Produced by R.W. Jones
THE ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN
By Cuthbert Bede
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[1 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF
MR. VERDANT GREEN
[2 ]
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT
"Let the poker be heated" were the fearful words which greeted Mr.
Verdant Green on his initiation into a spoof Lodge of Freemasonry at
Oxford. This was one of the many "rags" of which he was the butt
during his days at the university.
In this humorous classic there is told the story of a very raw
youth's introduction to university life, of fights between "town and
gown," escapes from proctors, wiles of bed-makers, days on the river,
or on and off horseback, and nights when "he kept his spirits up by
pouring spirits down."
These amusing experiences and diverting mishaps of an Oxford Freshman
need no introduction to a public that has already read and laughed
over them many times before.
The great feature of the volume is that it contains the whole 188
illustrations originally contributed by the Author.
[3 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF
MR. VERDANT GREEN
BY
CUTHBERT BEDE
WITH 188 ILLUSTRATIONS
BY THE AUTHOR
<VG003.JPG>
HERBERT JENKINS LIMITED
3 YORK STREET LONDON S.W.1
[4 ]
A HERBERT JENKINS' BOOK
~Printed in Great Britain by~ Garden City Press, Letchworth.
[5 ]
CONTENTS
PART I
CHAP.
PAGE
I MR. VERDANT GREEN'S RELATIVES AND ANTECEDENTS ........7
II MR. VERDANT GREEN IS TO BE AN OXFORD FRESHMAN ........14
III MR. VERDANT GREEN LEAVES THE HOME OF HIS ANCESTORS ...21
IV MR. VERDANT GREEN BECOMES AN OXFORD UNDERGRADUATE ....33
V MR. VERDANT GREEN MATRICULATES, AND MAKES A
SENSATION ...........................................41
VI MR. VERDANT GREEN DINES, BREAKFASTS, AND GOES TO
CHAPEL ...............................................51
VII MR. VERDANT GREEN CALLS ON A GENTLEMAN WHO "IS
LICENSED TO SELL" ...................................6l
VIII MR. VERDANT GREEN'S MORNING REFLECTIONS ARE NOT
SO PLEASANT AS HIS EVENING DIVERSIONS ...............72
IX MR. VERDANT GREEN ATTENDS LECTURES, AND, IN DESPITE
OF SERMONS, HAS DEALINGS WITH FILTHY LUCRE ..........83
X MR. VERDANT GREEN REFORMS HIS TAILOR'S BILLS AND
RUNS UP OTHERS. HE ALSO APPEARS IN A RAPID ACT
OF HORSEMANSHIP, AND FINDS ISIS COOL IN SUMMER ......92
XI MR. VERDANT GREEN'S SPORTS AND PASTIMES .............103
XII MR. VERDANT GREEN TERMINATES HIS EXISTENCE AS AN
OXFORD FRESHMAN .....................................114
PART II
I MR. VERDANT GREEN RECOMMENCES HIS EXISTENCE AS
AN OXFORD UNDERGRADUATE .............................123
II MR. VERDANT GREEN DOES AS HE HAS BEEN DONE BY .......126
III MR. VERDANT GREEN ENDEAVOURS TO KEEP HIS SPIRITS
UP BY POURING SPIRITS DOWN ..........................134
IV MR. VERDANT GREEN DISCOVERS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN
TOWN AND GOWN ........................................145
[6 CONTENTS]
CHAP.
PAGE
V MR. VERDANT GREEN IS FAVOURED WITH MR BOUNCER'S
OPINIONS REGARDING AN UNDER-GRADUATE'S
EPISTOLARY COMMUNICATIONS TO HIS MATERNAL RELATIVE ..157
VI MR. VERDANT GREEN FEATHERS HIS OARS WITH SKILL
AND DEXTERITY .......................................167
VII MR. VERDANT GREEN PARTAKES OF A DOVE-TART AND
A SPREAD-EAGLE .......................................176
VIII MR. VERDANT GREEN SPENDS A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND
A HAPPY NEW YEAR ....................................184
IX MR. VERDANT GREEN MAKES HIS FIRST APPEARANCE ON
ANY BOARDS ...........................................191
X MR. VERDANT GREEN ENJOYS A REAL CIGAR ...............202
XI MR. VERDANT GREEN GETS THROUGH HIS SMALLS ...........209
XII MR. VERDANT GREEN AND HIS FRIENDS ENJOY THE
COMMEMORATION .......................................2l8
PART III
I MR. VERDANT GREEN TRAVELS NORTH .....................222
II MR. VERDANT GREEN DELIVERS MISS PATTY HONEYWOOD
FROM THE HORNS OF A DILEMMA .........................227
III MR. VERDANT GREEN STUDIES YE MANNERS AND CUSTOMS
OF YE NATYVES .......................................238
IV MR. VERDANT GREEN ENDEAVOURS TO SAY SNIP TO
SOME ONE'S SNAP .......................................243
V MR. VERDANT GREEN MEETS WITH THE GREEN-EYED
MONSTER .............................................251
VI MR. VERDANT GREEN JOINS A NORTHUMBERLAND
PIC-NIC .............................................258
VII MR. VERDANT GREEN HAS AN INKLING OF THE FUTURE ......265
VIII MR. VERDANT GREEN CROSSES THE RUBICON ...............271
IX MR. VERDANT GREEN ASKS PAPA .........................280
X MR. VERDANT GREEN IS MADE A MASON ...................288
XI MR. VERDANT GREEN BREAKFASTS WITH MR. BOUNCER,
AND ENTERS FOR A GRIND .............................297
XII MR. VERDANT GREEN TAKES HIS DEGREE ..................302
XIII MR. VERDANT GREEN IS MARRIED AND DONE FOR ...........309
[7 ]
THE ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN.
CHAPTER I.
MR. VERDANT GREEN'S RELATIVES AND ANTECEDENTS.
IF you will refer to the unpublished volume of "Burke's Landed
Gentry", and turn to letter G, article "GREEN," you will see that the
Verdant Greens are a family of some respectability and of
considerable antiquity. We meet with them as early as 1096, flocking
to the Crusades among the followers of Peter the Hermit, when one of
their number, Greene surnamed the Witless, mortgaged his lands in order
to supply his poorer companions with the sinews of war. The family
estate, however, appears to have been redeemed and greatly increased
by his great-grandson, Hugo de Greene, but was again jeoparded in the
year 1456, when Basil Greene, being commissioned by Henry the Sixth
to enrich his sovereign by discovering the philosopher's stone,
squandered the greater part of his fortune in unavailing experiments;
while his son, who was also infected with the spirit of the age, was
blown up in his laboratory when just on the point of discovering the
elixir of life. It seems to have been about this time that the
Greenes became connected by marriage with the equally old family of
the Verdants; and, in the year 1510, we find a Verdant Greene as
justice of the peace for the county of Warwick, presiding at the
trial of three decrepid old women, who, being found guilty of
transforming themselves into cats, and in that shape attending the
nightly assemblies of evil spirits, were very properly pronounced by
him to be witches, and were burnt with all due solemnity.
In tracing the records of the family, we do not find that any of its
members attained to great eminence in the state, either in the
counsels of the senate or the active services of the field; or that
they amassed any unusual amount of wealth or landed property. But we
may perhaps ascribe these circumstances to the fact of finding the
Greens, generation after generation, made the dupes of more astute
minds, and when the hour of
[8 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]
danger came, left to manage their own affairs in the best way they
could, - a way that commonly ended in their mismanagement and total
confusion. Indeed, the idiosyncrasy of the family appears to have
been so well known, that we continually meet with them performing the
character of catspaw to some monkey who had seen and understood much
more of the world than they had, - putting their hands to the fire,
and only finding out their mistake when they had burned their fingers.
In this way the family of the Verdant Greens never got beyond a
certain point either in wealth or station, but were always the same
unsuspicious, credulous, respectable, easy-going people in one
century as another, with the same boundless confidence in their
fellow-creatures, and the same readiness to oblige society by putting
their names to little bills, merely for form's and friendship's sake.
The Vavasour Verdant Green, with the slashed velvet doublet and
point-lace fall, who (having a well-stocked purse) was among the
favoured courtiers of the Merry Monarch, and who allowed that monarch
in his merriness to borrow his purse, with the simple I.O.U. of
"Odd's fish! you shall take mine to-morrow!" and who never (of
course) saw the sun rise on the day of repayment, was but the
prototype of the Verdant Greens in the full-bottomed wigs, and
buckles and shorts of George I.'s day, who were nearly beggared by the
bursting of the Mississippi Scheme and South-Sea Bubble; and these,
in their turn, were duly represented by their successors. And thus
the family character was handed down with the family nose, until they
both re-appeared (according to the veracious chronicle of Burke, to
which we have referred) in
"VERDANT GREEN, of the Manor Green, Co. Warwick, Gent., who married
Mary, only surviving child of Samuel Sappey, Esq., of Sapcot Hall,
Co. Salop; by whom he has issue, one son, and three daughters:
Mary,-VERDANT,-Helen,-Fanny."
Mr. Burke is unfeeling enough to give the dates when this bunch of
Greens first made their appearance in the world; but these dates we
withhold, from a delicate regard to personal feelings, which will be
duly appreciated by those who have felt the sacredness of their
domestic hearth to be tampered with by the obtrusive impertinences of
a census-paper.
It is sufficient for our purpose to say, that our hero, Mr. Verdant
Green, junior, was born much in the same way as other folk. And
although pronounced by Mrs. Toosypegs his nurse, when yet in the
first crimson blush of his existence, to be "a perfect progidy, mum,
which I ought to be able to pronounce, 'avin nuss'd a many parties
through their trouble, and being aweer of what is doo to a Hinfant,"
- yet we are not aware that his ~debut~ on the stage of life,
although thus applauded
[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 9]
by such a ~clacqueur~ as the indiscriminating Toosypegs, was
announced to the world at large by any other means than the notices
in the county papers, and the six-shilling advertisement in the
~Times~.
"Progidy" though he was, even as a baby, yet Mr. Verdant Green's
nativity seems to have been chronicled merely in this everyday
manner, and does not appear to have been accompanied by any of those
more monstrous phenomena, which in earlier ages attended the
production of a ~genuine~ prodigy. We are not aware that Mrs.
Green's favourite Alderney spoke on that occasion, or conducted
itself otherwise than as unaccustomed to public speaking as usual.
Neither can we verify the assertion of the intelligent Mr. Mole the
gardener, that the plaster Apollo in the Long Walk was observed to be
bathed in a profuse perspiration, either from its feeling compelled
to keep up the good old classical custom, or because the weather was
damp. Neither are we bold enough to entertain an opinion that the
chickens in the poultry-yard refused their customary food; or that
the horses in the stable shook with trembling fear; or that any
thing, or any body, saving and excepting Mrs. Toosypegs, betrayed any
consciousness that a real and genuine prodigy had been given to the
world.
However, during the first two years of his life, which were passed
chiefly in drinking, crying, and sleeping, Mr. Verdant Green met with
as much attention, and received as fair a share of approbation, as
usually falls to the lot of the most favoured of infants. Then Mrs.
Toosypegs again took up her position in the house, and his reign was
over. Faithful to her mission, she pronounced the new baby to be
~the~ "progidy," and she was believed. But thus it is all through
life; the new baby displaces the old; the second love supplants the
first; we find fresh friends to shut out the memories of former ones;
and in nearly everything we discover that there is a Number 2 which
can put out of joint the nose of Number 1.
Once more the shadow of Mrs. Toosypegs fell upon the walls of Manor
Green; and then, her mission being accomplished, she passed away for
ever; and our hero was left to be the sole son and heir, and the prop
and pride of the house of Green.
And if it be true that the external forms of nature exert a hidden
but powerful sway over the dawning perceptions of the mind, and shape
its thoughts to harmony with the things around, then most certainly
ought Mr. Verdant Green to have been born a poet; for he grew up amid
those scenes whose immortality is, that they inspired the soul of
Shakespeare with his deathless fancies!
The Manor Green was situated in one of the loveliest spots in all
Warwickshire; a county so rich in all that constitutes the
[10 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]
picturesqueness of a true English landscape. Looking from the
drawing-room windows of the house, you saw in the near foreground the
pretty French garden, with its fantastic parti-coloured beds, and its
broad gravelled walks and terrace; proudly promenading which, or
perched on the stone balustrade might be seen perchance a peacock
flaunting his beauties in the sun. Then came the carefully kept
gardens, bounded on the one side by the Long Walk and a grove of
shrubs and oaks; and on the other side by a double avenue of stately
elms, that led, through velvet turf of brightest green, down past a
little rustic lodge, to a gently sloping valley, where were white
walls and rose-clustered gables of cottages peeping out from the
embosoming trees, that betrayed the village beauties they seemed loth
to hide. Then came the grey church-tower, dark with shrouding ivy;
then another clump of stately elms, tenanted by cawing rooks; then a
yellow stretch of bright meadow-land, dappled over with browsing kine
knee-deep in grass and flowers; then a deep pool that mirrored all,
and shone like silver; then more trees with floating shade, and
homesteads rich in wheat-stacks; then a willowy brook that sparkled
on merrily to an old mill-wheel, whose slippery stairs it lazily got
down, and sank to quiet rest in the stream below; then came, crowding
in rich profusion, wide-spreading woods and antlered oaks; and golden
gorse and purple heather; and sunny orchards, with their dark-green
waves that in Spring foamed white with blossoms; and then gently
swelling hills that rose to close the scene and frame the picture.
Such was the view from the Manor Green. And full of inspiration as
such a scene was, yet Mr. Verdant Green never accomplished (as far as
poetical inspiration was concerned) more than an "Address to the
Moon," which he could just as well have written in any other part of
the country, and which, commencing with the noble aspiration,
"O moon, that shinest in the heaven so blue,
I only wish that I could shine like you!"
and terminating with one of those fine touches of nature which rise
superior to the trammels of ordinary versification,
"But I to bed must be going soon,
So I will not address thee more, O moon!"
will no doubt go down to posterity in the Album of his sister Mary.
For the first fourteen years of his life, the education of Mr.
Verdant Green was conducted wholly under the shadow of his paternal
roof, upon principles fondly imagined to be the soundest and purest
for the formation of his character. Mrs. Green, who was as good and
motherly a soul as ever lived,
[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 11]
was yet (as we have shown) one of the Sappeys of Sapcot, a family
that were not renowned either for common sense or worldly wisdom, and
her notions of a boy's education were of that kind laid down by her
favourite poet, Cowper, in his "Tirocinium" that we are
"Well-tutor'd ~only~ while we share
A mother's lectures and a nurse's care;"
and in her horror of all other kind of instruction (not that she
admitted Mrs. Toosypegs to her counsels), she fondly kept Master
Verdant at her own apron-strings. The task of teaching his young
idea how to shoot was committed chiefly to his sisters' governess,
and he regularly took his place with them in the school-room. These
daily exercises and mental drillings were subject to the inspection
of their maiden-aunt, Miss Virginia Verdant, a first cousin of Mr.
Green's, who had come to visit at the Manor during Master Verdant's
infancy, and had remained there ever since; and this generalship was
crowned with such success, that her nephew grew up the girlish
companion of his sisters, with no knowledge of boyish sports, and no
desire for them.
The motherly and spinsterial views regarding his education were
favoured by the fact that he had no playmates of his own sex and age;
and since his father was an only child, and his mother's brothers had
died in their infancy, there were no cousins to initiate him into the
mysteries of boyish games and feelings. Mr. Green was a man who only
cared to live a quiet, easy-going life, and would have troubled
himself but little about his neighbours, if he had had any; but the
Manor Green lay in an agricultural district, and, saving the Rectory,
there was no other large house for miles around. The rector's wife,
Mrs. Larkyns, had died shortly after the birth of her first child, a
son, who was being educated at a public school; and this was enough,
in Mrs. Green's eyes, to make a too intimate acquaintance between her
boy and Master Larkyns a thing by no means to be desired. With her
favourite poet she would say,
"For public schools, 'tis public folly feeds;"
and, regarding them as the very hotbeds of all that is wrong, she
would turn a deaf, though polite, ear to the rector whenever he said,
"Why don't you let your Verdant go with my Charley? Charley is three
years older than Verdant, and would take him under his wing." Mrs.
Green would as soon think of putting one of her chickens under the
wing of a hawk, as intrusting the innocent Verdant to the care of the
scape-grace Charley; so she still persisted in her own system of
education, despite all that the rector could advise to the contrary.
[12 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]
As for Master Verdant, he was only too glad at his mother's decision,
for he partook of all her alarm about public schools, though from a
different cause. It was not very often that he visited at the
Rectory during Master Charley's holidays; but when he did, that young
gentleman favoured him with such accounts of the peculiar knack the
second master possessed of finding out all your tenderest places when
he "licked a feller" for a false quantity, "that, by Jove! you couldn't
sit down for a fortnight without squeaking;" and of the jolly mills
they used to have with the town cads, who would lie in wait for you,
and half kill you if they caught you alone; and of the fun it was to
make a junior form fag for you, and do all your dirty work; - that
Master Verdant's hair would almost stand on end at such horrors, and
he would gasp for very dread lest such should ever be ~his~ dreadful
doom.
And then Master Charley would take a malicious pleasure in consoling
him, by saying, "Of course, you know, you'll only have to fag for the
first two or three years; then - if you get into the fourth form -
you'll be able to have a fag for yourself. And it's awful fun, I can
tell you, to see the way some of the fags get riled at cricket! You
get a feller to give you a few balls, just for practice, and you hit
the ball into another feller's ground; and then you tell your fag to
go and pick it up. So he goes to do it, when the other feller sings
out, 'Don't touch that ball, or I'll lick you!' So you tell the fag
to come to you, and you say, 'Why don't you do as I tell you?' And he
says, 'Please, sir!' and then the little beggar blubbers. So you say
to him, 'None of that, sir! Touch your toes!' We always make 'em wear
straps on purpose. And then his trousers go tight and beautiful, and
you take out your strap and warm him! And then he goes to get the
ball, and the other feller sings out, 'I told you to let that ball
alone! Come here, sir! Touch your toes!' So he warms him too; and
then we go on all jolly. It's awful fun, I can tell you!"
Master Verdant would think it awful indeed; and, by his own fireside,
would recount the deeds of horror to his trembling mother and
sisters, whose imagination shuddered at the scenes from which they
hoped their darling would be preserved.
Perhaps Master Charley had his own reasons for making matters worse
than they really were; but, as long as the information he derived
concerning public schools was of this description, so long did Master
Verdant Green feel thankful at being kept away from them. He had a
secret dread, too, of his friend's superior age and knowledge; and in
his presence felt a bashful awe that made him glad to get back from
the Rectory to his own sisters; while Master Charley, on the other
hand, entertained a lad's contempt for one that could not fire
[AN OXFORD FRESHMAN 13]
off a gun, or drive a cricket-ball, or jump a ditch without falling
into it. So the Rectory and the Manor Green lads saw but very little
of each other; and, while the one went through his public-school
course, the other was brought up at the women's apron-string.
But though thus put under petticoat government, Mr. Verdant Green
was not altogether freed from those tyrants of youth, - the dead
languages. His aunt Virginia was as learned a Blue as her esteemed
ancestress in the court of Elizabeth, the very Virgin Queen of Blues;
and under her guidance Master Verdant was dragged with painful
diligence through the first steps of the road that was to take him to
Parnassus. It was a great sight to see her sitting stiff and
straight, - with her wonderfully undeceptive "false front" of
(somebody else's) black hair, graced on either side by four
sausage-looking curls, - as, with spectacles on nose and dictionary in
hand, she instructed her nephew in those ingenuous arts which should
soften his manners, and not permit him to be brutal. And, when they
together entered upon the romantic page of Virgil (which was the
extent of her classical reading), nothing would delight her more than
to declaim their sonorous Arma-virumque-cano lines, where the
intrinsic qualities of the verse surpassed the quantities that she
gave to them.
Fain would Miss Virginia have made Virgil the end and aim of an
educational existence, and so have kept her pupil entirely under her
own care; but, alas! she knew nothing further; she had no
acquaintance with Greek, and she had never flirted with Euclid; and
the rector persuaded Mr. Green that these were indispensable to a
boy's education. So, when Mr. Verdant Green was (in stable language)
"rising" sixteen, he went thrice a week to the Rectory, where Mr.
Larkyns bestowed upon him a couple of hours, and taught him to
conjugate {tupto}, and get over the ~Pons Asinorum~. Mr. Larkyns
found his pupil not a particularly brilliant scholar, but he was a
plodding one; and though he learned slowly, yet the little he did
learn was learned well.
Thus the Rectory and the home studies went hand and hand, and
continued so, with but little interruption, for more than two years;
and Mr. Verdant Green had for some time assumed the ~toga virilis~ of
stick-up collars and swallow-tail coats, that so effectually cut us
off from the age of innocence; and the small family festival that
annually celebrated his birthday had just been held for the
eighteenth time, when
"A change came o'er the spirit of ~his~ dream."
[14 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN]