I should like to fill several volumes with accounts of various
University Snobs; so fond are my reminiscences of them, and so numerous
are they. I should like to speak, above all, of the wives and daughters
of some of the Professor-Snobs; their amusements, habits, jealousies;
their innocent artifices to entrap young men; their picnics, concerts,
and evening-parties. I wonder what has become of Emily Blades, daughter
of Blades, the Professor of the Mandingo language? I remember her
shoulders to this day, as she sat in the midst of a crowd of about
seventy young gentlemen, from Corpus and Catherine Hall, entertaining
them with ogles and French songs on the guitar. Are you married, fair
Emily of the shoulders? What beautiful ringlets those were that used to
dribble over them!--what a waist!--what a killing sea-green shot-silk
gown!--what a cameo, the size of a muffin! There were thirty-six young
men of the University in love at one time with Emily Blades: and no
words are sufficient to describe the pity, the sorrow, the deep,
deep commiseration--the rage, fury, and uncharitableness, in other
words--with which the Miss Trumps (daughter of Trumps, the Professor
of Phlebotomy) regarded her, because she DIDN'T squint, and because she
WASN'T marked with the small-pox.
As for the young University Snobs, I am getting too old, now, to speak
of such very familiarly. My recollections of them lie in the far, far
past--almost as far back as Pelham's time.
We THEN used to consider Snobs raw-looking lads, who never missed
chapel; who wore highlows and no straps; who walked two hours on the
Trumpington road every day of their lives; who carried off the college
scholarships, and who overrated themselves in hall. We were premature in
pronouncing our verdict of youthful Snobbishness The man without straps
fulfilled his destiny and duty. He eased his old governor, the curate
in Westmoreland, or helped his sisters to set up the Ladies' School. He
wrote a 'Dictionary,' or a 'Treatise on Conic Sections,' as his nature
and genius prompted. He got a fellowship: and then took to himself a
wife, and a living. He presides over a parish now, and thinks it rather
a dashing thing to belong to the 'Oxford and Cambridge Club;' and his
parishioners love him, and snore under his sermons. No, no, HE is not a
Snob. It is not straps that make the gentleman, or highlows that unmake
him, be they ever so thick. My son, it is you who are the Snob if you
lightly despise a man for doing his duty, and refuse to shake an honest
man's hand because it wears a Berlin glove.
We then used to consider it not the least vulgar for a parcel of lads
who had been whipped three months previous, and were not allowed more
than three glasses of port at home, to sit down to pineapples and ices
at each other's rooms, and fuddle themselves with champagne and claret.
One looks back to what was called a 'wine-party' with a sort of wonder.
Thirty lads round a table covered with bad sweetmeats, drinking bad
wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again. Milk
punch--smoking--ghastly headache--frightful spectacle of dessert-table
next morning, and smell of tobacco--your guardian, the clergyman,
dropping in, in the midst of this--expecting to find you deep in
Algebra, and discovering the Gyp administering soda-water.
There were young men who despised the lads who indulged in the coarse
hospitalities of wine-parties, who prided themselves in giving RECHERCHE
little French dinners. Both wine-party-givers and dinner-givers were
Snobs.
There were what used to be called 'dressy' Snobs:--Jimmy, who might
be seen at five o'clock elaborately rigged out, with a camellia in his
button-hole, glazed boots, and fresh kid-gloves twice a day;--Jessamy,
who was conspicuous for his 'jewellery,'--a young donkey, glittering
all over with chains, rings, and shirt-studs;--Jacky, who rode every day
solemnly on the Blenheim Road, in pumps and white silk stockings, with
his hair curled,--all three of whom flattered themselves they gave laws
to the University about dress--all three most odious varieties of Snobs.
Sporting Snobs of course there were, and are always--those happy beings
in whom Nature has implanted a love of slang: who loitered about the
horsekeeper's stables, and drove the London coaches--a stage in and
out--and might be seen swaggering through the courts in pink of early
mornings, and indulged in dice and blind-hookey at nights, and
never missed a race or a boxing-match; and rode flat-races, and kept
bull-terriers. Worse Snobs even than these were poor miserable wretches
who did not like hunting at all, and could not afford it, and were in
mortal fear at a two-foot ditch; but who hunted because Glenlivat and
Cinqbars hunted. The Billiard Snob and the Boating Snob were varieties
of these, and are to be found elsewhere than in universities.
Then there were Philosophical Snobs, who used to ape statesmen at the
spouting-clubs, and who believed as a fact that Government always had
an eye on the University for the selection of orators for the House of
Commons. There were audacious young free-thinkers, who adored nobody or
nothing, except perhaps Robespierre and the Koran, and panted for the
day when the pale name of priest should shrink and dwindle away before
the indignation of an enlightened world.
But the worst of all University Snobs are those unfortunates who go
to rack and ruin from their desire to ape their betters. Smith becomes
acquainted with great people at college, and is ashamed of his father
the tradesman. Jones has fine acquaintances, and lives after their
fashion like a gay free-hearted fellow as he is, and ruins his father,
and robs his sister's portion, and cripples his younger brother's outset
in life, for the pleasure of entertaining my lord, and riding by the
side of Sir John. And though it may be very good fun for Robinson to
fuddle himself at home as he does at College, and to be brought home by
the policeman he has just been trying to knock down--think what fun it
is for the poor old soul his mother!--the half-pay captain's widow, who
has been pinching herself all her life long, in order that that jolly
young fellow might have a University education.