question that this was
where the public burnings were held.” The inhumanity of sweeping
such ashes into a heap by the wayside, as one might pile the refuse
of a smelting-furnace, is almost as revolting to most people as the
disgusting obstinacy of the consumed heretics. We saw another official
record, of an earlier date, relative to this locality,—the bills sent
by the Sheriff of Oxford to the Queen, after two “public burnings.”
One headed—“_To burn Latimer and Ridley_” has seven items, including
“wood-fagots, furze-fagots, chains, and staples,” accumulating into
a total of £1, 5s. 9d. “_To burn Cranmer_” was a cheaper operation.
“Furze and wood-fagots,” the carriage of these, and “2 laborers,”
cost but “12s. 8d.” Ridley and Latimer suffered for their obstinacy,
October 16, 1555; Cranmer in March of the next year.
The walks and drives in and about Oxford are exceedingly beautiful. The
“Broad Walk,” in Christ Church Meadows, deserves the eulogiums lavished
upon it by tongue and pen. The interlacing tracery of the elms, arched
above the smooth, wide avenue; the glimpses to right and left of “sweet
fields in living green;” clumps of superb oaks and pretty “pleasances;”
the dark-gray towers, domes and spires of the city, and the ivied
walls of private and public gardens; the Isis winding beneath willows
and between meadows, and dotted, although it was the long vacation,
with gliding boats,—all this, viewed in the clear, tender light of the
“Queen’s weather” that still followed us on our journeyings, made up
a picture we shall carry with us while memory holds dear and pleasant
things.
When we go abroad again—(how often and easily the words slip from our
lips!) we mean to give three weeks, instead of as many days, to Oxford.
“Honor bright, now!” said Caput, settling into his place, with the rest
of us, in the railway carriage, after the last look from the windows
upon the receding scene;—“when you say ‘Oxford’ do you think first of
Alfred the Great; of Cœur de Lion, who was born there; of William the
Conqueror, who had a tough battle to win it; of Cardinal Wolsey—or of
Tom Brown?”
“That reminds me!” said Prima, serenely ignoring the query her elders
laughingly declined to answer,—“we must get some sandwiches at Rugby.
Everybody does.”
We did—all leaving the train to peep into the “Refreshment Room of
Mugby Junction,” and quoting, _sotto voce_, from the sketch which,
it is affirmed, has made this, in very truth, what Dickens wrote it
down ironically—“the Model Establishment” of the line. “The Boy” has
disappeared, or grown up. Mrs. Sniff,—“the one with the small waist
buckled in tight in front, and with the lace cuffs at her wrists, which
she puts on the edge of the counter and stands a-smoothing while the
Public foams,”—has been supplanted by a tidy dame, cherry-cheeked and
smiling. She filled our order with polite despatch, and, in her corps
of willing assistants one searches uselessly for the “disdaineous
females and ferocious old woman,” objurgated by the enraged foreigner;
as vainly in the array of tempting edibles upon the counter for
“stale pastry and sawdust sangwiches.” We had our railway carriage to
ourselves, and, carrying our parcels thither, prepared to make merry.
“I need not explain to this assembly the ingredients and formation
of the British Refreshment Sangwich,” began Prima, who knows Dickens
better than she does the Catechism.
The sandwich of Rugby,—as revised—is put up by the half-dozen in
neat white boxes, tied with ribbons, like choice confections. The
ingredients are sweet, white bread, and juicy tongue or ham. The pastry
is fresh and flaky, the cakes delicate and toothsome. We kept our
sandwich-boxes as souvenirs.
We did not catch a sight of Banbury Cross, or of the young woman with
bells on her toes who cantered through our nursery rhyme to that
mythical goal. But we did supplement our Mugby Lunch by Banbury cakes,
an indigestible and palatable compound.