Chapter II: The Stones of Oxford (2)

The greater number of scholars left Oxford, and their rooms were occupied by ladies and cavaliers. College trees were cut down for use in the defences. A little war, much gallantry and coarseness, drove away learning and tranquillity, unwilling to linger for the sound of Sir John Denham’s smooth and insipid Muse, which produced _Coopers Hill_ in 1642. The Muses were probably in hiding abroad with Lovelace and Marvell; for Milton was writing only prose, and George Wither, a Magdalen man, was a captain of Parliamentary horse at Maidstone. Yet a contemporary pamphlet says that “Robin Goodfellow” found the Muses near Eynsham. “He had not gone as far as Ensham, but he espied the nine Muses in a vintner’s porch crouching close together, and defending themselves as well as they could from the cold visitation of the winter’s night. They were extream poore, and (which is most strange) in so short an absence and distance from Oxford they were grown extreamly ignorant, for they took him for their Apollo, and craved his power and protection to support them.”

One room at Trinity College was pleasant still; for the glass of the window was richly painted with a St. Gregory. And there Aubrey received the newly-published _Religio Medici_, “which first opened my understanding.” He carried it to Eston with Sir Kenelm Digby. Coming back to Oxford, he bade a servant to draw the ruins of Osney “two or three ways before ’twas pulled down.”

Plague came in 1643, fire in the following year. The Cavaliers were reputed to have embezzled books from the Bodleian, which had formerly resisted, and won the respect of, Charles himself. The colleges

The Bridge runs westward across the picture, some buildings of the Botanic Garden appearing on the extreme left.

Over the centre of the Bridge rises the fine tower of the College, while to the right above the north balustrade of the Bridge shows the roof of the Hall and Chapel.

On the ground floor of the gabled buildings are the kitchens, the upper storey being used as sets of rooms for students.

We see part of the river Cherwell.]

made what some call a “friendly loan” of all their plate: it was never returned or replaced by the King. Week by week, they furnished him with labour and cash. And when the Parliamentarians entered at last, there were at Merton, for example, “no Bachelors, hardly any Scholars, and few Masters,” and the hall was untenantable. The triumph of Parliament brought with it an inquisition in Oxford, which resulted in the exile, not without force, of the greater number of heads of houses and fellows for refusal to submit. The soldiers broke the Magdalen chapel window-glass; Cromwell himself took away the college organ to Hampton Court. But “the first thing General Fairfax did, was to set a good guard of soldiers to preserve the Bodleian Library. He was a lover of learning, and had he not taken this special care, that noble library had been utterly destroyed.” The chief objection to the intruded fellows and heads of houses seems to have been that they were intruded and were likely to stay. As for their accomplishments, though some lacked humour, they seem to have been respectable. The undergraduates and bachelors were in the main loyal to Cromwell; and when Prince Charles was rumoured to be approaching Oxford, New College tower became a Parliament citadel, and a troop of horse was enlisted from the colleges. The old glory of religion faded; the sound of distant Latin chanted was no longer heard in Christ Church and New College. But in one house, three devoted men preserved the old religion right through the Commonwealth, constantly and without molestation. Other changes made men more content. Three coffee-houses were opened in Oxford and patronised by royalists and “others who esteemed themselves virtuosi and wits.” Men who would have adorned any age came up. Christopher Wren came to Wadham, and thence to All Souls’. Evelyn revisited Oxford and found no just ground to regret the former times, ... “creation of Doctors, by the cap, ring, kiss, etc., those ancient ceremonies and institutions, as yet not wholly abolished.” At All Souls’ he heard “music, voices, and theorbos, performed by some ingenious scholars.” At New College “the chapel was in its ancient garb, notwithstanding the scrupulosity of the times,” and the chapel at Magdalen was “in pontificial order, the altar only I think turned table-wise.” Then he dined at Wadham, and wrote down an account of what he saw at the Warden’s, “that most obliging and universally curious Dr. Wilkins.” The transparent apiaries, hollow speaking statues, dials, waywisers, and other “artificial mathematical and magical curiosities,” which he saw, well illustrate the activities of the time in the cradle of the Royal Society.

A little after Wren came Thomas Traherne, the poet, to Brasenose, still enjoying that childhood which he praised so adeptly. We may think of him in the peaceful embowered city as having that characteristic ecstasy at the sight of common things which his lyrical prose describes. “The corn was orient and immortal wheat which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to

On the right of the picture are the entrance gate and part of the south front of All Souls’ College. West of the College, and facing the narrow street leading into Radcliffe Square, shows the east end of the south aisle of St. Mary’s Church, and the white pinnacles of the Nave.

Past the porch and the new extension of Brasenose to the High Street rises the tower and spire of All Saints’, the distance being closed by the tower of St. Martin at Carfax.]

everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees, when I saw them first through one of the gates, transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged men seem! Immortal cherubim! And young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty!”

Again, books began to flow in their natural courses to the libraries. Selden’s eight thousand came to the Bodleian. Building was resumed; for Brasenose chapel was half built by the time of the Restoration.

The Restoration restored to Oxford the Church, a few excellent old men, and the morals of the siege. The august Clarendon was indeed Chancellor; but the city became a fashionable resort. Charles II., with his Queen and Castlemaine, were there in 1663, and again with the Parliament in the year of the plague. “High-thundering Jove,” runs a contemporary ballad, supposed to be spoken by London to Oxford:--

High-thundering Jove cannot withstand thy charms,
That Britain’s mighty monarch in thy arms
Canst hold so fast, and quite to overcome
The greatest potentate in Christendom.

The aim of scholars, said Anthony à Wood, “is not to live as students ought to do, viz., temperate, abstemious, and plain and grave in their apparel; but to live like gentry, to keep dogs and horses, to turn their studies into places to keep bottles, to swagger in gay apparell and long periwigs!” There was too much punning, thought Eachard. In his inquiry into the causes of the contempt of the clergy, he is not kind to the University of the day, and asks, “Whether or not Punning, Quibbling, and that which they call Joquing, and such delicacies of wit, highly admired in some academic exercises, might not be very conveniently omitted?” The first Common Room was established at Merton soon after the Restoration. But in that age even Common Rooms seem to have been but privileged and secluded inns, and quite without the severely genial amphictyonic character of to-day. When Pepys visited Oxford he naturally found it “a very sweet place”; spent 2s. 6d. on a barber in its honour; 10s. “to him that showed us All Souls’ College and Chichley’s picture”; 2s. for seeing the Brasenose butteries and the gigantic hand of the “Child of Hale”; and having seen the Physic Garden, the hospital, and Friar Bacon’s study, concluded: “Oxford mighty fine place, well seated, and cheap entertainment.” But the cheap entertainment is now among the lost causes. A little while afterwards, Evelyn attended the opening of the Sheldonian Theatre, built by Wren. He complained of the “tedious, abusive, sarcastical rhapsody” which was permitted on that occasion to the _Terræ Filius_, a kind of Billingsgate Aristophanes, who half-officially represented the undergraduate aversion to sweetness and light. The university printing-office

The proceedings of Commemoration take place here, at which time the _area_--entered by the door to the left--is crowded by visitors.

One of the two figures is gazing at the pulpit from which the prize poems and essays of successful candidates are recited.

The axe and fasces projecting from the pulpit denote the justice of the awards.

The upper gallery is supported by wooden columns standing upon a podium partially surrounding the _area_, and the building altogether is one of Sir Christopher Wren’s best works.]

lay under the theatre, and, says a ballad of the time--

What structure else but prides it to reveal
Treasures? which bashful this would fain conceal; ...
Spain, Gascoin, Florence, Smyrna, and the Rhine
May taste their language there, tho’ not the wine.
The Jew, Mede, Edomite, Arabian, Crete,
In those deep vaults their wandring ideoms meet,
And to compute, are in amazement hurld,
How long since Oxford has been all the world.

At Magdalen, men were planting the elms of the grove and laying out the walks round the meadow. Bishop Fell was completing the west front of Christ Church, which the Civil War had interrupted, and planting those elms in the Broad Walk that look on the Cathedral and Corpus and Merton, and, farther off, Magdalen tower. In 1680 Wren’s tower over Wolsey’s gateway at Christ Church was finished. One of the Osney bells was recast to hang therein.

The resistance of James II. fell in this coarse, frivolous, self-satisfied age. He was welcomed to Oxford by music and ceremony. The conduit “ran claret for the vulgar.” But when he adventured to force his nominee into the presidentship of Magdalen, he could not even procure a blacksmith to burst a resisting door. Again, the University stood to arms to oppose Monmouth’s rebellion, and clothed its members in scarlet coats, with scarves, and white-plumed hats; but had to be contented with the bonfires in celebration of the victory at Sedgemoor, and a full-dress parade. Not long afterwards many yards of orange ribbon made the High Street gaudy with a pretence at honouring William III. But the colleges were vigorously Jacobite, and proved it by drinking the healths of the Stuarts as long as they could. Merton, Exeter, All Souls’, and Wadham were the exceptions. One example of the lighter occupations of the period is to be found in a story of somewhat earlier date, told of Dr. Bathurst, Vice-Chancellor and President of Trinity. “A striking instance of zeal for his college, in the dotage of old age, is yet remembered. Balliol College had suffered so much in the outrages of the grand rebellion, that it remained almost in a state of desolation for some years after the Restoration, a circumstance not to be suspected from its flourishing condition ever since. Dr. Bathurst was perhaps secretly pleased to see a neighbouring and once rival society reduced to this condition, while his flourished beyond all others. Accordingly, one afternoon, he was found in his garden, which then ran almost continuous to the east side of Balliol College, throwing stones at the windows with much satisfaction, as if happy to contribute his share in completing the appearance of its ruin.” I seem to find an echo of the sentiment of very different men, with a love of the old time amidst the politics and wine of the day, in Aubrey’s ejaculation: he wished that monasteries had not entirely been suppressed; for if but a few had been left, “what a pleasure ’twould have been to have travelled from monastery to monastery!” Nevertheless, the Oxford output of bishops was not decreased, and the number of quiet scholars--men like

In the centre of the quadrangle rises a cylindrical dial, surmounted by a “pelican in her piety,” the badge of the Founder of the College. Behind, to the right, is the great entrance gateway and tower.

The College cat gives scale.]

Hody of Wadham--was larger than one might conclude from the pages of _honest_ Thomas Hearne, of St. Edmund Hall.

It was upon an old monastic foundation--once Gloucester College, then Gloucester Hall--that the one new eighteenth-century college was established. Gloucester Hall had numbered among its inhabitants several famous, rather odd men, like Tom Coryat and Thomas Allen, but had fallen away after the Restoration. It was, in short, almost a possession of nettles. The buildings were only kept on the edge of desolation by the Principal and two or three families in residence. The seventeenth century had made one fantastic attempt to retrieve the Hall. A colony of twenty students from the four Patriarchates of the Eastern Church was to be regularly established there. But the dreamy plan was soon parched and destroyed in the odour of scandal. After much trifling procrastination, the Greeks were succeeded by Worcester College, and a lucky poverty left the worn old buildings for a little longer untroubled. A library, a hall, and a chapel were prepared for the new society. Wide spaces of land on every side of it were retained or acquired, which afterwards gave the college a fat rent and its incomparable bosky and watered garden.

While Worcester was being founded in the conventional way, Oxford was developed by such buildings as the cloister at Corpus, the Pembroke chapel, the hall at All Souls’, the front quadrangle at Queen’s, and the little Lincoln “Grove” cottages. Then also the Trinity College lime trees were planted. In most of the work of that time Dean Aldrich of Christ Church had a hand or a word. This clever and genial tutor was one of the best men of his day, and quite typical of the early eighteenth century. He seems to have been one to whom action came more naturally than dreams, if he dreamed at all; and he could easily express the many sides of his personality in a lasting way. A happy and golden mediocrity! He encouraged Boyle in the dazzling indiscretion of _The Epistles of Phalaris_. He wrote the enduring Oxford Logic, a smoking catch, and “Hark! the bonny Christ Church bells”; and perhaps this translation:--

If on my theme I rightly think,
There are five reasons why men drink,
Good wine, a friend, or being dry,
Or lest we should be, by and by,
Or any other reason why.

The size of his architectural designs is seen in Peckwater quadrangle at Christ Church; their charm, in All Saints’, which the moon loves. Soon after his death in 1710, the stately library at Christ Church and that copious one at All Souls’ were begun.

In the year of the building of Pembroke chapel, Samuel Johnson entered the college, where they preserve his deal writing-table and china tea-pot. As Aldrich represents the early part of the century in Oxford, so Johnson represents the middle. Men are nowadays disposed to blame the cheerfulness of an age that produced a hundred immortals who do not give the true

Through the opening between the west end of the College Library on the right, and some houses inhabited by Masters of the College on the left, appears the spire of the University Church of St. Mary. Part of the pediment of the buildings on the north side of Peckwater Quadrangle shows beneath.

The piece of masonry on the extreme right of the picture is part of the wall of the passage leading to Tom Quadrangle.

Two undergraduates converse to the left.]

ring. The college historians often entitle one of their eighteenth-century chapters the “dark” or “iron” age; and indeed, as a “school of universal learning,” the Oxford of that day might be called in question. It was more aristocratic and exclusive, perhaps, than it had ever been, and it failed to justify itself. “What class in life”--it was a song by a fellow in a play of the period--

What class in life, tho’ ne’er so great,
With a good fellowship can compare?

And in the same play, says one, of Horace, “He was a jolly _utile dulci_ dog, and I believe formerly might be fellow at a college.” Yet in our backward glances over Oxford history, how often do we stop when we reach that age! whether we are drinking from an old reminding tankard with the date 17--, or looking at one of its books, or living in one of the rooms which it wainscotted or furnished, heavily but how genially! “You are a philosopher, Dr. Johnson,” said Edwards, his college friend. “I have tried too in my time to be a philosopher; but I don’t know how, cheerfulness was always breaking in.” Cheerfulness broke in pretty often in Oxford. And that was a time when there was more love of Oxford than ever before. Even the wealthy Fellows of All Souls’ (“that Eden to the fruitful mind,” as Lady Winchilsea called it at that time) never bought their college; and when one of them was taunted with the quip that Oxford was less learned than Bath, he was able to reply that it was also more fashionable. I find, too, in its love of the past, as in its love of nature, something heartier, though I daresay less mystical, than our own. Johnson’s love of Pembroke is an example. He had lived there as an undergraduate only fourteen months, and there seems to have been little that was tangible, to take hold of him in so short a time. Yet when he came back long after, and heard old Camden’s grace after meat--which they still use--he was at home. It is true that men of that age could as little appreciate its blank verse as we can compose it, but there were many who could then appreciate what we can now only describe. The country (in summer)--antiquity--good living--were fine things; but when they wrote, it was theology, or morals, or inaccurate philology. There was a man, long ago with God, who after much waiting obtained a fine coveted room at New College: instead of writing a sonnet forthwith, he expressed a wish to kick some one downstairs incontinently. On one occasion, it is said, the head of a college, and a great lover of Oxford, who was jocund and recumbent after a feast, was with great circumstance invited by several wags “to accept the crown of this old and famous kingdom, since King George has resigned.” To which he slowly replied, without surprise, that “if we can hold our Court of St. James’s in this Common Room, we shall not demur.” Warton’s _Companion to the Guide_ and Wood’s _Modius Salium_ are full of what we should call poor Oxford humour; but I think there is sufficient indication of the laughter it caused, to make us pause in any condemnation of it as compared with our own “thoughtful mirth,” which

Across the picture runs a cloistered screen separating the green
quadrangle of All Souls’ College from Radcliffe Square. Over an
entrance to the College to the left rises an octangular ogee roof,
protecting some beautiful wrought-iron gates.

To the right of this is the grand sweeping entablature of the
Camera, bearing its majestic dome and lantern. This dome may
compare with some of the finest in Europe.

The time is morning.
]

inspires mainly a desire to say something more mirthful and less thoughtful. And for those who care for none of these things, what sweeter or more dignified picture of quietness and study is there than at Lincoln in Wesley’s time, or at University under Scott, or Christ Church under Jackson? What handsomer than the Camera which was built in the middle of that century, or better to live in than Fisher’s buildings at Balliol? Or what inheritance more agreeable than the old bowling-greens, so happily celebrated in the Sphæristerium; or than the college gardens, which are nearly all eighteenth-century gifts? It has been said that the only movement in the eighteenth century was a very slow ascent to the nineteenth. That is not quite so, as many will agree who look at the re-fronting of University College chapel and hall, which was done when the wonderful century was reached at length. In fact, if we condemn the eighteenth century, we have to disown a large part of the nineteenth. In Oxford that is especially so. The destruction of the old chapels at Balliol and Exeter, and of the Grove at Merton, was carried out only fifty years ago; so long have the dark ages lingered in Oxford. As for the new buildings at New College, Christ Church, Merton, etc., they have been so widely condemned that it is to be presumed there is some merit in them, which an age nearer the millennium will praise.

But those works are only the less admirable and more conspicuous emblems of the nineteenth-century reformation. It had at length become possible again for a man to keep his terms and take his degree without continual residence within college walls. The numbers of the University grew rapidly, and at a time when more efficient tutors and discipline made Oxford attractive to many who were neither frivolous nor rich. Oxford became, in fact, a place of education. The previous century had been conspicuous for great names and lack of system; what was achieved was due to individual endowment and energy; and the able men stood somewhat apart from their contemporaries. Wesley, for example, not only failed to make a strong party, but even to rouse an opposition of useful size. The nineteenth century, on the other hand, was a sociable one in matters of intellect. There were few lonely names. There were many groups. College after college--in a few cases before, in nearly all cases after, the first Commission--became known for their style of thought more than for their noblemen or wine. The fault of monkishness was either blotted out or exchanged for one that is more commonly pardoned to-day, _nimium gaudens popularibus auris_. At first, this meant an emphasis upon the distinction between college and college. It required more than a walk up Turl Street to get from Oriel to Balliol. The competition engendered by the new separate honour schools probably increased this for a time; and it was reported of one Head that, when told that Worcester College was above his own in a class list, he turned to the butler, and asked where Worcester was. But the east wind of the Commission changed all that. At the same time

The gateway and wall have disappeared, this view of the Library
being shut out by the new high buildings.

To the left of the picture is a part of the College, and over the
gateway shows a portion of the old Schools, the majestic dome and
lantern of the Radcliffe Library filling the intervening space.

A couple of undergraduates lean against the building to the left of
the picture.
]

the friendly and often stimulating intercourse between senior and junior members of the colleges grew apace, and was no doubt encouraged by the increasing fashionableness of athletic sports, which gave a “Blue” the importance of a fellow, and a greater consciousness of importance.

In its progress towards what is most admired in modern Oxford, Balliol is the most interesting college. Nearly all other colleges have indeed acquired a more or less thorough resemblance to Balliol in its good and bad points, but no other college has been so long, so persistently, and so progressively devoted to the same ideal. Even those who do not wholly like that ideal cannot fail to admire the consistency and energy of the men who have achieved it, or could find the like to any comparable extent in colleges that cherish other affections.

But nowhere has there been an entire rupture with the past, or anything new which has not in a sense been laid reverently upon the foundations of the old. If one could see Keble College without its buildings, it might well seem to be not the youngest of the colleges. So, too, with Hertford College, which is indeed but the rejuvenation of the old homes of Hobbes, Selden, and Matthew Hale: it has doffed knee-breeches and periwig, and even those perhaps unwillingly, since its fellowships are lifelong for the celibate. And in the architecture of Oxford, some of the most novel effects of last century were produced by work in the same spirit of reverence for the past. Here, a window received back its casements again; there, a fine roof was rescued from its burial under the impertinent superimpositions of more egotistic innovators. No other age and city perhaps would have been so curious and fortunate in restoring the old, as when at Christ Church the old floral marble base of St. Frideswide’s shrine was restored after three hundred years in the wilderness. Part was found in the cemetery wall, part in a well-side, part in a staircase, part in a wall: and almost the whole now rests in the Cathedral again.

At the east end of the choir is seen the wheel-window with two
circular-headed windows underneath, restored in 1871.

Above these rises the late groined roof of the Choir, its richness
contrasting well with the Norman arches below, which spring from
corbels attached to the pillars.

The Cathedral is also the College Chapel.
]

DONS ANCIENT AND MODERN