interesting link between them—a link which also associates them with that
eminent Magdalen man, the historian of the Roman Empire. They both read,
and were affected by, Law’s “Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”; and
Law had been tutor to Gibbon’s father and was to end his days as a sort
of domestic chaplain to one of Gibbon’s aunts. It is curious to observe
how differently his exhortations influenced the minds of the three men.
Gibbon devotes a good deal of space, in his Autobiography, to Law’s
“theological writings which our domestic connection has tempted me
to peruse”; and he holds the scales with a rigid impartiality. Law’s
“sallies of religious frenzy,” he says, “must not be allowed to
extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a
scholar.” He thinks that, “had not his vigorous mind been clouded by
enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious
writers of the times.” His conclusion is that:
“If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will
soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow
that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange
contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian
world.”
Gibbon, that is to say, looks at Law solely with the eye of a literary
critic, damns him with faint praise, but leaves his propositions
unexamined as childish conceptions which he has long since put away,
and does not propose to be concerned with any more. His tone is that of
a head-master who praises, while he corrects, a set of Latin verses.
Johnson read the book, expecting it to afford him ribald amusement, but
was “over-matched” by it, and even frightened by it some distance along
the road which leads to religious mania. Whitefield read it with real
Methodistical enthusiasm.
* * * * *
About the Oxford Methodists in general enough has already been said in
the chapter on Lincoln; but Whitefield is of sufficient importance to be
detached from the group and considered separately.
He was not the originator of the movement, though he came to be a force
in it. The Wesleys were several years his seniors, and had set Methodism
going before he came into residence. But though he was their disciple he
was hardly of their type. They were scholars, gentlemen, and organisers.
He was a man of the people, half-educated, brought up in the tap-room
of his mother’s inn, a religious demagogue, a rhetorician, whose mouth,
foaming with sanctimonious phrases, suggests the froth on the tankards
of his mother’s beer. The dignity which compels even those who differ
from the Wesleys to respect them was entirely wanting in Whitefield. He
emerged from his humble station with the defects of his origin clinging
to him, and he never shook them off. It is impossible to think of him
as a man whom one would have liked to know at Oxford. It is, indeed,
difficult to think of him as anything but mad.
His position at Pembroke was that of a servitor; and he was the
exaggerated type of the “pi-man” of his period. He had no joy in his
youth, and no power of concealing his abject terror of hell-fire. He made
himself conspicuous about it; it is not too much to say that he made
himself ridiculous. Here are a few extracts from his own admissions on
the subject:
“I always chose the worst sort of food, though my place
furnished me with variety. I fasted twice a week. My apparel
was mean. I thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair
powdered. I wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty
shoes.”
“Satan used to terrify me much, and threatened to punish me if
I discovered his wiles. It being my duty, as servitor, in my
turn to knock at the gentlemen’s doors by ten at night, to see
who were in their rooms, I thought the devil would appear to me
every stair I went up. And he so troubled me when I lay down to
rest that, for some weeks, I scarce slept above three hours at
a time.... Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate
on the ground and begging for freedom from those proud hellish
thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”
“It was suggested to me that Jesus Christ was among the wild
beasts when He was tempted, and that I ought to follow His
example; and being willing, as I thought, to imitate Jesus
Christ, after supper I went into Christ Church walk, near our
college, and continued in silent prayer under one of the trees
for near two hours, sometimes lying flat on my face, sometimes
kneeling upon my knees, all the while filled with fear and
concern lest some of my brethren should be overwhelmed with
pride. The night being stormy, it gave me awful thoughts of the
day of judgment. I continued, I think, until the great bell
rung for retirement to the College, not without finding some
reluctance in the natural man against staying so long in the
cold.”
And so forth. All things considered, it is not surprising that the
“polite students,” as Whitefield calls them, laughed, and even “threw
dirt,” or that his tutor advised him to take medicine. Academic
authorities are seldom sympathetic towards undergraduates who, as
Whitefield did, neglect their studies for their devotions—presumably
because the religious uneasiness of their pupils seems to them a
reflection on their own assured composure.
WORCESTER COLLEGE
Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College
for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s
Palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote
situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable
Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F.
W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.
The buildings and the site of what is now Worcester College have in their
time played many parts.
First of all, in the very early days, a year after the foundation of
Merton, Gloucester College was instituted there. It was a monastic
establishment for the benefit of Benedictines who wanted to “live
properly” at Oxford, in cells, and with facilities for praise and
prayer, instead of mixing with the common herd in inns or lodgings; but
abuses crept in, and the monks ceased to live as properly as founders
and benefactors could have wished. We read of monks admonished for
“noctivagation,” for the haunting of taverns, for theft, and for assault
and battery, to say nothing of the neglect of the Lenten fast. On one
occasion, it is recorded, “four turbulent Benedictines” tried to kill
the Proctor; and a State Paper of 1539 exposes the fact that another
Benedictine, with a bookseller to help him, got through “twenty legs of
mutton, five rounds of beef, and six capons” between Ash Wednesday and
Good Friday.
[Illustration: WORCESTER COLLEGE.
[To face p. 289.]
The dissolution of the monasteries implied, of course, the dissolution
of Gloucester College as its corollary. It served, for a time, as a
Palace for the Bishop of Oxford, but was afterwards separated from the
see and turned into Gloucester Hall—a Hall in which, at first, not only
students, but also miscellaneous lodgers were allowed to have rooms. Even
women were permitted to reside within its walls; and it had a bad name
as a place of refuge for Papists, open or concealed. It prospered under
these conditions for a season, but, after the Restoration, fell upon evil
days. There came a time when there were absolutely no undergraduates in
residence, when the grass overgrew the paths, when the Principal, sitting
alone in his glory, was distrained upon for arrears of taxes, and when
burglars broke into the Hall and carried off the plate.
In William III.’s reign, however, under the principalship of Benjamin
Woodroffe, the Hall pulled up again. There was an attempt to turn
it into a special college for Greek students from Constantinople,
Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—a kind of precedent, though an
imperfect one, for the endowment of the Rhodes Scholars. The experiment
failed—partly for lack of funds, and partly because the Principal
offended his Oriental pupils by trying to proselytise them; but
Gloucester Hall was not involved in the collapse, for Woodroffe had other
irons in the fire. He found a benefactor in Sir Thomas Cookes, who was
proposing to bequeath £10,000 to Oxford; and this £10,000 was devoted,
after long negotiations, to the transformation of Gloucester Hall into
Worcester College in 1714.
* * * * *
If Worcester is more famous for one thing than another, it is for its
remoteness from the centres of academical activity; and there are plenty
of stories bearing on this branch of the subject. Letters have been
addressed to Worcester College, _near_ Oxford; the nickname of Botany
Bay has been bestowed. A member of Gloucester Hall was once excused for
being late at a ceremony at Saint Mary’s “because of the distance, and,
the wind being against him, he could not hear the bell.” A Worcester
Proctor, summoning offending undergraduates to his presence at a later
period, had to find a means of coping with similar excuses. The men whom
he proctorised, and bade call on him, always made a point of asking him
where Worcester was; and when they kept the appointment, they generally
began with: “I’m so sorry, sir. I fear I’m behind my time; but the fact
is I had the greatest difficulty in finding my way. I made ever so many
inquiries, but no one was able to direct me.”
And, if Worcester seems remote now that one can approach it on a tramcar
by way of Beaumont Street, it must have seemed much more remote in the
old days before Beaumont Street was made. A graphic picture has been
preserved of Provost Landon, as Vice-Chancellor, going and coming with
difficulty. Preceded, Coxe tells us, by his bedels with their gold and
silver maces, he proceeded:
“through Gloucester Green, then the acknowledged site of the
pig-market, and down the whole length of Friars’ Entry, at the
risk of being besprinkled by trundled mops in those straits of
Thermopylæ, of stumbling over buckets, knocking over children,
of catching the rinsings of basins, and ducking under linen
lines suspended across from the opposite houses.”
Enough, however, of that ancient gibe. We will next note that Worcester,
the only Oxford college founded in the eighteenth century, is able to
furnish a striking illustration of the academic manners and customs of
that age.
What reading men thought of Oxford, and how they behaved themselves
there, in the eighteenth century, we have already remarked in the cases
of Adam Smith of Balliol, Gibbon of Magdalen, Joseph Butler of Oriel,
and Jeremy Bentham of Queen’s. The attitude and deportment of men of a
different type is illustrated by the career of Foote of Worcester, who
was no other than Samuel Foote the comedian.
His great-grandfather having been the founder’s second cousin, Foote
put in a claim to a scholarship as founder’s kin. The claim, after
consideration, was allowed. He came into residence in 1737, and devoted
the whole of his time to the neglect of his duties and the defiance
of the dons. He acted Punch through the streets of Oxford. Finding a
bell-rope hanging in a church porch which opened on a field in which
cattle were turned out to graze, he tied hay round it, with the result
that a hungry cow, in her attempts to eat the hay, set the bell tolling
at the dead of night, and the Provost, half fearing that supernatural
agencies were at work, sat up, with the sexton, into the small hours, to
solve the mystery.
He solved it, and Oxford laughed at him. He sent for Foote and
reprimanded him; but Foote was insolent, after an ingenious fashion of
his own.
The Provost, Dr. Gower, was a pompous and pedantic person who picked his
words carefully and preferred polysyllabic vocables to any others; and
Foote appeared before him carrying an enormous dictionary under his arm.
The reprimand began; but, as soon as a long word occurred, Foote begged
the Provost to stop.
“One moment, if you please, sir. You said ‘ebullitions,’ I think? It was
‘ebullitions,’ was it not? ‘Ebullitions’ means—ah, yes, I have it. Now,
if you will continue, sir, I am at your service.”
And so forth. As often as the Provost used a word of more than ordinary
length, Foote, with a gravely submissive and apologetic air, arrested the
harangue by pleading ignorance of its meaning, searched for it in the
lexicon, read out the definition, and repeated his formula: “Ah, yes, I
see. That means—— Now I am once more ready, sir, and if you will please
proceed——”
So that the lecture was turned into a farce; and Foote might perfectly
well have been sent down for so transmuting it, though, as a matter of
fact, his disappearance was due to an offence of a different character.
He kept joyous company, and he kept it openly. In fact, he was one day
discovered driving a gay and painted “actress” through the streets of
Oxford, on the box seat of a coach and six—himself attired in garments
so far removed from the “subfusc” that he compelled the attention of all
beholders. It was useless for him, this time, to try to brazen matters
out with the help of a dictionary; and the entry regarding his conduct in
the College Register runs as follows:
“Whereas Samuel Foote, Scholar of Worcester College, by a
long course of ill-behaviour has rendered himself obnoxious
to frequent censures of the society publick and private, and
having whilst he was under censure for lying out of college
insolently and presumptuously withdrawn himself and refused to
answer to several heinous crimes objected to him, though duly
cited by the Provost by an instrument in form, in not appearing
to the said citation for the above-mentioned reasons, his
scholarship is declared void, and he is hereby deprived of all
benefit and advantage of his said scholarship.”
So Samuel Foote departed, though he does not seem to have been actually
expelled, and, in due course, became a public buffoon—which was what
he was most fitted to become; and though one would not venture to say,
with the example of Mr. Arthur Bourchier before one, that Oxford is no
proper place for comedians, it can hardly be denied that Oxford—even
eighteenth-century Oxford—was no proper place for Samuel Foote.
* * * * *
Our next interesting name is that of Thomas de Quincey, essayist and
opium-eater.
His mother sent him up in 1803, with fifty guineas in his pocket, and
liberty to choose his own college. Professor Saintsbury, speaking from
the lofty standpoint of Merton, protests that wise guardians would have
counselled him to go anywhere rather than to Worcester; but one does
not quite know why. He was poor, and Worcester was one of the cheaper
colleges. In the matter of “caution money,” in particular, it let its
members off lightly. That fact appears to have been the determining
consideration; and de Quincey had too many queer experiences behind him
to be likely, in any case, or at any college, to acquire the Oxford
manner, and settle down into a typical Oxonian.
He had run away from school and wandered about Wales, with a duodecimo
Euripides in his pocket, camping out on the hillsides in a tent, which he
carried on his back during the day. He had starved in a Soho lodging and
rubbed shoulders with the submerged tenth. After that, it was hardly to
be expected that he would have either the notions or the behaviour of the
ordinary public schoolboy who blossoms into the average University man.
There were three sets for him to choose among—sets known respectively,
according to the manner of their lives, as the Saints, the Sinners,
and the Smilers; but though he sat with the Smilers—with the men, that
is to say, who affected to be studious without being glum—in hall, his
soul dwelt almost as far apart from them as from the others. “I,” he has
written, “whose disease was to meditate too much and observe too little,
upon my first entrance upon college life, was nearly falling into a deep
melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings I had witnessed in
London.”
It was while at Worcester, too, that de Quincey first took to opium, as
a remedy against neuralgia, and continued to take it because he liked
it, and came to believe that “here was the secret of happiness about
which philosophers had disputed for so many ages.” And the opium habit,
of course, like the more modern morphia habit, tends to make a man
self-sufficing and uncompanionable, and careless of clean collars and
other particularities of the toilet; and there are stories to show that
that was its effect upon de Quincey.
“I neglected my dress habitually,” he says, “and wore my
clothes till they were threadbare, partly under the belief
that my gown would conceal defects, more from indisposition
to bestow on a tailor what I had destined for a bookseller.
At length, however, an official person sent me a message on
the subject. This, however, was disregarded, and one day
I discovered that I had no waistcoat that was not torn or
otherwise dilapidated, whereupon, buttoning my coat to the
throat and drawing my gown close about me, I went into hall.”
And, of course, undergraduate opinion was not going to stand that sort of
thing even from a man of genius. It was an occasion for the Smilers to
smile, and they smiled—and also chaffed. Evidently, they said, de Quincey
had seen the Order in Council, printed in the _Gazette_, interdicting
the use of waistcoats. It would be a good idea if it were followed by
another Order interdicting the use of trousers. Trousers were such costly
garments, and so very troublesome to put on. Et cetera, et cetera, until
de Quincey learnt his lesson.
Most curious also was de Quincey’s conduct when the time came for him
to try to satisfy the examiners. He handed in remarkably good papers.
One of the examiners spoke of him to one of the Worcester tutors as
“the cleverest man I ever met with.” But then, just as he seemed about
to triumph, he “scratched” and disappeared. It has been suggested that
he had some imaginary grudge against the examiners; but it seems more
likely that his nerves gave way before the prospect of the _viva voce_.
It was not in him to face the trial with the theatrical self-assurance of
Sir Robert Peel. He feared that his hair would stand up and his tongue
cleave to the roof of his mouth. So, without saying anything to any one,
he turned and fled; and for that incident also the opium was probably
responsible.
* * * * *
The interest of the remarkable Worcester names which remain to be
mentioned is chiefly theological.
Among novelists, indeed, the College educated Henry Kingsley; but of
him little is recorded except that he was a boating man, and presented
the College with a pair of silver oars, to be competed for. He was by
way of being the bad boy of the Kingsley family, though most critics
incline to think that he was more inspired than his famous and earnest
brother Charles. Among economists, again, the College can boast of both
Bonamy Price, who was Arnold’s favourite pupil at Laleham and one of
his assistant masters at Rugby, and of Thorold Rogers, who quitted Holy
Orders, wrote a “History of Prices,” and was distinguished for his
Aristophanic humour. People are interested in them up to a point; but
they are more interested in F. W. Newman and Dean Burgon.
* * * * *
F. W. Newman, of course, was the famous Cardinal’s brilliant younger
brother—the grave dialectician who shocked the world, at a time when it
was more easily shocked than it is at present, by writing “Phases of
Faith.” He fought his way through theology as grimly as men fight their
way through the “Ethics,” and, starting from the Evangelical standpoint,
ultimately arrived at a creed of which one need say no more than that its
exceeding vagueness did not prevent him from being exceedingly earnest
about it.
How, in the days of his early orthodoxy, he went out, together with a
dentist and a stonemason, as a missionary to Baghdad; how he and the
dentist and the stonemason sang hymns together on the ship which conveyed
them to the scene of their labours; how he was chased by a mob for
distributing copies of the New Testament in a Mohammedan centre; how
he was impressed by the remark of an Aleppo carpenter that the English
people, though skilled in the mechanical arts, were lacking in spiritual
insight; how he came to the conclusion that his hymn-singing was making
him ridiculous; how he found it impossible to speak the evangelical
jargon of his associates; how he quarrelled with the dentist and the
stonemason, and separated from them—all these matters may be studied
by the curious in his biography. It is not on account of any of these
exploits that Worcester is proud of him. Worcester’s pride depends upon
the fact that he is, so far as is known, the only undergraduate to whom
the Public Examiners ever made a present of books in order to testify to
their appreciation of his exceptional attainments.
* * * * *
Similarly with Burgon. Though he was a theologian, his theology has
nothing to do with Worcester, and Worcester has nothing to do with his
theology. His principal contribution to theological thought was his
famous criticism of Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” For his own part, he said,
he was quite content to look for his first parents in the Garden of Eden;
but if his opponents preferred to look for theirs in the Zoological
Gardens, they were perfectly welcome to do so. That is the _mot_ which
people generally have in mind when they say of Burgon that buffoonery was
his forte and piety his foible. Perhaps the one epigram fairly warrants
the other; but the fame of both epigrams is eclipsed by the fame of
Burgon’s Newdigate.
He won that prize for English verse in his last year, having been
beaten in previous years by Matthew Arnold and Principal Shairp; and it
is hardly too much to say that his Newdigate is the best Newdigate ever
written. The one wonderful line which made it famous has already been
quoted in a reference to Newdigates contained in an earlier chapter; but
the present chapter may fairly end with a presentation of the jewel in
its setting:
“Not virgin white—like that old Doric shrine
Where once Athena held her rites divine:
Not saintly grey—like many a minster fane
That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain:
But rosy red—as if the blush of dawn
Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn:
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which men called old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime—
_A red-rose city—half as old as time_.”
It will not be denied that Worcester has every title to be proud of
Burgon for writing that.
HERTFORD COLLEGE
Hart Hall—The principalship of Dr. Richard Newton—Hart Hall
becomes Hertford College—Decline, fall, and dissolution of the
College—The buildings purchased for Magdalen Hall—Magdalen
Hall once more transformed into Hertford College—Famous
men at Hertford and Magdalen Hall—Charles James Fox—George
Selwyn—Robert Stephen Hawker.
The present Hertford College is the heir and successor of an earlier
Hertford College, and also of Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall; and one
must begin with a word on the strange vicissitudes of these various
foundations.
Hart Hall came first, dating from some time in the thirteenth century;
but the founders of the halls of those days are no more to be
confounded with the benefactors of learning than are the keepers of the
boarding-houses in which the majority of University students reside on
the Continent. They were merely landlords who desired a particular class
of tenant; and the so-called Principal of the Hall was not a person set
in authority over the students, but a student reputed to be solvent
and elected by his fellow students, for that reason, to make himself
responsible to the landlord for the rent. It was not until a later date
that he was nominated from outside and charged to direct the studies and
control the conduct of the inmates.
That was the first stage. The second began with the appointment to the
principalship of Dr. Richard Newton. He was a man of ambition and energy;
and he made it the object of his life to get Hart Hall incorporated as a
College. There was considerable opposition; but, after a long fight, he
got his way; and Hart Hall became Hertford College in 1737.