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ROWLANDSON’S OXFORD
[Illustration: FRONT VIEW OF CHRIST CHURCH.]
ROWLANDSON’S OXFORD
BY A. HAMILTON GIBBS
(ST JOHN’S COLLEGE)
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.
1911
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I THE UNDERGRADUATE THEN AND NOW
Blissful ignorance--The real education--Empty schools--
Manhood--Lonely freshers--The “pi” man--The newcomer’s
metamorphosis--The Lownger’s day--Regrets at being down 1-8
CHAPTER II THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRESHER
First arrival--Footpads and “easy pads”--Farewell to
parents--A forlorn animal--Terrae Filius’s advice--Much
prayers--“Hell has no fury like a woman scorned”--The
disadvantages of a conscience 9-17
CHAPTER III THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY FRESHER--(_continued_)
Ceremony of matriculation--Paying the swearing-broker--
Colman and the Vice-Chancellor--Learning the Oxford
manner--_Homunculi Togati_--Academia and a mother’s
love--The jovial father--Underground dog-holes and
shelving garrets--The harpy and the sheets--The first
night 18-28
CHAPTER IV THE SMART
Valentine Frippery and his letter--Boiled chicken and
pettitoes--Lyne’s coffee-house and the _billet doux_--
Tick--Liquor capacity--A Smart advises _The Student_--
Latin odes for tradesmen only 29-38
CHAPTER V THE TOAST
Terrae Filius sums her up--Merton Wall butterflies--Hearne
comments--Flavia and the orange tree--Dick, the sloven--
The President under her thumb--Amhurst’s table of cons.--
King Charles and the other place 39-45
CHAPTER VI THE SERVITOR
The germ of Ruskin Hall--Description of himself--George
Whitefield--College exercises--Running errands and copying
lines--Samuel Wesley--Famous servitors 46-54
CHAPTER VII SPORTS AND ATHLETICS
Rowing--Dame Hooper’s--Southey at Balliol--Cox’s six-oared
crew--The river-side barmaid--Sailing-boats--Statutes
against games--Bell-ringing--Hearne and gymnasia--Horses
and badger-baiting--Cock-fights and prize-fights--
Paniotti’s Fencing Academy--Old-time “bug-shooters”--
Skating in Christ Church meadows--Cricket and the
Bullingdon Club--Walking tours 55-68
CHAPTER VIII CLUBS AND SOCIETIES
The foregathering fresher--Dibdin and the “Lunatics”--The
Constitution Club--The Oxford Poetical Club--Its rules and
minutes--High Borlace--The Freecynics and Banterers 69-82
CHAPTER IX WORK AND EXAMINATIONS
Tolerated ignorance--Lax discipline--Gibbon and Magdalen--
The “Vindication”--Opposing and responding--“Schemes”--
Doing austens--Perjury and bribes--Receiving presents--
Magdalen collections 83-94
CHAPTER X ’VARSITY LITERATURE
Present-day ineptitude--Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_--
Domestic intelligence--Election poems--Curious
advertisements--Superabundance of St John’s editors--
Terrae Filius 95-108
CHAPTER XI ’VARSITY LITERATURE--(_continued_)
_The Student_--Cambridge included--Its design--The female
student--Poem by Sir Walter Raleigh--Bishop Atterbury’s
letter--The manly woman 109-121
CHAPTER XII ’VARSITY LITERATURE--(_continued_)
The _Oxford Magazine_--Introduction of illustrations--Odd
advertisements--Attention paid to the Drama--Prologue to
the _Cozeners_, written by Garrick--Visions, fables, and
moral tales--_The Loiterer_--Diary of an Oxford man, 1789 122-135
CHAPTER XIII ’VARSITY LITERATURE--(_continued_)
_The Oxford Packet_--_Academia: or the Humours of Oxford_--
_The Oxford Act_--_The Oxford Sausage_--Present and latter
day literature summed up 136-141
CHAPTER XIV THE OXFORD TRADESMAN
_The Student’s_ opinion of one--A tradesman’s poem and its
result--Dodging the dun--Debt and its penalties--
Tradesmen’s taste in literature--Advertising and _The
Loiterer_--Tick--Dr Newton, innkeeper--Amhurst’s
confession--Fathers and trainers of toasts 142-152
CHAPTER XV THE DON
Tutors--Their slackness--The real and the ideal tutor--Dr
Newton on tutors’ fees--Dr Johnson’s recommendation of
Bateman--Public lecturers--Terrae Filius and a Wadham
man’s letter 153-162
CHAPTER XVI THE DON--(_continued_)
The examiners--Perjury and bribery--Method of examining--
College Fellows--Election to Fellowships--Gibbon and the
Magdalen Dons--Heads of colleges--Their domestic and
public character--Golgotha and Ben Numps--St John’s head
pays homage to Christ Church--Drs Marlowe and Randolph 163-174
CHAPTER XVII THE DON--(continued)
Proctors--The Black Book--Personal spite and the taking of
a degree--The case of Meadowcourt of Merton--Extract from
Black Book--The taverner and the Proctor--Isaac Walton and
the senior Proctor--Amhurst’s character sketch of a
certain Proctor 175-183
CHAPTER XVIII CELEBRITIES AS OXFORD MEN
Charles James Fox--Earl of Malmesbury--William Eden--Cards
and claret--Midnight oil--Oxford friendships remembered
afterwards--Edward Gibbon--Delicate bookworm--Antagonism
towards Oxford--Becomes a Roman Catholic--Subsequent
apostasy--John Wesley--Resists taking orders--Germs of
ambition--America the golden opportunity--Oxford
responsible for Methodism 184-198
CHAPTER XIX CELEBRITIES AS OXFORD MEN--(_continued_)
William Collins--Joins the Smarts--Forgets how to work--
Oxford kills his will-power--Loses his reason--Samuel
Johnson at Pembroke--A lonely freshman--Translates Pope’s
_Messiah_--Suffers horribly from poverty--Dr Adam, his
tutor--Readiness and physical pluck--Love of showing
off--His love of Pembroke 199-210
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
FRONT VIEW OF CHRIST CHURCH _Frontispiece_
VIEW OF ST MARY’S CHURCH AND RADCLIFFE LIBRARY _To face page_ 9
COLLEGE SERVICE " 15
A VIEW OF THE THEATRE, PRINTING HOUSE, ETC., AT OXFORD " 19
BUCKS OF THE FIRST HEAD " 30
MERTON COLLEGE AND CHAPEL, FROM THE QUADRANGLE " 40
A ’VARSITY TRICK--SMUGGLING IN " 45
VIEW OF QUEEN’S COLLEGE " 53
NORTH VIEW OF FRIAR BACON’S STUDY AT OXFORD " 59
A DUCK HUNT " 66
A WESTERN VIEW OF ALL SOULS’ COLLEGE " 74
THE ORIGINAL ENTRANCE TO THE CLOISTERS AT MAGDALEN " 92
OFF TO A BADGER-BAITING " 133
A SOUTH VIEW OF THE OBSERVATORY AT OXFORD " 160
MERTON COLLEGE " 177
STAIRCASE, CHRIST CHURCH " 193
FOREWORD
The task of writing a book on Oxford University is by no means an easy
one. If it be a novel there are countless pitfalls to entrap the
author--points small and inconsequent to the reader who cannot proudly
claim the City of Spires as his Alma Mater, but irritating beyond
description to the man who knows and loves Oxford.
But if modern Oxford dealt with from the romantic and sentimental point of
view as the background of a story contains such a network of difficulties,
the Oxford of two hundred years ago, Rowlandson’s Oxford, contains them
multiplied a hundred times, because it now becomes a question not of
reproducing the vivid pictures of the hour and moment, but of recreating
the atmosphere of a time that is silent in death.
It is, therefore, with great diffidence that I have attempted to
resuscitate the life and moods of Oxford of the eighteenth century. Barely
two years have elapsed since the days when I looked out from my windows
into the quad of my college. All the work and play, the alarums and
excursions which go to form the life of the average Undergraduate have not
yet had time to fade into dim, half forgotten memories. Alma Mater still
grasps me in her warm hand. So vivid indeed are all the impressions which
I received from the friendly gargoyles and the peace-touched lawns, the
beautiful colleges with their silent cloisters, the full-blooded
twenty-firsters and bump-suppers, and the thousand and one everyday
happenings, that I might be merely awaiting the passing of vacation to go
up once more.
With all the Undergraduate interests still so strongly at heart, I think
that it is natural that I should have studied the Rowlandson period with
the mind of the Undergraduate and have carried out my task from the
Undergraduate point of view. It is difficult to give any idea of the
quaintness, delight, and amusement caused by going back two hundred years
to a University so like and so unlike--like, in that the men, although so
different outwardly, had practically the same ideas as we have and carried
them out in the same colleges, even in the same rooms, in a precisely
similar manner; unlike in that the Dons were a breed of men differing in
every respect from those who look after us to-day.
Working, then, on the hypothesis that Oxford men in Rowlandson’s time were
identical with ourselves, I have drawn analogies between every step in the
lives of both. I have endeavoured to show that from the beginning of their
fresherdom, when they felt self-conscious, _gauche_, and timid, down to
the days when they took their degrees and knew Oxford blindfold in all her
moods and tenses, they possessed the same outlook, had the same
aspirations and ambitions, and were filled with the same admiration and
love of Alma Mater as the men of to-day. For instance, as a freshman the
Georgian Undergraduate curiously watched the seniors who were responsible
for the tone of their college. Gradually he sloughed both his nervousness
and his un-Oxford wardrobe and began to assert his own individuality.
Little by little he discovered new sides of Oxford life, new haunts in
which he began to feel at home. Daily he made new acquaintances who, as
time went by, ripened into friends. Eventually, by the end of his first
year, he had so absorbed Oxford into his personality that he in turn was
able to condescend to the next year’s arrivals. During this time his
attitude towards the Dons, the statutes, the schools--to everything, in
short, outside the immediate Undergraduate side of life--varied with the
terms. At the beginning they were subjects only to be broached with awe
and deliberation. But the more he came into contact with an ever
increasing circle of friends, the sooner his respect changed into
ridicule, disgust, and finally, when a senior, into amused toleration.
In précis form such was the development of the eighteenth-century
Undergraduate. His metamorphosis into a “blood,” with all its amusing
accompaniments and accomplishments--the former consisting of the latest
fashions in clothes and the _entrée_ to the innermost recesses of the
Maudlin Groves in the company of the most celebrated Oxford damsel; the
latter of a facility for dashing off a well thought out extempore series
of oaths, being the handiest man at a tea-table, drinking more than any
other buck of his acquaintance before finally succumbing, to follow in the
natural sequence of events according to the temperament of the freshman.
Had he a leaning towards becoming a “blood” not only was there nothing to
stop him, but, on the contrary, all the existing conditions were such as
to facilitate the execution of his desires.
In all these phrases the old-time Undergraduate can be compared with his
modern brothers. In his dealings with the river-side barmaids, the local
tradesmen, and the proctors he pursued much the same ingenuous methods
which are used with equal success to-day. Just as we become members of
unlimited numbers of year clubs and settle the affairs of the entire human
species at the nightly meetings with ease and eloquence, they, too, formed
societies and took themselves with a similar seriousness. They contributed
literary morsels to the Undergraduate papers which satirised existing
institutions in the same youthful manner in which we satirise them. They
conducted “rags” with a thoroughness and disregard of results which ended
in the same speedy rustication of the ringleaders which inevitably
overtakes the men who are still unwise enough to be found out.
In a word, my object has been not to compare the ethics of the university
to-day with those of yesterday, but rather to set forth an analogy between
Dons and Undergraduates of that period and this, and the business of their
daily life, from the point of view of one upon whom the influence of Alma
Mater has not yet been mellowed into an analytical remembrance by long
contact with the world which lies beyond her spires.
Whether I have succeeded in proving my case remains to be seen. At least I
venture to hope that the results of my work may form a frame for
Rowlandson’s pictures which are here reproduced for the first time from
Rowlandson’s original water-colour drawings.
Of these pictures many were engraved at the time in aquatint, but the
engraver was as a rule so obsessed with the Georgian ideas of the
beautiful in architecture that he practically reconstructed the majority
of the buildings represented, in accordance with that idea, so that some
of the most beautiful and characteristic buildings in Oxford and
Cambridge, so delicately portrayed by Rowlandson’s pencil, are turned into
rectangular monstrosities, the like of which was never seen in either
university town.
The superiority of hand-engraving over modern processes is evident enough,
when the engraving itself was made by the artist; but when the original
drawing is so hopelessly misrepresented as is the case with many of the
aquatints of Rowlandson’s drawings, the modern facsimile processes have
their obvious advantages.
It is therefore claimed that Rowlandson’s drawings of Oxford are here
reproduced for the first time, and it is believed that they will be a
revelation to many who have hitherto looked upon Rowlandson merely as a
somewhat gross caricaturist. The caricaturist, it is true, is still here
depicting in the foregrounds characteristic scenes in the university life
of the time, but here is also another Rowlandson with an appreciation of
the beauties of Oxford rare indeed in his age, and one who is able to
delineate them with accuracy and delicacy which have seldom been equalled
in the portrayal of such subjects.
The author desires to express his gratitude to the Rev. Christopher
Wordsworth for having very kindly granted him permission to make
quotations from “Social Life in the English Universities”; and to Messrs
Macmillan & Co., publishers of J. R. Green’s “Oxford Studies,” for
allowing him to make two quotations from that book; and also to Mr R. S.
Rait of the Oxford Historical Society for having permitted him to quote
from Miss L. Quiller-Couch’s “Reminiscences of Oxford,” published by that
society.
ROWLANDSON’S OXFORD
CHAPTER I
THE UNDERGRADUATE THEN AND NOW
Blissful ignorance--The real education--Empty schools--Manhood--Lonely
freshers--The “pi” man--The newcomer’s metamorphosis--The Lownger’s
day--Regrets at being down.
How few of us there are to-day who ever devote even the slack hour between
tea and “hotters” and Hall to finding out something at least about the
Undergraduates who had our rooms two centuries ago. Yet to every man the
word Oxford conjures up vast vague shadows from the past which make him as
a freshman tread softly and with reverence through the quads and gardens,
High Streets and by-streets of the City of Spires. Great names rise up
into our minds and fill us with wonder, but the scout knocks at our door
with half-cold food and our dreams dissolve into irritated reality. There
may come a moment, perhaps, when, with feet at rest upon the mantel-shelf
and a straight-grained pipe bubbling in quiet response between our teeth,
we are deafening our ears to the call of bed, the slow-flowing
conversation drifts by chance to a casual query as to what our
predecessors did at the same hour two hundred years ago. Beyond a few more
or less unimaginative surmises we remain in ignorance, blissful and
uncaring, believing them to be strange-clothed beings of stilted language
and curious habits, and at once the talk turns to present and more
pleasant topics. We little think that to all intents and purposes we are
almost exactly the same as our old-time-brethren.
To-day we row, play cricket, football, tennis, golf; we cut our lectures
when we safely can and “binge” at every opportunity. Schools do occupy us,
it is true, but as a mere secondary item in the university scheme of
things--and rightly so. A degree, however good, does not, by itself, make
men of us and teach us how to live. It is the social life of the
university which is the real education and which sends us out into the
world ready to face anything and everything. By developing our bodies we
develop our minds, and in this programme of athletics and sociability we
are a replica of our eighteenth-century brethren. They rose about nine,
breakfasted at ten, and dallied away the morning with a flute or the
latest French comedy. By way of strenuous exercise, necessitated by a
climate which was just as evil then as now, they walked, rode, rowed, or
skated, and in the evening figured at the Mitre or Tuns where they made
merry into the small hours with beer, claret, or punch.
To them schools were much less a source of worry than they are to us, for,
beyond attending occasional disputations and an odd lecture or so, when a
Don could be persuaded to give one, they obtained their degree by the
simple but expensive process of drinking the examiner--usually a hardened
toper--under the table overnight. He was then led, in the morning, while
still pleasantly fuddled, to the schools, and there, in consideration of a
respectable douceur, he signed away the necessary papers with a beaming
and self-satisfied smile. They knew nothing of the humours of white ties,
dark suits, and a week’s terrible strain to get a First in Honour
Mods--before the Finals are even thought of. The shivering crowds waiting
in the Hall to be led to the slaughter did not exist in those days. A
Trinity man named Skinner, who matriculated in 1790, flung himself at the
subject in satirical verse:--
“Enter we next the Public Schools
Where now a death-like stillness rules;
Yet these still walls in days of yore
Back to the streets returned the roar of hundreds....
But since their champion Aristotle
Has been deserted for the bottle
The benches stand like Prebends’ stalls
Lone and deserted ’gainst the walls.”[1]
No sooner have we finished with our public school days, when we are known
as boys, and have either scrambled over the “Smalls” hedge with some
humility and relief, or else have secured the privilege of lording it in a
scholar’s gown, than we instantly become men. We may be anything between
eighteen and twenty, but if a sister, brother, or cousin be unwary enough
to refer to us as a boy--woe unto him or her! We may pretend that we do
not mind, but in our heart of hearts we rejoice in being Oxford “men,” and
guard our title jealously. We are not, however, unique in this. It is a
habit which has come down to us from the eighteenth century when they were
just as jealous of such points of etiquette.
George Colman the younger tells us that he came upon two freshmen of that
time who had had a quarrel. Six months before they blacked each other’s
eyes at Westminster in the good old British way. Now, however, being
Oxford men, they could not descend to such a childish level, but agreed to
afford each other “gentlemanly satisfaction.” They may have lacked a
certain sense of humour, but it was the right spirit, and it is safe to
conclude that they both did well at their respective colleges.
The lonely freshman of to-day who has no friends already in residence
wanders round just as nervously and makes the same _faux pas_ as did his
predecessors. It takes him just as long to find his feet and settle down
and make friends. Exactly in the same way also if he knows men already up
he is welcomed by them, invited to heavy breakfasts and put right on
matters of etiquette: such as never by any chance to wear square and gown
unless absolutely compelled to--and all the other minutiæ which are of
such importance. In the eighteenth century a freshman was taken by his
senior friends to the Mitre and sat in front of a bowl of punch with brown
toast bobbing in it. He heard sonnets recited to the eyelashes of Sylvia.
He was taught to drink on his knees to Phyllis or Chloe, or some other
fair female of the moment. He was taken to the barber’s and shown how to
wear a wig instead of his own hair. In fact, his feet were set in the
proper path then in just the same friendly spirit as now.
They had their clubs and societies at which, in the intervals of drinking,
they indicted Latin poems or discussed some important political question
where we, over mulled claret and other comestibles, read papers on “The
Abolition of the Halfpenny Press,” or “The Glories of Tariff Reform.” They
had big dinners, and tried to find their way home in the small hours. We
have our fresher’s wines and bump suppers in which the whole college
participates with the sole object of enjoying good wine and destroying
good furniture, and we crawl home, if we are outside college, through the
same streets. To-day we have the “pi” man who sternly refuses to
countenance such evil things as fresher’s wines; who has signed the pledge
and eschews tobacco. If he is compelled by an outraged band of senior men
to lend his presence against his better judgment, and is led out from a
room in a state of Doré-like chaos, he becomes uproarious on a glass of
water and two bananas, and writes home to his mother that his bill for
repairs is enormous owing to his bravery in being a martyr to his
principles, and that drunkenness is on the increase among the
Undergraduates. All the same he thoroughly enjoys himself, and in time
wears off rough corners and learns how to keep his vows without any
objectionable fanfare. At the end of the eighteenth century a man of this
kidney named Crosse wrote to his mother: “Oxford is a perfect hell upon
earth. What chance is there for an unfortunate lad just come from school
with no one to watch and care for him--no guide? I often saw my tutor
carried off perfectly intoxicated.” I can see the man crouching in a dark
corner of the quad appalled at the sight of his fellows dancing round a
bonfire, while his tutor rushes by on the arms of a festive crowd in full
rejoicing at some college triumph. It would be interesting to ascertain
Crosse’s views at the end of his university career. He remained, however,
in the obscurity of mediocrity.
Our trousseau when we first appear at the university consists of modest
socks and humble waistcoats, and ties which make no claim to originality
or even to smartness. They are content to be merely useful and to fulfil
their appointed functions. But does not every parent learn subsequently,
with dreadful results to his peace of mind, how after our first month we
make our way unerringly to the tailors and clothiers, and there with
deadly earnestness absorb colour schemes which cry a loud challenge to
Joseph’s coat? Our waistcoats are dreams,--sometimes nightmares; the
blending of harmony between shirt, tie, and socks is as perfect as the
rainbow. Our hair, which used to be parted carelessly down one side, now
disdains partings and goes straight back in one beautiful Magdalen sweep.
Our trousers are thrown at the scout’s head as a gift unless they be of
unparalleled width and of exceptional crease.
This tendency to burst forth into strange and variegated garments in token
of our emancipation from apron strings was just as strong in the old days.
The sons of country farmers came trooping into Oxford, their clouted shoes
thick with good red earth, in linsey wolsey coats, with greasy, uncombed
heads of hair flapping in the wind. Their stockings were of coarse yarn,
and they knew nothing better than to have long muslin neckcloths run with
red at the ends. But they soon realised the contempt in which they were
held for this dull chrysalis-like appearance. After a few weeks these
shamefaced clodhoppers sneaked into the side door of the barbers’ shops to
emerge proudly by the front entrance in a bob wig. Their clouted shoes
were relegated to young brothers, and they wore new ones--Oxford cut.
Their yarn stockings gave place to worsted, until, after a very short
interval between their arrival and their settling down, they blushed out
like butterflies in tye wigs and ruffles and silk gowns. The “blood” of
that period, or, as the term then was, the “smart,” or the “buck of the
first head,” was distinguished when he aired his person, Amhurst told us,
“by a stiff silk gown which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a
flaxen tye wig, or sometimes a long natural one which reaches down below
his rump; a broad bully cock’d hat, or a square cap of above twice the
usual size; white stockings, thin Spanish leather shoes; his cloaths lined
with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as at the
wrists. Besides all which marks, he has a delicate jaunt in his gait, and
smells philosophically of essence.”
How his direct descendant, the Bullingdon man, must envy him his
magnificent opportunities of making a brave show! Not for him the silk
gown, the bully cocked hat. The best he can do in imitation is the amazing
dinner jacket which he sometimes sports at the theatre, under which one
finds not the accepted form of dress shirt but a peculiar form of
abortion which is neatly ruffled at “bosom and wrists.” In place of the
Spanish leather shoes the last word to-day is apparently buckskin. The
“delicate jaunt in the gait” has been retained--the result being caused
now by a union of “Eton slouch” and “Oxford manner.” The head still smells
of essence--honey and flowers at Hatt’s, brilliantine at Martyr’s. These
great-minded people think alike not only in point of dress but of the
manner of killing time. “The Lownger” summed up the process as carried out
in the eighteenth century--
“I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,
Blow a tune on my flute, or perhaps make a pen,
Read a play till eleven or cock my lac’d hat,
Then step to my neighbour’s, till dinner to chat.
Dinner over to Tom’s or to James’s I go,
The news of the town so impatient to know,
While Low, Locke and Newton and all the rum race
That talk of their Modes, their ellipses and space,
The Seat of the Soul and new Systems on high,
In Halls as abstruse as their mysteries lie.
From the coffee-house then I to Tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray,
I sup before eight and secure from all duns,
Undauntedly march to the Mitre or Tuns,
Where in Punch or good Claret my sorrows I drown,
And toss off a bowl to the best in the town.
At one in the morning I call what’s to pay?
Then home to my College I stagger away.
Thus I tope all the night as I trifle all day.”
Every one knows the various processes of slacking at the present time, so
that there is no need for detail. But in essence the method is the same,
and the result also. Our lunches at the Cherwell Hotel, at the riverside
inns at Iffley and Abingdon; our “Grinds”; our slacking on the river in
summer term--all these were done two centuries ago, and, just as some of
the more energetic of us seek to immortalise these doings by contributing
poems and articles to the ’varsity papers, so did the Undergraduates then
send their sonnets and Latin verses to _The Student_, the _Oxford
Magazine_, and Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_. In place of the musical comedy
lady, whose silvery laughter floats down wind to-day, the Oxford toast
flaunted it right merrily in the old days. The gownsmen’s tobacco accounts
then amounted to quite as much as ours do, and they wrote home for further
supplies of pocket money in almost the identical terms which we use
to-day. Yesterday’s and to-day’s Oxford men are one and the same. Oxford
herself and her Dons are changed, but the Undergraduate goes on doing and
thinking the same things in the same way, and when he goes down now he
feels very much as felt the eighteenth-century poet who, also down,
sang:--
“Could Ovid, deathless bard, forbear,
Confin’d by Scythia’s frozen plains,
Cease to desire his native air
In softest elegiac strains?
Cursed with the town no more can I
For Oxford’s meadow cease to sigh....
Can I, while mem’ry lasts, forget
Oxford, thy silver rolling stream,
Thy silent walks and cool retreat
Where first I sucked the love of fame?
E’en now the thought inspires my breast
And lulls my troubled soul to rest.”
[Illustration: VIEW OF ST. MARY’S CHURCH & RADCLIFFE LIBRARY.]