author of "Hamlet"? Of his careless young teachers in stage-craft--so
soon his out-distanced rivals--Lyly and Peele and Lodge would have
been at home beside the Isis and the Cherwell, as Greene and Nash and
Marlowe by the Cam; but Shakespeare--did those fluttering gowns, those
gaudy-hooded processions, stir in him more than a stranger's
curiosity? The stern day of that all-learned Master of Balliol, Dr.
Jowett, who stiffened examinations to a point that would have dismayed
Shakespeare's contemporaries, save, perhaps, the redoubtable Gabriel
Harvey, was still in the far future; the magnificent New Schools,
with their dreaded _viva voces_, had not yet come; the Rhodes
Scholarships were beyond the dream-reach of even a Raleigh or a
Spenser; but academic tests and academic pomps there were. The Old
Schools Quadrangle, not quite complete, had been building in a
leisurely way since 1439 and was in regular use, though the Divinity
School, whose arched, groined, boss-studded roof is one of the
beauties of Oxford, had nearly suffered wreck, in the brief reign of
Edward VI, at the hands of that class of theological reformers who
have a peculiar aversion to stained glass. The exercises of the
_Encaenia_ Shakespeare would have heard, if he ever chanced to hear
them, in St. Mary's, but half a century after his death they were
transferred to the new Sheldonian Theatre. In St. Mary's, which was
not only "Learning's receptacle" but also "Religion's parke," these
exercises, the _Acts_, naturally took the form of disputations
concerning "wingy mysteries in divinity." When they passed out from
the church to an unconsecrated edifice, political and social themes,
still treated in scholastic Latin, were added, but even so the
entertainment was of the dullest. Professional fun-makers, successors
of the mediæval minstrels, had to be called in to enliven the occasion
with a peppering of jests, but these became so scurrilous that the use
of hired buffoons was forbidden by Convocation. Then the resourceful
undergraduates magnanimously came forward, volunteering to take this
delicate duty upon themselves, and manfully have they discharged it to
this day. These young Oxonians have developed the normal undergraduate
gift for sauce into an art that even knows the laws of proportion and
restraint. The limits allowed them are of the broadest, but only twice
in living memory has their mischief gone so far as to break up the
assemblage.
The threefold business of the annual _Encaenia_ is to confer honorary
degrees, to listen to the prize compositions, and to hear an address
delivered by the Public Orator in commemoration of Founders and
Benefactors, with comment on current events. On the one occasion when
I was privileged to be present, the hour preceding the entrance of the
academic procession was the liveliest of all. The lower galleries were
reserved for guests, but the upper, the Undergraduates' Gallery, was
packed with students in cap and gown, who promptly began to badger
individuals chosen at whim from the throng of men standing on the
floor.
"I don't like your bouquet, sir. It's too big for your buttonhole. If
the lady wouldn't mind--"
The offending roses disappeared in a general acclaim of "Thank you,
sir," and the cherubs aloft pounced on another victim. The
unfortunates so thrust into universal notice usually complied with the
request, whatever it might be, as quickly as possible, eager to escape
into obscurity, but a certain square-jawed Saxon wearing a red tie put
up a stubborn resistance until all the topmost gallery was shouting at
him, and laughing faces were turned upon him from every quarter of the
house.
"Take off that red tie, sir."
"Indeed, sir, you don't look pretty in it."
"It doesn't go well with your blushes."
"_Will_ you take off that tie, sir?"
"It's not to our cultured taste, sir."
"It's the only one he's got."
"Dear sir, _please_ take it off."
"It gives me the eye-ache, sir."
"Have you paid for it yet?"
"Was there anybody in the shop when you bought it?"
"Are you wearing it for an advertisement?"
"Hush-h! _She_ gave it to him."
"Oh, SHE put it on for him."
"You're quite right, sir. Don't take it off."
"We can sympathize with young romance, sir."
"Be careful of it, sir."
"Wear it till your dying day."
"It's the colour of her hair."
But by this time the poor fellow's face was flaming, and he jerked off
the tie and flung it to the floor amid thunders of derisive applause.
Then the Undergraduate Gallery turned its attention to the organist,
who in all the hubbub was brilliantly going through the numbers of his
program.
"Will you kindly tell us what you're playing, Mr. Lloyd?"
"We don't care for classical music ourselves."
"'Auld Lang Syne,' if you please."
The organ struck into "Auld Lang Syne," and the lads sprang up and
sang it lustily with hands clasped in the approved Scotch fashion.
"'Rule, Britannia,' Mr. Lloyd."
Again he obliged them and was rewarded by a rousing cheer, followed by
cheers for the Varsity and the ladies, groans for the Proctors, who
are the officers of discipline, and barks for their assistants, the
so-called Bulldogs. In the midst of this yelping chorus the great
doors were flung wide, and an awesome file of dignitaries, in all the
blues and purples, pinks and scarlets, of their various degrees, paced
slowly up the aisle, escorting their distinguished guests, savants of
several nations, and headed by the Vice-Chancellor, whose array
outwent Solomon in all his glory.
The top gallery was on its feet, but not in reverence. The organ-march
was drowned in the roar of lusty voices greeting the Head of the
University thus:
"Oh, whist, whist, whist!
Here comes the bogie man.
Now go to bed, you Baby,
You Tommy, Nell, and Dan.
Oh, whist, whist, whist!
He'll catch ye if he can;
And all the popsies, wopsies, wop,
Run for the bogie man."
The uproar was no whit diminished when presently the Vice-Chancellor
was seen to be making an address.
"Who wrote it for you, sir?"
"Oh, that's shocking bad Latin."
"_Jam!_ What kind of jam?"
"It's just what you said to those other blokes last year."
"It's always the same thing."
"It's all blarney."
"The guests wish you were done, sir."
"You may sit down, sir."
But the Vice-Chancellor, unperturbed, kept on with his inaudible
oratory to its natural end.
A professor of illustrious name was next to rise, throwing up a
laughing look at the boys, whose tumult bore him down after the first
few sentences. What matter? It was idle to pretend that that great
audience could follow Latin speeches. They were all to go into print,
and he who would and could might read them at his ease. The phrase
that undid this genial personage was _clarior luce_.
"Oh, _oh_, sir! Lucy who?"
"Clare or Lucy? Try for both, sir."
"We'll surely tell your wife, sir."
"A sad example to our youth, sir."
"You shock our guest from Paris, sir."
The prize English essayist was hardly allowed to recite the first
paragraph of his production.
"Very nice."
"But a great bore."
"It's not as good as mine."
"That'll do, sir."
"The Vice-Chancellor is gaping, sir."
"Three cheers for the lady who jilted the Senior Proctor!"
Under the storm of enthusiasm evoked by this happy suggestion, the
English essayist gave place to the Greek poet, a rosy-cheeked
stripling who stood his ground barely two minutes.
"Aren't you very young, my dear?"
"Will some kind lady kiss him for his mother?"
The English prize poem, the Newdigate, founded by Sir Roger Newdigate
of the George Eliot country, was heard through with a traditional
attention and respect, though the poet's delivery came in for
occasional criticism.
"You're too singsong, sir."
"Please give him the key, Mr. Lloyd."
Even those few world-famed scholars and statesmen on whom the
University was conferring the high distinction of her D. C. L. were
showered with merry impudence, as one by one they advanced to receive
the honour, though there were no such lucky shots of wit as have
signalised, on different occasions, at Oxford or at Cambridge, the
greeting of certain popular poets. Holmes was asked from the gallery
if he had come in the one-hoss shay, and Longfellow, wearing the
gorgeous vestments of his new dignity, was hailed by a cry: "Behold
the Red Man of the West." Even the Laureate, whose prophet locks were
flung back from his inspired brow somewhat more wildly than their
wont, was assailed by a stentorian inquiry:
"_Did_ your mother call you early, call you early, Alfred dear?"
The conferring of degrees upon Oxford students takes place--at
irregular intervals, but not infrequently--in the Convocation House.
Into a long, narrow room, dignitaries grouped at the top and
candidates at the bottom, with guests seated in rows on either side,
sweeps the Vice-Chancellor in his gorgeous red and white. He is
preceded by the mace-bearer and followed by two Proctors. Taking the
place of honour, he reads a page or two of Latin, lifting his cap--the
Proctors raising theirs in solemn unison--whenever the word _Dominus_
occurs. The lists of candidates for the various degrees are then read,
and the Proctors, at the end of each list, rise simultaneously, march
a few steps down the hall, wheel with military precision, and, like
the King of France, march back again. These apparently wayward
promenades are supposed to give opportunity for tradesmen with unpaid
bills to imperil a candidate's degree by plucking the Proctor's gown.
The Oxford tradesmen have not availed themselves of this privilege for
a century or so, but the term _plucked_ is only too familiar. With
many bows and much Latin, even with kneeling that the Vice-Chancellor
may tap the learned pates with a Testament, the higher degrees are
conferred. Each brand-new doctor withdraws into the robing-room, where
his waiting friends eagerly divest him of his old plumage and trick
him out in gayer hood and more voluminous gown. So arrayed, he returns
for a low bow to the Vice-Chancellor, who touches his own
mortar-board in response. The larger company of candidates for the
first degree come forward in groups, each head of a college presenting
his own men, and these are speedily made into bachelors.
Out of that student multitude have come--not all, be it confessed,
with degrees--many of England's greatest. Glorious phantoms haunt by
moonlight the Gothic shadows of High Street. The gallant Lovelace, the
resolute Pym, Admiral Blake, Sir Philip Sidney, Francis Beaumont, Lord
Herbert of Cherbury, Sir Thomas Browne, Dr. Johnson, Dean Swift,
Wellington, Peel, Gladstone, Adam Smith, Hamilton, Locke, Hobbes,
Blackstone, Newman, Manning, Stanley, Maurice, Faber, Heber, Clough,
Jeremy Taylor, Whitfield, the Wesleys, the Arnolds,--and this is but
the beginning of a tale that can never be told. Yet Oxford, "Adorable
Dreamer" though she be,
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope,"
has not done as well by her poets as by the rest of her brood. With
all her theology, she did not make a churchman out of Swinburne, nor a
saint of Herrick, and as for Landor and Shelley, her eyes were holden
and she cast them forth.
Of Shakespeare, an alien figure crossing the path of her gowned and
hooded doctors, or watching her "young barbarians all at play"--for
Oxford lads knew how to play before ever "Eights Week" was thought
of--she seems to have remembered nothing save that he stood godfather
to his landlady's baby-boy, little William Davenant, in the old Saxon
church of St. Michael's. Oxford let him pay his reckoning at the Crown
and go his way unnoted. He was none of hers. Even now, when his name
is blazoned on rows upon rows of volumes in window after window of
Broad Street, I doubt if the Oxford dons would deem Shakespeare
capable of editing his own works.
"Where were you bred?
And how achieved you these endowments, which
You make more rich to owe?"
One would like to fancy that Duke Humphrey's library, beautiful as a
library of Paradise, made the poet welcome; but the King's
Commissioners had despoiled it in 1550, and more than half a century
went by before, toward the close of Shakespeare's life, Sir Thomas
Bodley had refounded and refitted it as The Bodleian.
Yet the grey university city, "spreading her gardens to the moonlight,
and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle
Age,"--how could she have failed deeply to impress the sensitive
spirit of that disregarded wayfarer? Although she had suffered so
grievously under the flail of the Reformation, although she was
destined to become the battered stronghold of Charles I, the voice
within her gates was, and is, not the battle-cry, but the murmurous
voice of meditation and dream and prayer. As we enter into the
sanctuary of her grave beauty, personal chagrins and the despair of
our own brief mortality fall away. The unending life of human thought
is here, enduring, achieving, advancing, with its constant miracle of
resurrection out of the old form into the new.
COUNTIES OF THE SEVERN VALLEY
Of the counties occupying the Severn basin, three form, in
continuation with Cheshire, the Welsh border,--Shropshire, Hereford,
and Monmouth. Shropshire, together with the West Midland counties of
Worcester and Gloucester, is traversed by the mother stream, but
Hereford and Monmouth lie in their respective vales of the tributary
Wye and Usk, and Warwickshire, already noted, in the broad basin of
the Avon.
In previous summers we had explored, to some extent, Gloucestershire
and Worcestershire and the picturesque Wye valley, but we were, except
for glimpses from the railway, strangers to Shropshire, and so dropped
off the train at Shrewsbury, in a Saturday twilight, with but moderate
expectation. Had not the judicious Baedeker instructed us that "not
more than half a day need be devoted to Shrewsbury"? What happened was
that we lost our hearts to the beautiful old town and lingered there
nearly a week without finding time, even so, to do a third of the
tourist duty laid down in what a guileless Florentine has called "the
red prayer-book of the foreigners." But we would gladly have stayed
months longer and listened for the moonlight talk between that lofty
Norman castle, "builte in such a brave plot that it could have espyed
a byrd flying in every strete," and those fine old houses of the Salop
black-and-white whose "curious sculptures and carvings and quirks of
architecture" gave such pleasure to Hawthorne. Surely here, in this
city of many memories, "a stone shall cry out of the wall, and the
beam out of the timber shall answer it."
Shrewsbury is but a little city,--one of the local proverbs runs: "We
don't go by size, or a cow would catch a hare,"--but its architectural
grace and a certain joyousness of open-air life more French than
English endow it with rare charm. It won a fitting praise from its own
Tudor poet, Thomas Churchyard:
"Now Shrewsbury shall be honoured (as it ought);
The seate deserves a righte greate honour heere;
That wallèd town is sure so finely wrought,
It glads itself, and beautifies the sheere."
Fortunate in situation, Shrewsbury is enthroned upon twin hills almost
surrounded by the Severn. As one of the warders of the Welsh border,
it was stoutly fortified, and enough of the old wall remains to make a
pleasant promenade. On the only land approach, an isthmus barely three
hundred yards broad, stands the square red keep of the castle. The
slender spire of St. Mary's is a landmark far and wide. St. Alkmund's,
with a sister spire, has a tradition that reaches back to Æthelfreda,
daughter of Alfred the Great. Old St. Chad's, a noble church in the
days of Henry III, has swayed and sunk into a fragment that serves as
chapel for the cemetery where some of the first Salopian families take
their select repose. The towered Abbey Church is of venerable dignity,
with battered monuments of cross-legged knight and chaliced priest,
and a meek, bruised, broken effigy supposed to represent that fiery
founder of the abbey, first Earl of Shrewsbury and builder of the
castle, Roger de Montgomery, second in command at Hastings to William
the Conqueror.
[Illustration: THE SEVERN BELOW THE QUARRY, SHREWSBURY]
The first known name of Shrewsbury was The Delight, and by that
name it may well be remembered of those who have wandered through Wyle
Cop and Butchers' Row, past the Raven tavern where Farquhar wrote "The
Recruiting Officer" and the old half-timbered house where Richmond,
soon to be Henry VII, lodged on his way to Bosworth Field. There are
steep streets that, as the proverb has it, go "uphill and against the
heart," but carven gables and armorial bearings and mediæval
barge-boards tempt one on. There are wild and fierce associations, as
that of the Butter Market, where at the High Cross poor Prince David
of Wales--who must have had nine lives--after being dragged through
the town at a horse's tail, was "hanged, burned and quartered," but in
the main it is a city of gracious memories. Its Grammar School, an
Edward VI foundation, which in the seventeenth century boasted four
masters, six hundred scholars, and a "hansome library," counts on its
roll of alumni Charles Darwin, the most famous native of Shrewsbury,
the poet Faber, Philip Sidney and his _fidus Achates_, Fulke Greville,
whose tomb in St. Mary's Church at Warwick bears the inscription that
he was "Servant to Queen Elizabeth, Counsellour to King James, and
Friend to Sir Philip Sidney." It was in 1564, that starry year in
English literary annals, that the two lads entered the school.
Sidney's father was then Lord President of Wales--one of the best she
ever had--and resident at Ludlow Castle, from whose splendid halls Sir
Henry and Lady Mary wrote most wise and tender letters to their
"little Philip." He must have profited by these, for in after years
Fulke Greville extolled him as the paragon of schoolboys:
"Of his youth I will report no other wonder than this, though
I lived with him and knew him from a child, yet I never knew
him other than a man, with such staidness of mind, lovely and
familiar gravity, as carried grace and reverence above great
years; his talk ever of knowledge and his very play tending
to enrich his mind so that even his teachers found something
in him to observe and learn above that which they had usually
read or taught."
The school, still flourishing, is now housed in new buildings across
the Severn, opposite the Quarry, a spacious park with
"Broad ambrosial aisles of lofty limes."
Here we used to sit on shaded benches and watch the bright-eyed
urchins fishing in the river, for Shropshire, as the saying goes, is
"full of trouts and tories." Here we would repeat Milton's invocation
to the Goddess of the Severn:
"Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave,
In twisted braids of lilies knitting
The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair,"
and when her "sliding chariot" declined to stay for us
"By the rushy-fringèd bank,"
we would ignobly console ourselves with "a Shrewsbury cake of Palin's
own make,"--such a delicious, melting-on-the-tongue concoction as
Queen Bess was regaled withal and as suggested to Congreve, in his
"Way of the World," the retort: "Why, brother Wilful of Salop, you may
be as short as a Shrewsbury cake, if you please." The Simnel cake of
which Herrick sings,--
"I'll to thee a Simnel bring,
'Gainst thou goest a mothering,"
is made only in the days approaching Christmas and Easter. It consists
of minced fruit in a saffron-coloured crust, said to be exceeding
tough, and on Mothering Sunday, in Mid-Lent, is taken as a gift to
their mothers by children out at service, who, on this local festival,
come home to be welcomed at the cost of the fatted calf, veal and
rice-pudding being the regulation dinner. The ancient refrain: "A
soule-cake, a soule-cake! Have mercy on all Christen soules for a
soule-cake!" refers to yet another specialty of Shropshire ovens. On
All Souls' Eve it used to be the custom to set out on the table a
tower of these round flat cakes, every visitor reducing the pile by
one. The residue, if residue there were, fell to the share of the poor
ghosts.
The Quarry, in the bad old times, was often the scene of bull-baitings
and bear-baitings and cock-fights. It is better to remember that the
Whitsun Plays were performed here, for these were comely and edifying
spectacles. In 1568, when Sir Henry Sidney favoured the Grammar School
with a visit, there was "a noble stage playe played at Shrewsbury, the
which was praysed greately, and the chyffe actor thereof was one
Master Aston," being no less a personage than the head master.
A Quarry holiday that, by the grace of Sabrina, fell within the brief
limits of our sojourn, was the Shrewsbury Floral Fête, vaunted on the
pink program as "The Grandest Fête in the United Kingdom." Our
landlady earnestly vouched for the truth of this description. "There
is them who would have it as York Gala be the greatest, but York Gala,
grand however, ben't so grand as this."
On Wednesday, August twenty-second, we took aristocratic tickets at
two and six, for Wednesday is the day of the county families. Thursday
is the shilling day, when, by train, by coach, by barge, by wagonette,
by farmer's gig and carrier's cart, all the countryside comes
streaming in. The weather had been watched with keen anxiety. "Rain
spells ruin," the saying went; but it was clear and hot. Men, women,
and children lay on the grass around their luncheon baskets--we had
hardly expected this of the county families--all through the wide
enclosure, making the most of every disk of shade. From the central
bandstand and from the encircling tents--refreshment tents, flower
tents, fruit tents, vegetable tents, bee-and-honey tents--drooped rows
of languid pennons. The fountain in The Dingle sent up a silvery tree
of spray, while the white and yellow water-lilies in its little pool
blinked like sleepy children. Within the tents the heat was stifling,
but a continuous flow of flushed humanity, as whist as in the County
Store where even the awed shop girls are instructed to speak with
bated breath, passed in admiring review the sumptuous masses of
heavily fragrant flowers, the great black grapes almost bursting with
wine, the luscious plums and cherries, the amazing platoons of
plethoric onions, exaggerated potatoes, and preposterously elongated
turnips and carrots, the model beehives and the jars of amber honey.
The gold-medal exhibitors, perspiring but beaming, stood by their
red-ticketed products, while the silver-medal folk viewed their blue
tickets with a pleasant sense of superiority to the subdued
white-ticket battalion and the invisible yellow-ticketers who were
only "commended."