and dignified. This is an age when almost every ancient town or city
is approached through a ring of modern suburbs, but Cambridge is one
of the few and happy exceptions. You cannot enter Oxford by the old
coach road from London without passing through the modern suburb of
St. Clements, whose mean street pitifully discounts the approach to
the city over Magdalen Bridge; but at first, when nearing Cambridge,
nothing breaks the flat landscape save the distant view of King's
College Chapel, that gigantic pile of stone whose long flat skyline and
four angle-turrets so wrought upon Ruskin's feelings that he compared
it with a billiard-table turned upside down. It is not because of the
great Chapel that the entrance to Cambridge is noble: it will add
nothing to the beauty of the scene until that day--perhaps never to
come--when the building shall be completed with a stately belltower
after the design contemplated by its founder, Henry the Sixth. No; it
is rather by reason, firstly, of the broad quiet rural village street
of Trumpington, set humbly, as it were, in the gates of learning, and
secondly of the still broad and quiet, but more urban, Trumpington Road
that follows it, that Cambridge is so charmingly entered. A line of
old gabled cottages with old-fashioned gardens occupies either side of
the road; while an ancient mansion or two, together with the village
church, are hid, or perhaps glimpsed for a moment, off to the left,
where a by-road goes off, past the old toll-house, to Grantchester.
This is Trumpington. In that churchyard lies a remarkable man: none
other, indeed, than Henry Fawcett--we will not call him by his title of
"Professor," for that seems always so blatant a dignity--who died at
Cambridge in 1884, thus ending a life that had risen triumphant above,
surely, the keenest affliction Fate can inflict. Completely blinded in
youth by an accident of the most deplorable kind, he yet lived to fill
a career in life and politics apparently denied by loss of sight. The
text on his gravestone--a garbled passage from Exodus, chap. xiv. ver.
15--is singularly appropriate: "Speak unto the people, that they go
forward."
It is down this leafy by-way, past the church, that one finds
Grantchester Mill, a building generally thought to occupy the site of
that "Trumpington Mill" made famous in one of Chaucer's _Canterbury
Tales_.
For Trumpington has a certain literary fame, in association with
Chaucer's "Reeve's Tale":--
"At Trompington, not fer fro Cantebrigge,
Ther goth a brook, and over that a brigge,
Upon the whiche brook ther stont a melle."
The "Reeve's Tale" is not precisely a part of Chaucer to be discussed
in every drawing-room, and is indeed a story well calculated to make a
satyr laugh and the judicious grieve. Therefore, it is perhaps no great
pity that the mill stands no longer, so that you cannot actually seek
it out and say, "Here the proud Simon, the 'insolent Simkin,' ground
the people's corn, taking dishonest toll of it, and hereabouts those
roystering blades of University scholars, Allen and John, played their
pranks." Grantchester Mill is a building wholly modern.
It is a grave and dignified road, tree-shaded and echoing to the
drowsy cawing of rooks (like tired professors weary of lecturing
to inattentive classes), that conducts along the high road through
Trumpington village to the beginnings of the town. Here, by the bridge
crossing the little stream called the "Vicar's Brook," one mile from
Great St. Mary's Church, the very centre of Cambridge, stands the
eight-foot high milestone, the first in the series set up between
Cambridge and Barkway in the early years of the eighteenth century, and
paid for out of "Dr. Mouse's and Mr. Hare's Causey Money." This initial
stone cost £5, 8s. The arms of Dr. Mouse may still be traced, impaling
those of Trinity Hall.
[Illustration: TRUMPINGTON MILL.]
Beyond this hoary but little-noticed relic begin the Botanic
Gardens, and beside them runs or creeps that old Cambridge
water-supply, the "little new river," brought in 1610 from the Nine
Wells under yonder gentle hills that break the flatness of the
landscape away on the right.
[Illustration: THE FIRST MILESTONE FROM CAMBRIDGE.]
The idea of bringing pure water into Cambridge originated, in 1574,
with a certain Dr. Perne, Master of Peterhouse; its object both to
cleanse the King's Ditch, "which," says Fuller, "once made to defend
Cambridge by its strength, did in his time offend it with its stench,"
and to provide drinking water for the University and town. This
clear-running stream has an interest beyond its local use, for the
cutting of its course was designed by Edward Wright, of Gonville and
Caius College, who also drew the plans for Sir Hugh Myddleton's "New
River," whose course so closely neighbours this old road between Ware
and London.
The Conduit--"Hobson's Conduit," as it is called--that once stood on
Market Hill, was removed in 1854, and now stands at the very beginning
of Cambridge, where Trumpington "Road" becomes "Street," at the head of
this open stream.
The Nine Wells are not easy to find. They are situated near the village
of Great Shelford, under a shoulder of the Gog Magog Hills, and are
approached across two rugged pastures, almost impracticable in wet
weather. The term "wells" is misleading. They are springs, found
trickling feebly through the white clay in the bed of a deep trench
with two branches, cut in the hillside. Above them stands a granite
obelisk erected by public subscription in 1861, and setting forth
all the circumstances at great length. The term "Nine Wells" is not
especially applied to this spot, but is used throughout Cambridgeshire
for springs, whatever their number. A similar custom obtained in
classic Greece, but the evidence by which our Cambridgeshire practice
might possibly be derived from such a respectable source, and so be
linked with the Pierian spring and the Muses Nine, is entirely lacking.
[Illustration: HOBSON'S CONDUIT.]
The Gog Magogs--"the Gogs," as the country-folk irreverently
abbreviate their mysterious name--are the Cambridgeshire mountains.
They are not particularly Alpine in character, being, indeed, just a
series of gently rising grassy downs, culminating in a height of three
hundred feet above sea-level. No one will ever be able to explain how
these very mild hills obtained their terrific title; and Gog and Magog
themselves, mentioned vaguely in Revelations, where the devil is let
loose again after his thousand years' imprisonment in the bottomless
pit, are equally inexplicable.
The crowning height of the Gog Magogs was in Roman times the summer
camp of a cohort of Vandals, quartered in this district to overawe
the conquered British. It was then the policy of Rome, as it is of
ourselves in India and elsewhere at the present day, to enrol into
her service the strange tribes and alien nations she had conquered,
and to bring them from afar to impress her newest subjects with the
far-reaching might and glory of the Empire. This Vandalian cohort
was formed from the barbarian prisoners defeated on the Danube by
Aurelian, and enlisted by the Emperor Probus. The earthworks of their
camp are still traceable within the grounds of the mansion and estate
of Vandlebury, on the hilltop, once belonging to the Duke of Leeds.
From this point of view Cambridge is seen mapped out below, while in
other directions the great rolling fields spread downwards in fold upon
fold. Immense fields they are, enclosed in the early years of last
century, when Cambridgeshire began to change its immemorial aspect
of open treeless downs, where the sheep grazed on the short grass
and the bustard still lingered, for its present highly cultivated
condition. Fields of this comparatively recent origin may generally be
recognised by their great size, in striking contrast with the ancient
enclosures whose area was determined by the work of hand-ploughing.
These often measure over half a mile square, and mark the advent of the
steam-plough.
XXII
THE old Cambridge water-supply, meandering down from the hills, has
induced a similar discursiveness in these last pages. Onward from
Trumpington Road it runs in a direct line to the Conduit, and our
course shall, in sympathy, be as straight.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is the first public building to attract notice
on entering the town: a huge institution in the classic style, notable
for the imposing Corinthian columns that decorate its front; its
effect marred by the stone screen that interrupts the view up the
noble flights of steps. "The Fitzbilly," as all Cambridge men know it,
derives from the noble collections of art objects and antiquities,
together with great sums of money, left to the University in 1816 by a
Lord Fitzwilliam for the establishment of a museum and art gallery. It
was completed some forty years ago, and has since then been the great
architectural feature in the first glimpse of Cambridge. The coloured
marble decorations and the painting and gilding of the interior are
grandiose rather than grand; and although the collections, added to by
many later bequests, contain many priceless and beautiful objects, the
effect of the whole is a kind of mental and optical indigestion caused
by the "fine confused feeding" afforded by the very mixed arrangement
of these treasures,--a bad arrangement, like that of an overgrown
private collection, and utterly unsuited for public and educational
needs. You turn from a manuscript to a picture, from a picture to a
case of china, from that to missals, and so all through the varied
incarnations of art throughout the centuries.
Just beyond the Fitzwilliam Museum comes Peterhouse College, the oldest
of all the colleges in the University. To understand something of the
meaning of the colleges and their relation to the supreme teaching and
governing body, it will be necessary to recount, as briefly as may
be, the circumstances in which both University and Colleges had their
origin.
The origin of Cambridge University, as of that of Oxford, is of
unknown date, and the manner of its inception problematical. Who was
the great teacher that first drew scholars to him at this place? We
cannot tell. That he was a Churchman goes without saying, for the
Church, in the dark ages when learning began to be, held letters and
culture in fee-simple. Nor can we tell why Cambridge was thus honoured,
for it was not the home, like Ely, Crowland, or Thorney, of a great
monastic establishment, whence learning of sorts radiated. One of
the untrustworthy early chroniclers of these things gives, indeed,
a specific date to the beginnings of the University, and says that
Joffrid, Abbot of Crowland, in 1110 sent monkish lecturers to the
town; but the earliest record, beyond which we must not go into the
regions of mere surmise, belongs to a hundred and twenty-one years
later, when royal regulations respecting the students were issued.
Already a Chancellor and a complete governing body appear to have been
in existence. It is arguable that a century and more must have
been necessary for these to have been evolved from the earliest days
of a teaching body; but these affairs are for pundits. Such special
pleaders as John Caius and Thomas Key, who fought with great bitterness
and amazing pertinacity in the sixteenth century on the question as
to whether Oxford or Cambridge were the older of the two, had the
hardihood to trace them back to astonishing lengths. According to
Caius, arguing for Cambridge, it was one Cantaber, a Spanish prince,
who founded the University here in the very remote days when Gurguntius
was King of Britain. To this prince he traces the name of the town
itself, and I think that fact alone serves to discredit anything else
he has to say.
[Illustration: TRUMPINGTON STREET, CAMBRIDGE.]
But no matter when and how the University originated. To those early
teachers came so many to listen in the one room or hall, that probably
constituted the original University, that the town did not suffice, to
accommodate them, and, both for the sake of convenience and discipline,
the first college was founded, as primarily a lodgment or hostel for
the scholars. As their numbers continually grew, and as benefactors
began to look with increasing kindliness upon learning, so were more
and more colleges added.
The first of all the colleges was, as already stated, this of
Peterhouse, founded so far back as 1280 by Hugh de Balsham, Bishop
of Ely. It was at first established in the Hospital of St. John the
Evangelist, near by, but was removed, only six years later, to the
present site, for convenient access to the Church of St. Peter. It is
to the fact that the chancel of this church was used as its chapel
that the college owes its official but rarely heard title of "St.
Peter's." In 1352 St. Peter's Church was given a new consecration, and
has ever since been known as St. Mary the Less. Meanwhile, in 1632, the
college built a chapel of its own.
Peterhouse has points of interest other than being the first of the
colleges. It has nurtured men not only of distinction, but of fame. Men
so opposite in character as the worldly Cardinal Beaufort--the great
Cardinal who figures in Shakespeare--and the pious Archbishop Whitgift
were educated here; and in later times that great man of science, Lord
Kelvin; but perhaps the most famous of all is Gray, the poet, whose
"Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard" has done more to endear him to
his country than the acts of any statesman or divine.
Peterhouse does not present a cheerful front to the street. It is heavy
and gloomy, and its buildings, as a whole, do not help out the story of
its age. The chapel, whose weather-vane bears the emblem of a key, an
allusion to St. Peter, stands recessed behind the railings that give
upon the street, and blocks the view into the first of the three quads.
It is flanked on one side by the venerable brick building seen on the
extreme left of the illustration representing Trumpington Street, and
on the other by a great ugly three-storeyed block of stone, interesting
only because the rooms overlooking the street on the topmost floor were
those occupied by Gray. They are to be identified by iron railings
across one of the windows. A story belongs to these rooms. Gray, it
seems, lived long in them as a Fellow of his College, and might have
eked out his morbid life here, dining according to habit in Hall, and
then, unsociable and morose, retiring to his elevated eyrie, reading
the classics over a bottle of port. Gray had a very pretty taste in
port, but it did not suffice to make him more clubbable. His solitary
habits, perhaps, were responsible for a morbid fear of fire that grew
upon him, and increased to such a degree that he caused the transverse
bars, that still remain, to be placed outside his window overlooking
the churchyard of Little St. Mary's, and kept in constant readiness
a coil of rope to tie to them and so let himself down in case of an
alarm. His precautions were matters of common knowledge, and at last
his fears were taken advantage of by a band of skylarking students,
who placed a bath full of water beneath his rooms one winter night and
then, placing themselves in a favourable position for seeing the fun,
raised cries of "Fire!"
Their best expectations were realised. The window was hurriedly flung
up, and the frenzied poet, nightcapped and lightly clad, swiftly
descended into the bath, amid yells of delight. These intimate facts
seem to hint that Gray had not endeared himself to the scholars of
Peterhouse. This practical joke severed his connection with the
college, for he immediately removed across the street, to Pembroke.
Pembroke is prominent in this view down the long, quiet, grave street;
and the quaint turret of its chapel, built by Sir Christopher Wren, is
very noticeable. Gravity is, we have said, the note here, and so solid
a quality is quite in order, for Trumpington Street and the road beyond
have ever been the favourite walks of dons and professors, walking
oblivious to their surroundings in what we are bound to consider
academic meditation rather than that mere mental vacuity known as
absent-mindedness. There is a story told of the late Professor Seeley
exquisitely illustrating this mental detachment. It is a story that
probably has been told of many earlier professors, to be re-incarnated
to suit every succeeding age: a common enough thing with legends. It
seems, however, that the late Professor of History was walking past
the Conduit one fine day, speculating on who shall say what abstruse
matters, when a mischievous boy switched a copious shower of water over
him from the little stream in the gutter. The Professor's physical
organism felt the descending drops, some lazy, unspeculative brain-cell
gave him the idea of a shower of rain, and he immediately unfurled his
umbrella, and so walked home.
Next the new buildings of Pembroke, over against Peterhouse, the Master
of that college has his residence, behind the high brick walls of a
seventeenth century garden. On the left hand are Little St. Mary's, a
Congregational Church, and the church-like pinnacled square tower of
the Pitt Press, all in succession. Beyond, but hid from this view-point
by a gentle curve of the street, are "Cats," otherwise St. Catherine's,
and Corpus; and then we come to that continuation of Trumpington Street
called "King's Parade," opposite King's College. Here we are at the
centre of Cambridge, with Market Hill opening out on the right and the
gigantic bulk of King's College Chapel on the left, neighboured by that
fount of honour, or scene of disgraceful failure, the beautiful classic
Senate House, where you take your degree or are ignominiously "plucked."
In midst of Market Hill stands the church of Great St. Mary's, the
University Church. Town and University are at this point inextricably
mixed. Shops and churches, colleges, divinity schools and Town Hall all
jostle one another around this wide open space, void on most days, but
on Saturday so crowded with the canopied stalls of the market that it
presents one vast area of canvas. Few markets are so well supplied with
flowers as this, for in summertime growing plants are greatly in demand
by the undergrads to decorate the windows of their lodgings. This
living outside the colleges is, and has always been, a marked feature
of Cambridge, where college accommodation has never kept pace with
requirements. It is a system that makes the town cheerful and lively
in term, but at vacation times, when the "men" have all "gone down,"
its emptiness is correspondingly noticeable. To "go down" and to "come
up" are, by the way, terms that require some little explanation beyond
their obvious meaning of leaving or of arriving at the University. They
had their origin in the old-standing dignity of Alma Mater, requiring
that all other places should be considered below her--even the mighty
Gog Magogs themselves. From Cambridge to London or elsewhere is
therefore a [Greek: katabasis]--a going downward.
The Cambridge system of lodging out does not make for discipline,
and creates a lamentable laxity in a man keeping his proper quota
of chapels. To attend chapel at an early hour of the morning seems
much more of an infliction when living in the freedom of lodgings
than when in the cloistered shades of a college quad, and has led to
many absences, summonses before the Dean, and mild lectures from that
generally estimable and other-worldly personage. You, in the innocence
of your heart and your first term, advance the excuse that late study
makes it difficult to always keep chapels. Observe that it is _always_
midnight study, never card-parties and the like, and never that very
natural disinclination to turn out of bed in the morning that is
answerable for these backslidings. All very specious and unoriginal,
and that Dean has heard it all before, so many times, and years and
years ago, from men now gone into the world and become middle-aged.
Why, in his own youth _he_ gave and attended parties, and missed
chapels, and made these ancient blue-mouldy prevarications to the Dean
of _his_ college,--and so back and back to the infinities. Is he angry:
does he personally care a little bit? Not at all. It is routine. "Don't
you think, young man," he says, in his best pulpit-cum-grandfather
style, "don't you think that if you were to _try_ to study in the
morning it would be much better for your health, much better in every
way than reading at night? When I was _your_ age _I_ studied at night.
It gave me headaches. Now try and keep chapel. It is _so_ much better
to become used to habits of discipline. They are of such value to us in
after life"--and so forth.
XXIII
CAMBRIDGE is often criticised because it is not Oxford. As well might
one find fault with a lily because it is not a rose. Criticism of this
kind starts with the belief that it is a worse Oxford, an inferior copy
of the sister University. How false that is, and how entirely Cambridge
is itself in outward appearance and in intellectual aims need not be
insisted upon. It is true that Trumpington Street does not rival "the
High" at Oxford, but it was not built with the object of imitating that
famous academic street; and if indeed the Isis be a more noble stream
than the Cam, Oxford at least has nothing to compare with the Cambridge
"Backs."
"The Backs" are the peculiar glory of Cambridge, and he who has not
seen them has missed much. They are the back parts of those of the
colleges--Queens', King's, Clare, Trinity, and John's--whose courts
and beautiful lawns extend from the main street back to the Cam, that
much-abused and much idealised stream.
"The Cam," says a distinguished member of the University, with a horrid
lack of enthusiasm for the surroundings of Alma Mater, "is scarcely a
river at all; above the town it is a brook; below the town it is little
better than a sewer." Can this, you wonder, be the same as that "Camus,
reverend sire," of the poets; the stream that "went footing slow, His
mantle hairy and his bonnet sedge."
That, undoubtedly, is too severe. Above the town it is a brook that
will at any rate float such craft as Cambridge possesses, and has
shady nooks like "Paradise" and Byron's Pool, where the canoe can be
navigated and bathing of the best may be found; and now that Cambridge
colleges no longer drain into the river, the stream below town does not
deserve that reproach. Everything, it seems, depends upon your outlook.
If you are writing academic odes, for example, like Gray's, you praise
the Cam; if, like Gray again, writing on an unofficial occasion, you
enlarge upon its sluggish pace and its mud. Gray, it will be observed,
could be a dissembling poet. His "Installation Ode," as official in
its way as the courtly lines of a Poet Laureate, pictures Cambridge
delightfully, in the lines he places in the mouth of Milton--
"Ye brown, o'er-arching groves,
That contemplation loves,
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight!
Oft at the blush of dawn
I trod your level lawn--
Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia, silver bright,
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly,
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy."
Few lines in the whole range of our poetry are so beautiful as these.
But Gray's own private and unofficial idea of the Cam was very
different. When he took the gag off his Muse and allowed her to be
frank, we hear of the "rushy Camus," whose
"... Slowly-winding flood
Perpetual draws his humid train of mud."
Yet "the Backs" give a picture of mingled architecture, stately trees,
emerald lawns, and placid stream not to be matched anywhere else: an
ideal picture of what a poet's University should be. If, on entering
the town from Trumpington Street, you turn to the left past the Leys
School, down the lane called Coe Fen, you come first upon the Cam
where it is divided into many little streams running and subdividing
and joining together again in the oozy pasture of Sheep's Green,
and then to a water-mill. Beyond that mill begin "the Backs," with
Queens' College, whose ancient walls of red brick, like some building
of romance, rise sheer from the water. From them springs a curious
"mathematical" wooden bridge, spanning the river and leading from the
college to the shady walks on the opposite side.
With so dreamy and beautiful a setting, it is not surprising that
Cambridge, although the education she gave was long confined largely to
the unimaginative science or art of mathematics, has been especially
productive of poets. Dryden was an alumnus of Trinity; Milton sucked
wisdom at Christ's; Wordsworth, of John's, wrote acres of verse as
flat as the Cambridgeshire meads, and much more arid; Byron drank
deep and roystered at King's; and Tennyson was a graduate of Trinity.
Other poets owning allegiance to Cambridge are that sweet Elizabethan
songster, Robert Herrick, Marlowe, Waller, Cowley, Prior, Coleridge,
and Praed. Poetry, in short, is in the moist relaxing air of Cambridge,
and in those
"... brown o'er-arching groves
That contemplation loves."