Oxford! Alma Mater! not to love thee were indeed the ingratitude of a
degenerate son. Let the whiners of the Conventicle rail at thee for a
mother of heretics, and the Joseph Humes of domestic economy propose to
adapt the scale of thy expenses to their own narrow notions--I uphold
thee to be the queen of all human institutions--the incarnated union of
Church and State--royal in thy revenues as in thy expenditure--thy
doctrine as orthodox as thy dinners, thy politics as sound as thy port.
Oxford! who are they that rail at her? who dare to lift their voice
against that seat of high and holy memories? The man who boasts a
private education, (so private, that his most intimate friends have
never found it out,) who, innocent himself of all academic experiences
and associations, grudges to others that superiority which they never
boast indeed, but to which his secret soul bears envious witness. Or the
rich nonconformist, risen perhaps from obscurity to a rank in society,
indulging either his spleen or his pride--either to send his eldest son
as a gentleman-commoner to Christ-Church, to swallow the Thirty-nine
Articles with his champagne; or to have his fling at the Church through
her universities--accusing Churchmen of bigotry, and exclusiveness, and
illiberality, because Dissenters do not found colleges.[2] Or, worse
than all, the unworthy disciple who (like the noxious plant that has
grown up beneath the shade of some goodly tree) has drawn no nobility of
soul from the associations which surrounded his ungrateful youth: for
whom all the reality and romance of academic education were alike in
vain: sneering at the honours which he could not obtain, denying the
existence of opportunities which he neglected; the basest of approvers,
he quotes to his own eternal infamy the scenes of riot and dissipation,
the alternations of idleness and extravagance, which make up his sole
recollections of the university: and looking, without one glance of
affection, upon the face of his fair and graceful mother, makes the
chance mole, or the early wrinkle, which he traces there, the subject of
his irreverent jest, forgets the kindness of which he was unworthy, and
remembers for evil the wholesome discipline which was irksome only to
such as him.
"Non haec jocosae conveniunt lyrae;"
I admit mine is not the tongue or pen for such a subject; and Oxford
has, I hope, no lack of abler champions. But it was geese, you know, who
once saved the Capitol; and I must have my hiss at the iniquitous
quackeries which people seek to perpetrate under the taking title of
University Reform. And when I, loving Oxford as I do, see some of her
own sons arrayed against her, I can only remember this much of my
philosophy--that there are cases when to be angry becomes a duty. Men
who, knowing nothing of the universities from experience, think proper
to run them down, succeed at all events in exposing one crying evil--the
absurdity of meddling with what one does not understand. We who know
better may afford to smile at once at their spite and their ignorance.
But he who lifts his voice against the mother that bore him, can fix no
darker blot upon her fame than the disgrace of having given birth to
him.
Show me the man who did not like Oxford, and I will show you either a
sulky misanthrope or an affected ass. Many, many indeed, are the
unpleasant recollections which, in the case of nearly all of us, will
mingle with the joy with which we recall our college days. More than the
ghosts of duns departed, perhaps unpaid; more than the heart-burnings of
that visionary fellowship, for which we were beaten (we verily believe,
unfairly) by a neck; more than that loved and lost ideal of first class,
which we deserved, but did not get, (the opinions of our examiners not
coinciding in that point with our own;) yes, more than all these, come
forcibly to many minds, the self-accusing silent voice that whispers of
time wasted and talents misapplied--kind advice, which the heat of youth
misconstrued or neglected--jewels of price that once lay strewed upon
the golden sands of life, then wantonly disregarded, or picked up but to
be flung away, and which the tide of advancing years has covered from
our view for ever--blessed opportunities of acquiring wisdom, human and
divine, which never can return.
Yet in spite of all this, if there be any man who can say that Oxford is
not to him a land of pleasant memories, ~"Met' hemoi parhestios
ghenoito"~--which is, being freely translated, "May he never put his legs
under my mahogany"--that's all. I never knew him yet, and have no wish
to make his acquaintance. He may have carried off every possible
university honour for what I care; he is more hopelessly stupid, in my
view of things, than if he had been plucked fifteen times. If he was
fond of reading, or of talking about reading; fond of hunting, or
talking about hunting; fond of walking, riding, rowing, leaping, or any
possible exercise besides dancing; if he loved pleasant gardens or
solemn cloisters; learned retirement or unlearned jollification--in a
word, if he had any imaginable human sympathies, and cared for any thing
besides himself, he would have liked Oxford. Men's tastes differ, no
doubt; but to have spent four years of the spring of one's life in one
of the most magnificent cities and best societies in the world, and not
to have enjoyed it--this is not a variety of taste, but its privation.
I fancy there is a mistaken opinion very prevalent, that young and
foolish, older and wiser, are synonymous terms. Stout gentlemen of a
certain age, brimful of proprieties, shake their heads alarmingly, and
talk of the folly of boys; as if they were the only fools. And if at any
time, in the fulness of their hearts, they refer to some freak of their
own youth, they appear to do it with a sort of apology to themselves,
that such wise individuals as they are now should ever have done such
things! And as the world stands at present, it is the old story of the
Lion and the Painter; the elderly gentlemen are likely to have it their
own way; they say what they like, while the young ones are content to do
what they like. And the more absurdity a man displays in his teens, (and
some, it must be confessed, are absurd enough) the more insupportable an
air of wisdom does he put on when he gets settled. And as there is no
hope of these sedate gentry being sent to College again to teach the
rising generation of under-graduates the art of precocious gravity, and
still less hope of their arriving at it of themselves, perhaps there is
no harm in mooting the question on neutral ground, whether such a
consummation as that of putting old heads upon young shoulders is
altogether desirable.
Wherefore, I, Frank Hawthorne--being of the age of nine-and-twenty, or
thereabouts, and of sound mind, and about to renounce for ever all claim
and title to be considered a young man; having married a wife, and left
sack and all other bad habits; having no longer any fellowship with
under-graduates, or army subs, or medical students, or young men about
town, or any other class of the heterogeneous irregulars who make up
"Young England"--being a perfectly disinterested party in the question,
inasmuch as having lost my reputation for youth, I have never acquired
one for wisdom--hereby raise my voice against the intolerable cant,
which assumes every man to be a hare-brained scapegrace at twenty, and
Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in
more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are
empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool," &c., (musty as the proverb
is, it is rather from neglect than over-application.) I have known men
by the dozen, who in their youth were either empty-headed coxcombs or
noisy sots; does my reader think that any given number of additional
years has made them able statesmen, sound lawyers, or erudite divines?
that because they have become honourable by a seat in Parliament,
learned by courtesy, reverend by office, they are therefore really more
useful members of society than when they lounged the High Street, or
woke the midnight echoes of the quadrangle? Nay, life is too short for
the leopard to change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin; one can but
pare the claws of the first, and put a suit of the last European fashion
upon the other.
Let any man run over in his own mind the list of those school and
college companions with whom, after the lapse of ten years or so he has
still an opportunity of occasionally renewing his acquaintance, and
judging of the effect which time has had upon their habits and
characters. In how many cases can he trace any material alteration,
beyond what results from the mere accidents of time and place? He finds,
it is to be hoped, good principles developed, warm impulses ripened into
active habits, exaggerations softened down, (for I am giving him credit
for not choosing his companions, even in youth, among the vicious in
heart and principle;) but if he finds in any what he can call a _change_
at all, then I ask, in how many instances is it a change for the better?
or does he not find it rather where there was no sterling value in the
metal, which, as the gloss of youth wears off, loses its only charm?
Thirty is the turning-point of a man's life; when marrying becomes a
now-or-never sort of business, and dinners begin to delight him more
than dancing. As I said just now, then, I stand just at the corner; and,
looking round before I turn it, I own somewhat of a shyness for the
company of those "grave and reverend seniors" who are to be my
fellow-travellers hereafter through life. There are certain points on
which I fear we are scarce prepared to agree. I must have one window
open for the first few miles of the journey at all events--that I may
look behind me. Life's a fast train, and one can't expect to be allowed
to get out at the stations; still less to ask the engineer to put back,
because we have left our youth behind us. Yet there are some things in
which I hope always to be a boy; I hope ever to prefer thoughtlessness
to heartlessness, imprudence to selfishness, impulse to calculation. It
is hard enough to part with all the fiery spirits, the glowing
imaginations, the elasticity of mind and body which we lose as age
creeps on; but if, with the bright summer weather and cloudless skies of
youth, to which we are content to bid farewell, we must lose, too, the
"sunshine of the breast"--the "bloom of heart"--then well might the poet
count him happy who died in early spring--who knew nothing of life but
its fair promises, and passed away in happy scepticism of the winter
which was to come.
Talk of putting old heads upon young shoulders! Heaven forbid! It would
but be making them stoop prematurely. If indeed we could put young
hearts into old bodies occasionally, we might do some good; or if there
could ever be combined in some fortunate individual, throughout his
life, the good qualities peculiar to each successive climacteric; if we
could mix just enough of the acid and the bitter, which are apt to
predominate so unhappily after a long rubbing through the world, to
qualify the fiery spirit of youth, and prevent its sweetness from
cloying, the compound would undoubtedly be a very pleasant one. But
this, it is to be feared, like many other desiderata, is too good to be
attainable; and the experience which we undoubtedly want in early life,
we acquire too often at the cost of that freshness of heart, which
nature intended as a gift still more valuable.
Nowhere does the old Stagyrite display a more consummate knowledge of
what men are made of, than in his contrasted characters of youth and
age. I wonder how many of the old gentlemen who call themselves
philosophers in this degenerate age, ever read or remember what he says
on the subject. It is a great comfort, when one is arguing against so
much collective wisdom, to feel that one has such authority to fall back
upon; and I have the less hesitation in bringing my old friend Aristotle
forward to help me, because I can assure my unlearned readers, ladies
and others, that I am not going to quote any thing nearly so grave and
sensible as modern philosophy. "Stingy, ill-natured, suspicious,
selfish, narrow-minded"--these, with scarce a redeeming quality, are
some of the choice epithets which he strings together as the
characteristics of the respectable old governors and dowagers of his
day; while the young, although, as he confesses, somewhat too much the
creatures of impulse, and indebted to it for some of their virtues as
well as vices, are trustful towards others, honest in themselves,
open-handed and open-hearted, warm friends and brave enemies. It is
true, he observes, they have, in a large degree, the fault common to all
honest men, they are "easily humbugged;" a failing which perhaps may let
us into the secret of their sitting down so quietly under the imputation
of a hundred others. He urges, too, elsewhere, a fact I am not disposed
to battle about, that young men do not make good philosophers; but this
is in a book which he wrote for the use of his own son, wherein he
probably thought it his duty to take the conceit out of his
heir-apparent; but if he ever allowed the young philosopher to get a
sight of the other book containing the two characters aforesaid, it may
be doubted whether he found him as "easily humbugged" afterwards.
Remember, reader, as I said before I claim to occupy neutral ground. If
I essay to defend youth from some injustice which it suffers at the
hands of partial judges, it is as an amateur advocate rather than an
accredited champion--for I am young no longer. If I am rash enough to
couch a lance against that venerable phantom, which, under the name of
Wisdom, hovers round grey hairs, I am but preparing a rod for my own
back--for I feel myself growing old. I admit it with a sigh; but the
sigh is not for the past only, but even more for the present. I mourn
not so much for that which Time has taken away, as for the insufficiency
of that which it brings instead. I would rejoice to be relieved from the
dominion of the hot follies of youth, if I could escape at the same time
the degrading yoke of the cooler vices of maturity. I do not find men
grow better as they grow older; wiser they may grow, but it is the
wisdom of the serpent. We scarce grow less sensual, less vain, less
eager after what we think pleasure; I would we continued as generous and
as warm. We gain the cunning to veil our passions, to regulate even our
vices according to the scale (and that no parsimonious one) which what
we call "society" allows; we lose the enthusiasm which in some degree
excused our follies, with the light-heartedness which made them
delightful. Few men among us are they who can look back upon the years
gone by, and not feel that, if these may be justly charged with folly,
the writing of the accusation that stands against their riper age is of
a graver sort.
It is melancholy, rather than amusing, to hear men of a certain age rail
against the faults and extravagance of their juniors. Angry that they
themselves are no longer young, they visit with a rod of iron such an
intolerable offence in others. Even newspapers have of late been
eloquent against the disgusting immoralities of breaking knockers and
bonneting policemen. The _Times_ turns censor upon such an
"ungentlemanly outrage;" the _Weekly Despatch_ has its propriety shocked
by such "freaks of the aristocracy;" and both, in their zeal to
reprobate offences so dangerous to the best interests of society,
sacrifice somewhat of that "valuable space" which should have been
devoted to the bulletin of the health, or the history of the travels, of
the "gallant officer" who last deliberately shot his friend in a duel;
or the piquant details of the last _crim. con._, with the extraordinary
disclosures expected to be made by the "noble defendant." Society has no
sympathy with vices to which it has no temptation; it might have done
foolish things in its day, but has long ago seen the folly of them. So
we make a graceful acknowledgment of having been wrong once, for the
sake of congratulating ourselves upon being so very right now.
Let me then, for some few moments, recall those scenes which, on the
stage of life, have passed away for ever; and forgetting, as memory
loves to do, the evil that was in them, let it be not idle repining to
lament the good.
Oh! dark yet pleasant quadrangle, round whose wide area I might wander
now, a stranger among strangers, where are they who once gave life and
mirth to cheer those ancient walls? There were full a score of rooms,
congenial _lares_, in which no hour of day or night would have found me
other than a welcome guest. I had friends, yea, friends, within those
prison-like windows--warm hearts walled in by thy cold grey
stones--friends that had thoughts, and feelings, and pursuits in
common--who were not hospitable in words alone, suffering each other's
presence with well-concealed _ennui_--but friends in something more than
in the name. In vain, among the cold conventionalities of life, shall I
look for the warm and kindly welcome, the sympathy of feeling, the
unrestrained yet courteous familiarity of intercourse, which was part
and parcel of a college life; and if for this only I should say of
Oxford, that I shall not look upon its like again--if for this only, I
doubt whether the years of my youthful pilgrimage were altogether evil,
who shall gainsay me? Where, or in what society of wise, and orderly,
and respectable "grown-up children," shall I find the sincerity and
warm-heartedness that once were the atmosphere of my daily life? Where
is the friend of my maturer choosing, into whose house I can walk at any
time, and feel sure I am no intruder? Where is the man, among those with
whom I am by hard fate compelled to associate, who does not measure his
regard, his hospitality, his very smiles, by my income, my station in
society--any thing but myself? Older and wiser!--oh yes!--youthful
friendship is very foolish in such matters.
But I suppose I must put up, as I best may, with the accumulating weight
of years and wisdom. It won't do to give up one's degree, and begin
again at the university, even if they leave us a university worth going
to. At all events, one could not go back and find there those "old
familiar faces" that made it what it was; and it is more pleasant to
look upon it all--the place and its old occupants--as still existing in
some dream-land or other, than to return to find an old acquaintance in
every stick and stone, while every human face and voice is strange to
us.
Yet one does meet friends in old scenes, sometimes, when the meeting is
as unexpected as delightful. And just so, in my last visit to Oxford,
did I stumble upon Horace Leicester. We met in the quadrangle where we
had parted some six years back, just as we might if we had supped
together the night before; whereas we had been all the time hundreds of
miles asunder: and we met as unrestrainedly, only far more cordially.
Neither of us had much time to spare in Oxford, but we dined together of
course; talked over old friends, and told old stories. As to the first,
it was strange enough to moralize upon the after-fortunes of some of our
contemporaries. One--of whom, for habitual absence from lectures, and
other misdemeanours many and various, the tutors had prophesied all
manner of evil, and who had been dismissed by the Principal at his final
leave-taking, with the remark that he was the luckiest man he had ever
known, inasmuch as having been perseveringly idle without being plucked,
and mixed up in every row without being rusticated--was now working hard
day and night as a barrister, engaged as a junior on committee business
the whole Session, and never taking a holiday except on the Derby day.
The ugliest little rascal of our acquaintance, and as stupid as a post,
was married to a pretty girl with a fortune of thirty thousand. Another,
and one of the best of us--Charley White--who united the business habits
of a man with the frolic of a schoolboy, and who ought to have been
added to the roll of the College benefactors, as having been the founder
of the Cricket and the Whist Club, and restored to its old place on the
river, at much cost and pains, the boat which had been withdrawn for the
last five years, and reduced the sundry desultory idlenesses of the
under-graduates into something like method and order--Charley White was
now rector of a poor and populous parish in Yorkshire, busily engaged in
building a new church and schools, opening Provident Societies, and
shutting up beer-shops, and instructing the rising generation of his
parishioners in catechism and cricket alternately. While the steadiest
(I was very near saying the only steady man) among our mutual
acquaintance, who looked at every sixpence before he spent it, checked
his own washing-lists, went to bed at ten o'clock, and was in short an
exemplary character, (he was held out to me; on my first entrance, as a
valuable acquaintance for any young man, but I soon despaired of
successfully imitating so bright a model)--well, this gentleman having
been taken into partnership, somewhat prematurely perhaps on the
strength of the aforesaid reputation, by his father's firm--they were
Liverpool merchants of high standing--had thought proper, disgusted
probably with the dissipations and immoralities of trade, to retire to
America in search of purity and independence, without going through the
form of closing his accounts with the house. The Liverpudleians, indeed,
according to Horace's account, gave a somewhat ugly name to the
transaction; he had been cashier to the firm, they said, who were minus
some tens of thousands thereby; but as the senior partner was known to
have smoked cigars at a preparatory school (thereby showing what he
_would_ have done had he been sent to Oxford,) whereas our friend was
always "a steady man," I leave the reader to judge which party is
entitled to the most credit.
It was after we had separated that a friend of mine, not an Oxford man,
who had dined with us and appeared much amused by some of Horace's
reminiscences, asked me the very puzzling question, "Was your friend
Leicester what they call a 'rowing man' at College?" Now, I protest
altogether against the division of under-graduates into reading men and
rowing men, as arbitrary and most illogical; there being a great many
who have no claim to be reckoned either in one class or the other, and a
great many who hover between both. And this imaginary distinction,
existing as it notoriously does at Oxford, and fostered and impressed
upon men by the tutors, (often unintentionally, or with the very best
intentions,) is productive in many cases of a great deal of harm. A man
(or _boy_ if you please) is taught to believe, upon his very first
entrance, that one of these characters will infallibly cling to him, and
that he has only to choose between the two. For the imaginary division
creates a real one; in many colleges, a man who joins a boat's crew, or
a cricket club, or goes out now and then with the harriers, is looked
upon with suspicion by the authorities at once; and by a very natural
consequence, a man who wants to read his five or six hours a-day
quietly, finds that some of his pleasantest companions look upon him as
a slow coach. So, probably before the end of his first term, he is
hopelessly committed, at nineteen, to a consistency of character rarely
met with at fifty. If he lays claim to the reputation of a reading man,
and has an eye to the loaves and fishes in the way of scholarships and
fellowships, he is compelled, by the laws of his _caste_, to renounce
some of the most sensible and healthful amusements which a university
life offers. He must lead a very humdrum sort of life indeed. It is not
enough that he should be free from the stains of vice and immorality;
that his principles and habits should be those of a gentleman; that he
should avoid excesses, and be observant of discipline; this the
university would have a right to expect from all who are candidates for
her honours and emoluments. But there is a conventional character which
he must put on besides this. I say "put on;" because, however natural it
may be to some men, it cannot possibly be so to all. His exercise must
be taken at stated times and places: it must consist principally of
walking, whether he be fond of it or not, varied occasionally by a
solitary skiffing expedition down the river, or a game of billiards with
some very steady friend on the sly. His dress must exhibit either the
negligence of a sloven, (in case he be an aspirant for very high honours
indeed,) or the grave precision of a respectable gentleman of forty. He
must eschew all such vanities as white trousers and well-cut boots. He
must be profoundly ignorant of all university intelligence that does not
bear in some way on the schools; must be utterly indifferent what boat
is at the head of the river, or whether Drake's hounds are fox or
harriers. He must never be seen out of his rooms except at lecture
before two o'clock, and never return to a wine-party after chapel. His
judgment of the merits of port and sherry must be confined principally
to the fact of one being red and the other white, and the compounding of
punch must be to him a mystery unfathomable. Now, if he can be, or
assume to be, all this, then he will be admitted into the most orthodox
and steady set in his college; and if he have, besides, an ordinary
amount of scholarship, and tact enough to talk judiciously about his
books and his reading, he may get up a very fair reputation indeed. And
when at his final examination he makes, as nine-tenths of such men do
make, a grand crash, and his name comes out in the third or fourth
class, or he get "gulfed" altogether--it is two to one but his friends
and his tutor look upon him, and talk of him, as rather an ill-used
individual. He was "unlucky in his examination"--"the essay did not suit
him"--they were "quite surprised at his failure"--"his health was not
good the last term or two"--"he was too nervous." These are cases which
have occurred in every man's experience: men read ten hours a-day, with
a watch by their side, cramming in stuff that they do not understand,
are talked about as "sure firsts" till one gets sick of their very
names, assume all the airs which really able men seldom do assume, and
take at last an equal degree with others who have been acquiring the
same amount of knowledge with infinitely less pretension, and who,
without moping the best part of their lives in an artificial existence,
will make more useful members of society in the end. "How was it," said
an old lady in the country to me one day, "that young Mr C---- did not
get a first class? I understand he read very hard, and I know he refused
every invitation to dinner when he was down here in the summer
vacation?" "That was the very reason, my dear madam," said I; "you may
depend upon it." She stared, of course; but I believe I was not far out.
Let men read as much as they will, and as hard as they will, on any
subjects for which they have the ability and inclination; but never let
them suppose they are to lay down one code of practice to suit all
tempers and constitutions. Cannot a man be a scholar, and a gentleman,
and a good fellow at the same time?
And, after all, where is the broad moral distinction between these
_soi-disant_ steady men, and those whom they are pleased to consider as
"rowing" characters? it has always seemed to me rather apocryphal. If a
man thinks proper to amuse himself with a chorus in his own rooms at one
o'clock in the morning, it seems hardly material whether it be Greek or
English--Sophocles or Tom Moore. It's a matter of taste, and tastes
differ. Nor do I think the morality of Horace or Aristophanes, or the
theology of Lucretius, so peculiarly admirable, as to render them, _per
se_, fitter subjects for the exclusive exercise of a young man's
faculties than "the Pickwick Papers," or "The Rod and the Gun." I have
heard--(I never saw, nor will I believe it)--of the profanity of certain
sporting under-graduates, who took into chapel the racing calendar,
bound in red morocco, instead of a prayer-book; I hold it to have been
the malicious fiction of some would-be university reformer; but, even if
true, I am not sure that I much prefer that provident piety which I have
noticed getting up its Greek within the same walls by means of a
Septuagint and Greek liturgy. Religion is one thing, classical learning
another, and sporting information another; all totally distinct, and
totally different: the first immeasurably above the other two, but
standing equidistant from both. It does not make a man one whit the
better to know that Coraebus won the cup at Olympia B.C. 776, than it
does to know that Priam did _not_ win the St Leger at Doncaster A.D.
1830; from all I can make out, the Greeks on the turf at present are not
much worse than their old namesakes; I dare say there was a fair amount
of black-legism on both occasions. Men injure their moral and physical
health by reading as much as by other things; it takes quite as much out
of a man, and puts as little in him to any good purpose, to get up his
logic as to pull in an eight-oar.
Besides, if one is to read and enter into the spirit of a dozen
different authors, one dull monotonous round of physical existence seems
ill fitted to call out the requisite variety of mental powers. I hold
that there are divers and sundry fit times, and places, and states of
mind, suited to different lines of reading. If a man is at work upon
history, by all means let him sport oak rigidly against all visitors;
let him pile up his authorities and references on every vacant chair all
round him, and get a clear notion of it by five or six hours'
uninterrupted and careful study. Or, if he has a system of philosophy to
get up, let him sit down with his head cool, his window open, (not the
one looking into quad.,) let him banish from his mind all minor matters,
and not break off in the chain of argument so long as he can keep his
brain clear and his eyes open. Even then, a good gallop afterwards, or a
cigar and a glass of punch, with some lively fellow who is no
philosopher, will do him far more good than a fagging walk of so many
measured miles, with the studious companion whose head is stuffed as
full of such matter as his own, and whose talk will be of disputed
passages, and dispiriting anticipations of a "dead floorer" in the
schools. But if a man wants to make acquaintance with such books as
Juvenal, or Horace, or Aristophanes, he may surely do it to quite as
good purpose, and with far more relish, basking under a tree in summer,
or with a friend over a bottle in winter.
The false tone of society of which I have been speaking had its
influence upon Horace Leicester. Coming up to the university from a
public school, with a high character, a fair amount of scholarship, and
a host of acquaintances, he won the good-will at once of dons and of
under-graduates, and bid fair to be as universal a favourite at college
as he had been at Harrow. Never did a man enter upon an academic life
under happier auspices, nor, I believe, with a more thorough
determination to enjoy it in every way. He did not look upon his
emancipation from school discipline as a license for idleness, nor
intend to read the less because he could now read what he pleased, and
when he pleased. For, not to mention that Horace was ambitious, and had
at one time an eye to the class list--he had a taste for reading, and a
strong natural talent to appreciate what he read. But if he had a taste
for reading, he had other tastes as well, and, as he thought, not
incompatible; much as he admired his Roman namesake, he could not devote
his evenings exclusively to his society, but preferred carrying out his
precepts occasionally with more modern companions; and he had no notion
that during the next four years of his life he was to take an interest
in no sports but those of the old Greeks and Romans, and mount no horse
but Pegasus. For a term or two, Leicester got on very well, attended
lectures, read steadily till one or two o'clock, when there was nothing
particular going on, kept a horse, hired an alarm, and seldom cut
morning chapel, or missed a meet if within reasonable distance. It was a
course of life, which, in after days, he often referred to with a sigh
as having been most exemplary; and I doubt whether he was far wrong. But
it did not last. For a time his gentlemanly manners, good humour, and
good taste, carried it off with all parties; but it was against the
ordinary routine, and could not hold up against the popular prejudice.
The reading men eyed his top-boots with suspicion; the rowing men
complained he was growing a regular _sap_, always sporting oak when they
wanted him. Then his wine-parties were a source of endless tribulation
to him. First of all, he asked all those with whom he was most intimate
among his old schoolfellows to meet each other, adding one or two of his
new acquaintances: and a pretty mess he made of it. Men who had sat on
the same form with him and with each other at Harrow, and had betrayed
no such marked differences in their tastes as to prevent their
associating very pleasantly there, at Oxford, he found, had been
separated wide as the poles by this invisible, but impassable, line of
demarcation: to such a degree indeed, that although all had called upon
Horace, as they had upon each other, before it seemed decided on which
side they were to settle, yet when they now met at his rooms, they had
become strangers beyond a mere civil recognition, and had not a single
subject to converse upon in common. In fact, they were rather surprised
than pleased to meet at all; and it was in vain their host tried to get
them to amalgamate. Many seemed to take a pleasure in showing how
decidedly they belonged to one set or the other. One would talk of
nothing on earth besides hunting, and sat silent and sulky when Horace
turned the conversation; another affected an utter ignorance of all that
was going on in the university that was not connected with class-lists,
scholarships, &c. What provoked him most was, that some of those who
gave themselves the most pedantic airs, and would have been double-first
class men undeniably, if talking could have done it, were those whose
heads he well knew were as empty as the last bottle, and which made him
think that some men must take to reading at Oxford, simply because they
had faculties for nothing else.
At all events, Horace found the mixed system would not answer for
entertaining his friends. So the next time he asked a few of the reading
men, some of whom he knew used to be good fellows, together; and as he
really had a kindred taste with them on many subjects, he found an hour
or so pass away very pleasantly: when just as he was passing the wine
about the third round, and his own brilliancy and good-humour were
beginning to infect some of his guests--so that one grave genius of
twenty had actually so far forgotten himself as to fill a bumper by
mistake--up jumped the senior man of the party, and declaring that he
had an engagement to walk with a friend at seven politely took his
leave. This was the signal for a general dispersion; in vain did Horace
assure them they should have some coffee in the course of an hour, and
entreat some one or two to return. Off they all went with sundry smiles
and shakes of the head, and left their unfortunate host sitting alone in
his glory over the first glass of a newly opened bottle of claret.
I happened to be crossing the quadrangle from chapel in company with
Savile, at the moment when Leicester put his head out of his window as
if to enquire of the world in general what on earth he was to do with
himself for the next hour or two. Savile he hailed at once, and begged
him to come up; and though I knew but little of him, and had never been
in his rooms before, still, as I was one or two terms his senior, there
was nothing contrary even to Oxford etiquette in my accompanying Savile.
We laughed heartily when he explained his disappointment. Savile tried
to comfort him by the assurance that, as he had an hour to spare, he
would sit down and help him to finish a bottle or two of claret with a
great deal of pleasure; and was inclined to attribute the failure of the
evening, in a great measure, to his name not having been included in the
list of invitations--an omission by which he declared all parties had
been the losers; Horace's reading friends standing very much in need of
some one to put a little life into them, and himself as a candidate for
a degree, having missed a fair opportunity of meeting, among so many
choice fellows, some one to "put him up to the examiners' dodges." But
Leicester was irrecoverably disgusted. Nothing, he declared, would ever
induce him to ask a party of reading men to his rooms again; and from
that hour he seemed to eschew fellowship with the whole fraternity. Not
that he became idle all at once; on the contrary, I believe, for some
time he worked on steadily, or at least tried to work; but he was
naturally fond of society, and having failed to find what he wanted, was
reduced to make the best of such as he could find. So he gradually
became acquainted with a set of men who, whatever their good qualities
might be, had certainly no claim whatever to be considered hard readers,
and who would have considered a symposium which broke up at seven
o'clock as unsatisfactory as a tale without a conclusion. Amongst these,
his gentlemanly manners and kindness of heart made him beloved, while
his talents gave him a kind of influence; and, though he must have felt
occasionally that he was not altogether in his right place, and that,
besides his popular qualities, he had higher tastes and endowments with
which the majority of his companions could hardly sympathise, he was too
light-hearted to philosophise much on the subject, and contented himself
with enjoying his popularity, occasionally falling back upon his own
resources, and keeping up, in a desultory kind of way, his acquaintance
with scholarship and literature. The reading men of course looked upon
him as a lost sheep; the tutors shook their heads about him; if he did
well, it was set down as the result of accident; while all his misdoings
were labouring in his vocation. For, agreeably to the grand division
aforesaid, Horace was now set down as a "rowing-man;" and he soon made
the discovery, and did more thereupon to deserve the character than he
ever would have done otherwise. He was very willing to go on in his own
way, if all parties would but let him alone; he was not going to be made
a proselyte to long walks, and toast and water, nor had he any
conscientious abhorrence of supper-parties; and, as his prospects in
life were in no way dependent upon a class or a scholarship, and he
seemed to be tacitly repudiated by the _literati_ of his college, young
and old, on account of some of his aforesaid heterodox notions on the
subject of study, he accustomed himself gradually to set their opinions
at defiance; while the moderate reading, which encouragement and
emulation had made easy at school, became every day more and more
distasteful.
Horace's tottering reputation was at last completely overset in the eyes
of the authorities by a little affair which was absurd enough, but in
which he himself was as innocent as they were. It happened that a
youthful cousin of his, whose sole occupation for the last twelve months
of his life had been the not over-profitable one of waiting for a
commission, had come up to Oxford for two or three days, pursuant to
invitation, to see a little of the manners and customs of the
inhabitants. I think he had some slight acquaintance with our then
vice-principal--a good-natured, easy man--and Horace had got leave for
him to occupy a set of very small, dark rooms, which, as the college was
not very full, had been suffered to remain vacant for the last two or
three terms; they were so very unattractive a domicile, that the last
Freshman to whom they were offered, as a Hobson's choice, was currently
reported, in the plenitude of his disgust, to have take his name off the
books _instanter_. It is not usual to allow strangers to sleep within
college walls at all; but our discipline was somewhat lax in those days.
So Mr Carey had a bed put up for him in the aforesaid quarters. He was,
of course, duly _feted_, and made much of by Horace and his friends; and
a dozen of us sat down to a capital dinner in the rooms of the former,
on the strength of having to entertain a "stranger from the country;"
the hospitality of Oxford relaxing its rules even in favour of
under-graduates upon such occasions. It must have been somewhere towards
the next morning, when two or three of us accompanied young Carey down
to No. 8; and, after chatting with him till he was half undressed, left
him, as we thought, safe and quiet. However, soon after we had retired,
some noisy individual in the same staircase thought proper to give a
view-hollo out of his window, for the purpose of wishing the public
good-night. Now there was one of the Fellows, a choleric little old
gentleman, always in residence, holding some office, in which there was
as little to do, and as much to get as might be, and who seldom troubled
himself much about college discipline, and looked upon under-graduates
with a sort of silent contempt; never interfering with them, as he
declared himself, so long as they did not interfere with him. But one
point there was, in which they did interfere with his personal comfort
occasionally, and whereby his peace of mind and rest of body were
equally disturbed. Mr Perkins always took a tumbler of negus at ten
precisely, and turned in as the college clock struck the quarter past;
by the half-hour he was generally asleep, for his digestion was good,
and his cares few. But his slumbers were not heavy, and any thing like a
row in the quadrangle infallibly awoke him, and then he was like a lion
roused. He was wont to jump up, throw up his window, thrust out a red
face and a white nightcap, and after listening a few seconds for the
chance of the odious sounds being repeated, would put the very pertinent
question usual in such circumstances, to which one so seldom gets an
equally pertinent reply--"Who's that?" In case this intimation of Mr
Perkins being wide awake proved sufficient, as it often did, to restore
quiet, then after the lapse of a few more seconds the head and the
nightcap disappeared, and the window was shut down again. But if the
noise was continued, as occasionally it was out of pure mischief, than
in a minute or two the said nightcap would be seen to emerge hastily
from the staircase below, in company with a dressing-gown and slippers,
and Mr Perkins in this disguise would proceed to the scene of
disturbance as fast as his short legs could carry him. He seldom
succeeded in effecting a capture; but if he had that luck, or if he
could distinguish the tone of any individual voice so as to be able to
identify the performer, he had him up before the "seniority" next
morning, where his influence as one of the senior fellows ensured a
heavy sentence. But he had been engaged in so many unsuccessful chases
of the kind, and his short orations from his window so often elicited
only a laugh, though including sometimes brief but explicit threats of
rustication against the noisy unknown, strengthened by little expletives
which, when quoted by under-graduates, were made to sound somewhat
doubtfully--that at last he altered his tactics, and began to act in
silence. And so he did, when upon opening his window he saw a light in
the ground-floor rooms of the staircase whence the sounds proceeded on
the evening in question. Carey, by his own account, was proceeding
quietly in his preparations for bed, singing to himself an occasional
stanza of some classical ditty which he had picked up in the course of
the evening, and admiring the power of the man's lungs in the room above
him, when he heard a short quick step, and then a double rap at his
door. He was quite sufficiently acquainted, by this time, with the ways
of the place, not to be much surprised at the late visit and at the same
time to consider it prudent to learn the name and _status_ of his
visitor before admitting him; so he retorted upon Mr Perkins, quite
unconsciously, his own favourite query--"Who's that?" his first and
obvious impression being that it was one of the party he had just
quitted, coming probably, in the plenitude of good fellowship, to bring
him an invitation to wine or breakfast next day.
"It's me, sir--open the door," was the reply from a deep baritone, which
the initiated would never have mistaken.
"Who are you?" said Carey again.
"My name is Perkins, sir: have the goodness to let me in." He was
getting more angry, and consequently more polite.
"Perkins?" said Carey, pausing in his operations, in the vain endeavour
to recall the name among the score or two to whom he had been
introduced. "I'm just in bed--were you up at Leicester's?"
"Open the door, sir, if you please, immediately," and then came what our
friend took for a smothered laugh, but was really a sort of shiver, for
there was a draft in the passage playing all manner of pranks with the
dressing-gown, and Mr Perkins was getting cold.
An indistinct notion came into Carey's mind, that some one who had met
him in College might have taken him for a Freshman, and had some
practical joke in view; so he contented himself with repeating that he
was going to bed, and could let no one in.
"I tell you, sir, I'm Mr Perkins; don't you know me?"
"I wish you a very good night, Mr Perkins."
"What's your name, sir? eh? You impudent young puppy, what's your
infernal name? I'll have you rusticated, you dog--do you hear me, sir?"
On a sudden it struck Carey that this might possibly be a domiciliary
visit from one of the authorities, and that his best plan was to open
the door at once, though what had procured him such an honour he was at
a loss to imagine. He drew back the spring lock, therefore, and the next
moment stood face to face with the irate Mr Perkins.
His first impulse was to laugh at the curious figure before him; but
when demands for his name, and threats of unknown penalties, were
thundered forth upon him with no pause for a reply, then he began to
think that he had made a mistake in opening the door at all--that he
might get Leicester into a scrape if not himself--and as his person was
as unknown to Mr Perkins as that gentleman's to him, it struck him that
if he could give him the slip once, it would be all right. In a moment
he blew out his solitary candle, bolted through the open door, all but
upsetting his new acquaintance, whom he left storming in the most
unconnected manner, alone, and in total darkness. Up to Leicester's
rooms he rushed, related his adventure, and was rather surprised that
his cousin did not applaud it as a very clever thing.
What Mr Perkins thought or said to himself, what degree of patience he
exhibited in such trying circumstances, or in what terms he
apostrophised his flying enemy, must ever remain a secret with himself.
Five minutes after, Solomon the porter, summoned from his bed just as he
had made himself snug once more after letting out Horace's out-college
friends, confronted Mr Perkins in about as sweet a temper as that worthy
individual himself, with this difference, that one was sulky and the
other furious.
"Who lives in the ground-floor on the left in No. 8?"
"What, in 'Coventry?' Why, nobody, sir."
"Nobody! you stupid old sinner, you're asleep."
"No, sir, I ain't," and Solomon flashed his lantern in Mr Perkins's face
as if to ascertain whether _his_ eyes were open. Mr Perkins started
back, and Solomon turned half round as if to disappear again.
"Who lives there, Solomon, I ask you? Do you mean to tell me you don't
know? You are not fit--"
"I knows every gentleman's rooms well enough: nobody hasn't lived in
them as you means not these four terms. Mr Pears kept his fox in 'em one
time, till the vice-principal got wind of him. There may be some varmint
in 'em for all I knows--they a'n't fit for much else."
"There's some confounded puppy of a Freshman in them now--at least
there was--and he lives there too."
"I know there _be'n't_," said the persevering Solomon. And, without
deigning a word more, he set off with his lantern towards the place in
dispute, followed by Mr Perkins, who contented himself with an angry
"Now you'll see."
"Ay, now we shall see," replied Solomon, as, somewhat to Mr Perkins's
astonishment, they found the oak sported. Having made a selection from a
huge bunch of keys, the porter succeeded, after some fumbling, in
getting the door open. The room bore no traces of recent occupation.
Three or four broken chairs and a rickety table were the only furniture:
as far as the light of Solomon's lantern could penetrate, it looked the
very picture of desolation. Solomon chuckled.
"There _is_ a man living here. I'll swear there is. He was undressing
when I came. Look in the bedroom."
They opened the door, and saw a bare feather-bed and bolster, the usual
_materiel_ in an unoccupied college chamber. "Seeing's believing," said
the porter.
But, with Mr Perkins, seeing was not believing. He saw Solomon, and he
saw the empty room, but he did not believe either. But he had evidently
the worst side of the argument as it stood, so he wished the porter a
sulky good-night, and retreated.
The fact was, that the noisy gentleman in the rooms above, as soon as he
caught the tones of Mr Perkins's voice at Carey's door, had entered into
the joke with exceeding gusto, well aware that the visit was really
intended as a compliment to his own vocal powers. Carey's sudden bolt
puzzled him rather; but as soon as he heard Mr Perkins's footsteps take
the direction of the porter's lodge, he walked softly down-stairs to the
field of action, and, anticipating in some degree what would follow,
bundled up together sheets, blankets, pillow, dressing apparatus, and
all other signs and tokens of occupation, and made off with them to his
own rooms; sporting the oak behind him, and thus completing the
mystification.
As the facts of the case were pretty sure to transpire in course of
time, Horace took the safe course of getting his cousin out of college
next morning, and calling on Mr Perkins with a full explanation of the
circumstances, and apologies for Carey as a stranger unacquainted with
the police regulations of their learned body, and the respect due
thereto. Of course the man in authority was obliged to be gracious, as
Leicester could not well be answerable for all the faults of his family;
but there never from that time forth happened a row of any kind with
which he did not in his own mind, probably unconsciously, associate poor
Horace.
Whether my readers will set down Horace Leicester as a rowing man or
not, is a point which I leave to their merciful consideration: a reading
man was a title which he never aspired to. He took a very creditable
degree in due season, and was placed in the fourth class with a man who
took up a very long list of books, and was supposed to have read himself
stupid.
"He ought to have done a good deal more," said one of the tutors; "he
had it in him." "I think he was lucky not to have been plucked, myself,"
said Mr Perkins; "he was a very noisy man."