Chapter V: Part 5

The Dean was an excellent and breezy person who, even as an octogenarian, gave one the impression of a young man rejoicing in his youth; but no one ever accused him of endangering his intelligence by over-taxing it, and he seems hardly to have been less at ease in Zion than at the jovial gatherings of the Phœnix. That is not only a critic’s view of him; it is also his own view of himself and his life, frankly expressed by him in both prose and verse. “The reading men,” he tells us in his delightful reminiscences, “were not, as a rule, such cheery companions as the men who rode, and drove, and played cricket, and wore gay clothing, and smoked fragrant regalias”; and when he drops into poetry, it is:—

“How jollily, how joyously, we live at B.N.C.!
Our reading is all moonshine—the wind is not more free.”

The Dean also tells us that he went to Brasenose with a serious intention of studying, but soon found his energies diverted into other channels. He read hard for two terms; but one day he “met a friend in black velvet cap and scarlet coat, a bird’s-eye blue tie, buff kerseymere waistcoat, buck-skin breeches, and pale brown tops,” and the splendid spectacle aroused his envious ambition. He bought a horse, and wrote home for his pink. It came, and he enjoyed, and distinguished, himself in the hunting field; and his attitude towards the problems of the spiritual life became that which seems generally to have found favour at Brasenose.

Concerning the official attitude of Brasenose towards such matters he tells two good stories. Two Brasenose men, it appears, on two different occasions, being perplexed by religious doubts, ventured to lay their difficulties before their tutor. The poor man was amazed. Such a thing had never happened to him before in the whole course of his tutorial experience. He told one of the young men that his digestion was probably out of order, and that he had better see a doctor; he told the other that, if he cherished this desire for auricular confession, he had better join the Church of Rome. The Dean himself, one gathers, never laid himself open to any such rebuke; but his comments on the Romeward movement, of which he was a contemporary, are eloquent as to his religious mentality. The fish caught in the Roman net, he says, were so poor and flabby that a true sportsman would have thrown them back into the water.

So much for the jolly and Philistine Dean. It was worth while to dwell on him because he seems to represent, better than any other Brasenose man, the distinctive Brasenose point of view; but when we proceed to the task of praising famous men, there are other famous men whom it is more imperative to praise.

* * * * *

Bishop Heber is beyond question the most famous of them; and his Newdigate on “Palestine” is the most famous Newdigate ever written. That it is also the best will be disputed by admirers of Dean Burgon’s “Petra” and Mr. D. S. MacColl’s “Carthage,” not to mention Sir Rennell Rodd’s “Sir Walter Raleigh”; but that point of taste cannot be debated here. “Palestine” has, at any rate, been reprinted several times, and derives a special interest from the fact that it was amended at the suggestion of Sir Walter Scott. The story is an old one; but it must be repeated.

Scott was a friend of Heber’s half-brother, Richard, the book-collector—“Heber the magnificent,” he called him, “whose library and cellar are so superior to all others in the world.” Richard Heber took him to Oxford, and they went together to see Reginald Heber, whose poem had just won the prize.

“Scott observed,” says Lockhart, “that in the verses on
Solomon’s Temple, one striking circumstance had escaped him,
namely that no tools were used in the erection. Reginald
retired for a few minutes to a corner of the room, and returned
with the beautiful lines:

“No hammer fell, no ponderous axes rung,
Like some tall palm the mystic fabric sprung.
Majestic silence!”

It may be added that Heber was not only a serious but also a humorous poet. He wrote a satire called the _Whippiad_, and was also the author of a _jeu d’esprit_ on the misfortunes of the Dean of the College, a gentleman nicknamed “Dr. Toe,” whose _fiancée_, a Miss Belle H——, jilted him and married a footman:

“’Twixt footman John and Doctor Toe
A rivalship befell,
Which of the two should be the beau
To bear away the _Belle_.

“The footman won the lady’s heart,
And who can blame her?—No man.
The _whole_ prevailed against the _part_;
’Twas _Foot_-man _versus_ _Toe_-man.”

It will be agreed that there is something piquant and refreshing in the discovery that these lines are the product of the same pen that wrote “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains”; but even in that great missionary hymn by a missionary bishop the hand of the satirist has been detected. The hasty generalisation that, in the Orient, “only man is vile” is said to have found its way into a devotional composition because Heber discovered that a Cingalese tradesman had cheated him. If so, the interpolation may be accepted as a delightful example of what may be styled “the Brasenose touch.”

* * * * *

Reginald Heber’s brother Richard has already been mentioned; and there are those who would consider him a greater man than the Bishop. The Bishop, they would say, was only one bishop among many, whereas the bibliophile was the greatest bibliophile that the world has ever seen. He was less than sixty when he died, and he had already accumulated a library of 146,827 volumes, stored in six houses in various parts of England and the Continent. He was so occupied in collecting them that he quite forgot to dispose of them by will, and his executors had to sell them for the benefit of his estate. The sales extended over a period of three years, and the English sales alone realised £56,774. One gets a glimpse at the collection in the “Literary Reminiscences” of a brother bibliophile, Dr. T. F. Dibdin.

Dr. Dibdin had long been Richard Heber’s friend, and, hearing of his unexpected death, he hastened to his house in Pimlico, and was admitted to the room in which he lay in his coffin.

“And then,” he writes, “the room in which he had breathed his
last! It had been that of his birth. The mystic veil, which
for twenty-five years had separated me from this chamber, and
which the deceased would never allow me, nor any one else, to
enter, was now effectually drawn aside by the iron hand of
Death. I looked around me with amazement. I had never seen
rooms, cupboards, passages, and corridors so choked, so
suffocated with books. Treble rows were there, double rows were
there. Hundreds of slim quartos—several upon each other—were
longitudinally placed over thin and stunted duodecimos,
reaching from one extremity of a shelf to another. Up to the
very ceiling the piles of volumes extended, while the floor was
strewed with them in loose and numerous heaps.”

A marvellous spectacle truly, and a case to be quoted whenever it is said that all Brasenose men are obtuse to the charms of literature, though, of course, it may be said that Richard Heber was not a typical Brasenose man. Yet we may find the Brasenose touch in the statement already quoted from Scott, that his fine taste in books was combined with an equally fine taste for port and claret; and if we continue to seek that touch through the later history of the College, we may find it in the fact that Dean Milman, another of the great men of Brasenose and a winner of the Newdigate, began his literary career by producing a play at a London theatre, and we may further find it in the one story which survives of the Oxford career of the Rev. Richard Harris Barham.

The piety of the author of the “Ingoldsby Legends” is described by his biographer as “unostentatious.” It was, in fact, so little ostentatious while he was at Brasenose that he was “sent for” to explain his too frequent absence from the College chapel.

“The fact is, sir,” urged his pupil, “you are too late for me.”

“Too late?” repeated the tutor in astonishment.

“Yes, sir—too late. I cannot sit up till seven o’clock in the morning; I am a man of regular habits, and unless I get to bed by four or five at latest I am really fit for nothing next day.”

* * * * *

If any one desired still further examples of the Brasenose touch, he might have them by studying the career of Sir Tatton Sykes, that excellent Yorkshire sportsman who used to breakfast off “a jug of new milk and an immense apple-pie,” who broke stones to give him an appetite, thrashed impertinent bargees for his amusement, and seldom missed a day’s hunting till he had passed his seventy-sixth birthday, and lived to be ninety-one. It so happens, however, that though Sir Tatton was classed with York Minster and Fountains Abbey as one of the three great marvels of his native county, his residence at Oxford has left no trail of legend; so that we must leave him and pass on to the two eminent men of whom it may fairly be said that, though they were in Brasenose, they were not of it. They are F. W. Robertson—“Robertson of Brighton”—and Walter Pater.

* * * * *

F. W. Robertson seems to have resembled the mass of Brasenose men in one circumstance only: he took a pass degree. No doubt he would have obtained high honours if he had sought them; but, like John Richard Green, of Jesus, he did not seek them, and this may therefore be the proper place in which to recall the untrue story that when, in the least intellectual period of the history of Brasenose, the name of some commoner was, by some accident, placed in a class list, the other commoners proceeded to punish him under the pump as a violator of the unwritten law.

For the rest, F. W. Robertson, while at Brasenose, resembled neither the average Brasenosian nor the F. W. Robertson of later days. He was the Broad Church philosopher in the making, but he was not yet the Broad Church philosopher fully made. His views, according to Mr. Stopford Brooke, were “those of the Evangelical school, with a decided leaning to moderate Calvinism.” He organised “a society for the purposes of prayer and conversation on the Scriptures,” but it languished and died, and he was “chilled by the apathy and coldness of Oxford.”

That one can understand and believe. Oxford has been a place of many enthusiasms, many of them of a religious character, but private initiative in religious matters, however devout, has never been encouraged there. That sort of thing has always struck Oxford as odd, and even a little disrespectful towards the ample official provision of the means of grace. We saw the attitude exemplified when we spoke about the experiences of the Wesleys at Lincoln, and there is a characteristic story of a snub administered by the Head of a college to an undergraduate who had taken to preaching at the corners of the streets.

The young man challenged the Head with what he thought would prove an awkward question. What answer would he be able to make, he asked, if his Divine Master reproached him on the Day of Judgment for having neglected this means of diffusing a knowledge of the gospel truth? But the Head was equal to the occasion. “You need have no anxiety about that,” he replied; “I myself will take the entire responsibility.”

Robertson, one recognises, was the last man likely to feel at home in an atmosphere in which some things were not only said, but said as a matter of course, and approved. Probably they were heard with more approval at Brasenose than at most other colleges; and Robertson appears to have been hardly less out of his element there than was Nathaniel Hawthorne at Brook Farm. In one field of Oxford activity, indeed, he did distinguish himself. He was one of the orators of the Union Debating Society, where he maintained against John Ruskin, then of Christ Church, that the theatre was not an influence for good. “Pray for me,” he appealed to the man sitting next to him when he rose, rather nervously, to make his speech. But it cannot be said that he was, either in that or in any other respect, a typical Brasenose man.

Still less was Walter Pater a typical Brasenose man.

* * * * *

Pater came to Brasenose as a Fellow from Queen’s, where he had been a Scholar. For a time he was a lecturer and tutor, and all the stories indicate that, in engaging in those activities, he made a false start in life. A pupil coming to him for advice as to his reading was recommended to read the whole of Plato and the whole of Kant—which, from the point of view of the examinations, was almost the worst counsel that could have been given to him. His chief contribution to metaphysical thought is said to have been an expression of opinion that Plato was “not such a fool as he looked.” His attitude towards the discipline of the College was illustrated by a commendation of the bonfires which destroyed the statue of Cain and Abel, on the ground that they “lit up the spire of St. Mary’s so beautifully.” He once was one of the adjudicators in a prize essay competition, but when asked by the other adjudicators for his opinion, he replied that he could only remember that one of the essayists was called Sanctuary, and that Sanctuary had impressed him as a remarkably euphonious name.

In spite of this, however—and even to some extent because of it—Pater cut a considerable figure, and exercised a considerable influence, in the Oxford of his day; and he became the hero of almost as many legends as either Jowett or Mark Pattison. Mr. Edmund Gosse, as has been mentioned, graphically described his personal appearance as that of “a benevolent dragon.” All the world knows that he was the “Mr. Rose” of Mr. Mallock’s “New Republic,” and his place may be defined as that of the link between the pre-Raphaelites and the Æsthetes.

The note in his work which found the most eager listeners was the note of artistic Epicureanism; the place in which it was most definitely sounded was the “Conclusion” of the “Studies in the History of the Renaissance.” There was the exhortation to “burn always with a hard gem-like flame”; there was the eulogy of “great passions” as the source of a “quickened sense of life”; there was the declamation on the best way of making the most of life, leading up to the announcement that “the wisest” spend it “in art and song”; there, finally, was the view of art “professing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.”

The essay containing those precepts became the gospel of a considerable number of young men, and it was an insidiously dangerous gospel. The proclamation of it in a company of money-grubbers might, indeed, have some force, but, as a matter of fact, the audience which had least need of it was precisely the audience which heard it most gladly. It appeared to them to set a seal upon a holy alliance between debauchery and art; and whereas few of them were much concerned about art, a great many of them were deeply interested in debauchery. Debauchery, they now gathered, was being held up to admiration as the duty which lay nearest to them. They recognised it as an easy and agreeable duty, and they made haste to discharge it.

Perhaps that was not precisely what Pater meant. He said that it was not, and he ultimately struck the passage out lest it should “mislead some of the young men into whose hands it might fall.” But he might nevertheless have found it difficult to reply effectively to any controversialist who urged that, if he had not meant what he had been taken to mean he could not have meant anything at all.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE

The foundation by Bishop Foxe—Compulsory Greek—Strict
discipline in early times—The visitation by the Parliamentary
Commissioners—The ejection of the Fellows—Eminent _alumni_—The
judicious Hooker and his unhappy marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.

Corpus Christi College was founded in 1516, by Bishop Foxe; and it may be necessary to anticipate the questions of some strangers by stating at once that he was not the author of the “Book of Martyrs” but the predecessor of Cardinal Wolsey in the counsels of Henry VIII. He spoke of the College as his “hive” and of the scholars as his “bees” whom he expected to be “busy bees” and to “make honey.”

[To face p. 192.]

They have made plenty of it. The output of Corpus in the way of scholarship has been out of all proportion to the small size of the College. If it has never, like University, had an opportunity of expelling a man of genius, it has trained innumerable men of talent; and if the distinction of the most distinguished of its sons has not been, with rare exceptions, of the sort that makes a magnetic appeal to the imagination of mankind, there is, at least, no breach in the continuity of its long list of _alumni_ illustrious through their services to humane letters; a list which begins with the Hooker whom it is customary to call “judicious” and is by no means ended when we come to Professor Case, who alone, when Oxford seemed to be given over to the Hegelians, maintained, with the robust vigour of a true sportsman, his belief in the reality of the external world.

* * * * *

The original note of Corpus was an insistence upon compulsory Greek.

Modern reformers appear to think that, in demanding that the study of Greek should be optional at Oxford, they are marching forward—“moving with the times.” As a matter of fact, they are proposing to revert to a condition of things which prevailed at Oxford in the ignorant times prior to the Revival of Learning. Greek was, in those times, in the noble language of school prospectuses, an “extra”; and men could only learn it at their own expense from private tutors. Bishop Foxe put it into the curriculum, endowing a Reader in Greek, and required all Corpus men to attend his classes on pain of “loss of commons”—the loss, that is to say, of their dinner—if they should fail to do so.

That was one of his severe regulations; and there were many others which show him to have had a keen eye for discipline and detail.

Every Fellow of Corpus, it was ordained, was to share his bedroom with a Scholar; the Fellow sleeping in a high bed, and the Scholar in a truckle bed. One also gathers, since the Statutes contain no provision for scouts, that it was by the Scholars that the beds were to be made and the slops emptied. Dinner was to be eaten in hall, and the diners were only to converse in Greek or Latin. Those who went for walks were to go in parties of three, carrying no weapons except bows and arrows; and the only games permitted were “games of ball” in the College gardens. Certain prayers, private as well as public, were obligatory. It was expressly forbidden to any Scholar or Fellow—to any one, in fact, under the grade of President—to carry his own washing to the laundress; and violations of this, or any other rule, were to be punished in various ways. The junior members of the society might, for sufficient cause, be whipped; or they might be compelled to sit at separate tables in hall, consuming dry bread and water, while the well-conducted dined.

Such were the sanctions of industry and virtue; and the archives of the College are full of records of their application. One of the Scholars was once deprived of commons for a fortnight for “attempted murder”—a light sentence which suggests that the Senior Common-room had but an imperfect sympathy with the victim. Another, bearing the unusual name of Anne, was castigated for writing a satirical poem on the Mass. As he was condemned to receive a stripe for every line of his composition, he doubtless rose from the block with a sincere conviction that brevity is the soul of wit and crystallised epigram the best form in which to exhibit poetry.

Save for incidents of that sort, however, Corpus has not had a specially exciting history; and the first really animated scene in its annals occurs when Oxford, so to say, changed hands, and Charles I. being a prisoner, and the city having surrendered to Fairfax, the Lords and Commons resolved upon the Visitation and Reformation of Oxford with a View to “the due correction of offences, abuses, and disorders, especially of late times, committed there.”

* * * * *

Corpus, curiously enough, is a College which preserved its plate at a time when the plate of most of the colleges was melted down into money to reinforce the royal treasury. The story goes that it was preserved—exactly how, the story does not say—through the devotion of a butler to the College interests. The exploration of a secret cellar, or of an old drain, according to the legend, discovered the skeleton of a butler with the grip of his bony fingers clenched upon a precious punch-bowl. That is not the sort of story that one would willingly give up; but the evidence for it does not appear to be very solid; and the conjecture of Dr. Fowler that the bowl was first surrendered and afterwards redeemed with a money payment has more of the ingredients of plausibility.

Be that as it may, however, the Corpus men suffered more than the members of most colleges from the heavy hands of the Parliamentary Commissioners; and we have to picture “a Drum with a guard of musketeers” marching through the gate into the quadrangle—the drum beaten as a call for silence—the affixing of the Visitors’ Orders in the porter’s lodge—and the reading of a long list of Fellows and Scholars who were to be expelled.

It was a longer list than at some of the other colleges because the Visitors had been received in a contumacious spirit. They had no sooner entered the name of the new President of their choice, Dr. Staunton, in the College Register than two Scholars of the College—Will Fulman and Tim Parker—first erased the entry, and then tore out the sheet on which it had been made. When they proceeded to break open the College Treasury, which the Bursar would not unlock for them, they found that its valuable contents had already been removed. Whence resulted wholesale evictions of a brutally precipitate character.

The proclamation, according to one of its victims, was to the effect that “whosoever named in the Order should remain in Oxon, or within five miles of it, after sunset, should be taken and prosecuted as a spy.” This, it is added, was taken to mean that they would be hanged, “though many knew not whither to go on so short warning, nor could they have time to dispose their books and such goods as they had”; while, as an additional affront, “some were searched for letters only to pick their pockets.” It must have been a shocking scene, though the relation of it can be relieved by an anecdote which has the merit of exhibiting Oliver Cromwell in a more human light than usual.

One of the ejected, it appears, a certain James Quin, was presented to the Lord Protector; and the Lord Protector, having been told that he had a good voice, called upon him for a song. He sang so well that the Lord Protector “liquor’d him with sack,” and bade him ask a favour. He asked that his place on the foundation of the College might be restored to him, and his request was granted: a quaint incident, judged by our modern notions, but one for which there is a parallel in the later annals of the College, during the genial period of the Restoration.

Dr. Staunton had, by that time, been turned out; and his predecessor, Dr. Newlyn, had been brought back. This Dr. Newlyn was a shocking nepotist. He filled all the profitable places on the foundation with relatives of his own, and was only moderately shocked by the fact that one of them broke into the rooms of one of the Fellows and tried to murder him in his sleep; but there were some offences at which he drew the line, as the occurrence of a gross scandal was presently to prove.

This time there was a lady in the case. The offender was Matthew Curtois, a Probationer Fellow, a Master of Arts, and a Clerk in Holy Orders; and the offence was committed within the College walls. The punishment was a refusal to confirm Matthew Curtois in his Fellowship; but Matthew Curtois, instead of submitting and slinking away, made bold to appeal to the King. His weakness, he judged, was one with which the lover of Nell Gwynne and so many others was likely to sympathise; and his judgment was correct. The King, acting through the Visitor, George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, not only decreed his fellow-sinner’s restitution to his honours and emoluments, but also ordered him to be paid a pecuniary indemnity for his suspension: an act of royal interference with academical affairs which marks, as well as any other, the difference between those times and these.

But now, before going farther, we must turn back, and glance at the careers of a few of the representative men of whom Corpus is most justly proud.

* * * * *

Bishop Jewell should properly come first; but he is less interesting than Bishop Hooker, who comes next, and was introduced to Corpus through Jewell’s patronage. First a Scholar, he afterwards became a Fellow and a Lecturer in Hebrew; and we read of him, in the Life by Izaak Walton, that “in four years he was but twice absent from the chapel prayers.” Evidently he was just such a man as good Bishop Foxe would have wished to inhabit his “bee-hive”; and the tragedy of his life, which Walton relates in sympathetic detail, was his removal from it. The story must be told, if only to show that it was not in the conduct of his private life that the illustrious author of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” earned the fixed epithet of “judicious.”

He was, in fact, a pious don of the old-fashioned, simple-minded sort; and, of course, he was a bachelor, and in Holy Orders. Appointed to preach certain endowed sermons at Paul’s Cross, and coming up to London from Corpus for that purpose, he lodged in the house of John Churchman, sometime a draper in Watling Street. He caught a chill on the way; but Mrs. Churchman gave him “drink proper for a cold,” and then proceeded to admonish him in a motherly manner.

“Mr. Hooker,” she said—so Walton tells us—“you are a man of tender constitution. It would be best for you to have a wife that might prove a nurse to you—such a one as might both prolong your life and make it more comfortable, such a one as I can and will provide for you if you see fit to marry.”

It was, no doubt, in the abstract, good advice. It seemed very good advice indeed to Hooker as he sat by the roaring fire and sipped the comforting possets which Mrs. Churchman prepared for him. And he knew too, as an earnest student of the Bible, that a busy man might find good precedents for entrusting the choice of his wife to another. As Eleazar had been trusted to seek a wife for Isaac, so Mrs. Churchman should be trusted to choose a wife for him. But Mrs. Churchman had a daughter; and her chief anxiety was not to make Mr. Hooker happy, but to get her daughter off her hands. So she brought Joan Churchman forward and presented her.

“Take her—she is yours,” she said; and the simple-minded don forgot to be judicious, but married Joan Churchman, as Mrs. Churchman had meant him to do from the beginning, and lived unhappily with her ever afterwards.

“By this marriage,” Walton continues, “the good man was drawn from the tranquillity of his College, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of peace, and a sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy world.” And he draws a pathetic picture of a visit paid to the good man by two of his old pupils, Edwin Sandys and George Cranmer, in the country parsonage to which he retired together with the lady described by another biographer as “a clownish, silly woman and withal a mere Xanthippe.”

The pupils found their tutor in a field attached to the parsonage, looking after the sheep; Mrs. Hooker having told him to do so, as she wished to employ the shepherd as a man-servant in the house. They went up to the parsonage with him, hoping to enjoy his conversation; but Mrs. Hooker immediately called him away to rock the cradle. They fled, driven out by Mrs. Hooker’s inhospitable proceedings; and one of them condoled with him, saying that his wife evidently was not a very “comfortable companion.” Whereupon Mr. Hooker made answer:

“My dear George, if saints have usually a double share in the miseries of this life, I, that am none, ought not to repine at what my wise Creator hath appointed for me: but labour—as, indeed, I do daily—to submit myself to His will, and possess my soul in patience and peace.”

The story, of course, is full of morals for bachelor dons; only one imagines that the dons of our own day do not need the moral, but are much better able than was Hooker of Corpus to take care of themselves in the matters of the heart and the bonds of holy matrimony.

* * * * *

Another Corpus man of a very different character was the Duke of Monmouth, the favourite, and reputed natural son, of Charles II. He entered his name when the Court was driven to Oxford by the plague in 1665; but little is known about his term of residence except that he gave the College a piece of plate which the College is believed to have melted down in order to express its disapproval of the Monmouth rebellion. Dr. Pocock, the Oriental traveller, should also be mentioned, for he was the first of a long list of Oxford men who have distinguished themselves in the exploration of the Alps. He and William Windham, meeting at Geneva, in 1741, made up a party to explore the glaciers of Chamonix—a place till then unknown to tourists. General Oglethorpe, the associate of the Wesleys, and the founder of the State of Georgia, is a third who must not be overlooked. And a passing word may be given to Edward Young, afterwards Fellow of All Souls, the pious author of “Night Thoughts,” and the originator of the sentiment that “Procrastination is the thief of time.” “There are those,” we read, in a biographical account of the doings of this divine at Oxford, “who say that Young at this time was not the ornament to religion and morality which he afterwards became”; and that is credible enough, for we all know many ornaments of religion and morality whose proceedings while _in statu pupillari_ invite a similar remark.

The remark, however, is, on the whole, less applicable to the divines who have come from Corpus than to the divines who have come from a good many of the other colleges; so we need not insist, but may pass on to the period when the occurrence of more widely popular names gives Corpus a blaze of glory perceptible from afar. That period was in the early days of the nineteenth century, when Keble and Thomas Arnold—Arnold of Rugby—were contemporaries. A third member of the society at that time was John Taylor Coleridge—Mr. Justice Coleridge—who defeated them in some competitions for University and College prizes, and lived to write Keble’s Life, and to contribute a chapter of Corpus reminiscences to the Life of Arnold written by Dean Stanley.

Most of the time of the little company, when they were not reading for their examinations, appears to have been given to argument; most of Coleridge’s recollections are recollections of dialectical affrays. Oxford, at this date, was beginning to think of other matters besides political and academical affairs. The old wrangles between Jacobites and Hanoverians had ceased; and no one any longer thought it worth while to provoke authority by calling for cheers for the Young Pretender. Though the older men could remember such things, the younger men regarded them as belonging to history. The thing which was beginning to interest them was religion—or in some cases irreligion; and it interested them as an end in itself, and not merely in its relation to preferment and emolument.

Keble and Arnold of Corpus, it is instructive to remember, were the contemporaries at Oxford of Shelley of University; but Shelley does not seem to have been known to the others. Being orderly persons, scrupulous observers of the regulations, well-conducted reading men, they would probably have regarded him, if they had known him, as a dangerous and disreputable associate. Keble’s business in life was to be to preach at, and Arnold’s to summon to his study and flog, those who were, like Shelley, “tameless and swift and proud.” And yet he and they had more in common than they knew. They all represented, in their several ways, the new spirit of the dawning century; they were all, in their several ways, revolutionists, or at least men definitely related to revolution. Shelley was the revolutionist _pur sang_; Keble was the counter-revolutionist; Arnold was the practical man—the reformer with a reformer’s turn for compromise and opportunism—who knew how to make a little revolution go a long way.

Keble may perhaps be classed as an English analogue of Chateaubriand. Personally, it is true, he bore not the faintest resemblance to the religious reactionary who “took up religion as a subject,” and has been described as the Catholic Don Juan; but he resembled Chateaubriand in being a literary artist, with an artist’s feeling for the “beauty of holiness,” and he launched the English Movement which corresponds to the return of the æsthetes and aristocrats to their Catholic allegiance in France. The principal story told of him at Corpus is that he damaged the sun-dial in the quadrangle by throwing a bottle at it; and we may permit ourselves to discover a certain symbolism in that performance. The great sermon on National Apostasy—preached because reformers proposed to curtail the scandalous superfluity of Irish bishoprics—may similarly be described as a weak man’s heroic attempt to stop the clock.

The story of that attempt, however, and of the consequences which ensued from it, belongs more properly to the annals of Oriel than of Corpus. Arnold as well as Keble went on from Corpus to Oriel as a Fellow; but what there is to be said about him may best be said in the present chapter.

He and Keble became estranged in later years; but they continued to respect each other’s characters while examining each other’s propositions. To Arnold it seemed that Keble’s piety was no excuse for the narrowness of his mind, and he would have nothing to say to Keble’s view that a man could only achieve salvation by running in a groove. He believed in earnestness, indeed—perhaps there never was a man in more deadly earnest; but what he desired was an earnest conduct of the common affairs of life, not an earnest adherence to a complicated series of ecclesiastical propositions.

Hence his success, and his fame, as a schoolmaster. It was predicted of him, by the Provost of Oriel, when he stood for the Headmastership of Rugby, that he would, if elected, “change the face of public school education throughout England.” He was elected, and he did change it. Many of the changes which he introduced at Rugby were, indeed, based upon a system of school government already in force at Winchester; but Arnold breathed a new spirit into the institutions which he adopted. Members of the Sixth Form, under his inspiration, held up their heads with a new kind of pride. Rugbeians were distinguished—and boasted that they were distinguished—from other schoolboys by their “moral seriousness.”

The other schoolboys, of course, have not accepted the Rugbeian example without cavil or criticism. It has even been remarked—most notably by Etonians—that the difference between the “moral seriousness” of Rugby and the thing which is elsewhere called “priggishness” is not always visible to the naked eye. Possibly it is not. Possibly Arnold “overdid it,” like many another valuable innovator. But the thing which he did needed doing. It was better to overdo it than not to do it at all; and the pride which Corpus takes in Arnold is amply justified.

* * * * *

And so, of course, is the pride which Corpus takes in many _alumni_ of a later date, distinguished in a great variety of fields—in Henry Nettleship, Professor of Latin; in Professor Fowler, the historian of the College, whose lectures on Logic used to be as good as a play; in Professor Case, to whose robust faith in the external world a reference has already been made; in Mr. F. T. Dalton, who, as an editor, has struck out many purple passages from the compositions of the present writer; in Mr. Horace Hutchinson, the greatest living authority on the game of golf; in Mr. Henry Newbolt, the author of “Admirals All”; in Mr. Herbert Paul; and in Mr. A. B. Walkley, the dramatic critic who thrusts Aristotle down the throats of the vulgar, and concerning whom it was deposed by Mr. Zangwill, before a Parliamentary Committee on the Dramatic Censorship, that to him “nothing is sacred except the dancing of Adeline Genée.”

CHRIST CHURCH

Cardinal College—The fall of Wolsey—The foundation of
Christ Church—Notable scenes—The degradation of Cranmer—The
parliamentary visitation—The eviction of Dean Fell, Mrs. Fell,
and all the little Fells—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.

Cardinal Wolsey founded Cardinal College, spent about £8,000 on it—say £100,000 of our modern money—out of the proceeds of the disendowment of the monasteries, and then fell like Lucifer. Henry VIII. first stopped the work, but presently refounded the College, and united it with the new bishopric of Oxford, which was removed to that site from Osney. The Head of the College was also to be the Dean of the Cathedral; and the number of students on the foundation was to be 101. The 101 strokes of Great Tom, which are to be heard every evening of the year at nine o’clock, were originally ordered as a separate reminder to each one of the students that it was time to go to bed. Five minutes after the last stroke, the gates, not of Christ Church only but of every college in Oxford, are closed; though nowadays, as a concession to the modern spirit, porters are in attendance to open them to those who knock.

[To face p. 209.]

That is as much as space permits to be said concerning the “beginnings.” They were not humble beginnings, like those of most of the other colleges, but splendid and ostentatious. Christ Church started with a flourish of trumpets which has hardly yet ceased sounding in our ears. Henry VIII. himself often dined in its Hall; and it has ever since been the frequent recipient of royal favours. It is impossible to walk in Tom Quad without feeling that this is the college of all others which kings, to whom life is a pageant, would delight to honour. Tom Quad, with its great spaces, its fountain, its wide pavement, has “an air about it” which no other college even simulates. There is an indefinable suggestion, not of study for study’s sake, but rather of leisurely preparation for the leadership of men. The very place, one would say, for the training of statesmen and pro-consuls. It seems incredible that the student who has had the right to pace Tom Quad should go away and fail in life. It does not cease to seem incredible when one learns that it has sometimes happened.

The history of Christ Church, indeed, is more of a pageant—or is fuller of pageants—than the history of any other college. Its full history would fill a book—not a short book, but a long one; but those whose historic sense bids them conjure up the picturesque features of the past will make their first pause at the striking scene of the degradation of Archbishop Cranmer, punished for being a Protestant at a time when the majority were Catholics: a shocking spectacle, though an imposing ceremony, and one anticipating, in all its meanest details of humiliation, that ceremony of the degradation of Captain Dreyfus which, not many years since, stirred the civilised world to horror.

The exact locality of the degradation is uncertain; but it took place, at any rate, somewhere close to the cathedral, and probably in the cloisters. Within the cathedral, Cranmer was set up on the rood-screen and made to listen to the recital of his iniquities. Then he was dragged down again and invested in episcopal robes made, in mockery, of rags and canvas. Then, when he had been declared, in the name of the Blessed Trinity and by the authority of the Church, deposed, degraded, and cut off from all the privileges attached to his episcopal Order, he was marched outside to endure the remainder of his punishment.

“One by one,” writes his biographer, Dean Hook, “all the
ornaments and distinctions of office were taken off.... A
barber clipped the hair round the Archbishop’s head; and
Cranmer was made to kneel before Bonner. Bonner scraped the
tips of the Archbishop’s fingers to desecrate the hand which,
itself anointed, had administered the unction to others.
The threadbare gown of a yeoman bedel was thrown over his
shoulders, and a townsman’s greasy cap was forced upon his
head. The Archbishop of Canterbury, or, as he was now called,
Thomas Cranmer, was handed over to the secular power. In
the lowest and most offensive manner the innate vulgarity
of Bonner’s mind displayed itself. Turning to Cranmer, he
exclaimed: ‘Now you are no longer my Lord,’ and he thought it
witty ever afterwards to speak of him as ‘this gentleman here.’”

And so to Bocardo, and thence to the stake of martyrdom—a lamentable illustration of the bitter saying that Cambridge educated Reformers and that Oxford burnt them.

* * * * *

Such might be the first striking scene in a Christ Church pageant. A further scene—a whole series of further scenes, less tragic, indeed, but not less remarkable—may be found at the time of that Civil War to which it has been necessary to make so many references.

The King, as has already been mentioned, lodged at Christ Church, while the Queen’s Court was at Merton. Almost all the Christ Church men save the old and decrepit and the few who, as Wood puts it, “retained their sacred habit as a cloak for their sloth or timidity,” were ready to fight for the King; and they and many other men from other colleges mustered at the Schools and were marched through the High to Christ Church, “where, in the great quadrangle, they were reasonably instructed in the word of command and their postures.” They fought valiantly—twenty of them as officers—but with the result which the world knows; and presently, of course, when the city surrendered, and the Parliament sent its Visitors, there was as much trouble at Christ Church as anywhere.

Dean Samuel Fell, who was also Vice-Chancellor of the University, did his best to be dignified in extremely difficult circumstances. The Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery, who was Chancellor, harangued his Vice-Chancellor in the coarse language of the camp, and told him that he ought to be flogged; but Samuel Fell was not to be intimidated. These Visitors, he said, his juniors in academic standing and position, were too “inconsiderable” persons for the Dean of Christ Church to parley with. He therefore refused to parley with them; and they haled him off to prison, and then proceeded to the Deanery, where Mrs. Fell and the children held the fort.

They knocked, and there was no answer. They tried the door, and found that it was locked and barred. They smashed their way through it with sledge-hammers, entered, and waited for Mrs. Fell to go. But Mrs. Fell did not budge. Mrs. Fell even said that she had no intention of budging. When the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery argued with her, she argued back with equal vigour; and there was nothing for it but to bid the soldiers act. They strapped Mrs. Fell into a chair, and they strapped all the little Fells on to boards, and they lifted their living, screaming, and protesting loads, and carried them out, and deposited them in the middle of Tom Quad, where they remained until three of the canons came to the rescue, and conducted them to a place of refuge in a neighbouring apothecary’s house. It may be doubted whether Tom Quad has ever witnessed so strange a scene, before or since.

* * * * *

Enough of the picturesque, however. We must next turn to personalities; and, as we find more famous men among Deans of Christ Church than among the Heads of any of the other Houses, we may fitly begin by saying something about some of them in the Mainly about People style. Dr. Samuel Fell’s son John has a fair title to come first. A popular rhyme preserves his memory, and the story of that rhyme must be told.

This second Dr. Fell was one of the first of the deans to take not only himself but his duties seriously. He insisted that Christ Church men should read, and also that they should wear academic dress; he raised the standard of examinations, and was strict in all matters of discipline. As he ruled in the loose days of the Restoration, he inevitably had trouble with some of the livelier spirits; and one of the liveliest of the recalcitrant was Tom Brown, an author and wit of some note in his day, though now forgotten. Tom Brown, having offended, was to be sent down; but, at the last moment, the Dean partially relented. He handed Tom Brown Martial’s epigram beginning “_Non amo te, Sabidi_,” and promised to allow him to remain in residence if he could extemporise a satisfactory English version of it. Whereupon Tom Brown improvised the familiar quatrain:

“I do not love thee, Dr. Fell,
The reason why I cannot tell,
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.”

Hardly less famous is Aldrich—equally famous, as a logician, as a writer of catches, and as a smoker. His Logic remained the textbook in common use at Oxford for more than two centuries. Concerning his addiction to tobacco a story is told of a bet made that he would be found smoking at ten o’clock in the morning—a bet lost because, at the moment when the clock struck, he was not puffing at his pipe, but refilling it. One of his most popular catches was specially composed for the use of smokers, being so arranged as to give each singer a breathing time in which to keep his pipe alight. Moreover, much as the Dean loved his pipe, he loved his bowl no less; and he was the author of a Latin epigram, enumerating five excuses for the glass:

“Si bene quid memini, sunt causæ quinque bibendi:
Hospitis adventus, præsens sitis atque futura,
Aut vini bonitas, aut quælibet altera causa.”

Aldrich’s successor was Atterbury, who had been a tutor under him; and Atterbury was the most brilliant of the Oxford representatives in the famous “Battle of the Books” concerning the authenticity of the “Epistles of Phalaris.” The ultimate victory in that encounter rested, of course, with Bentley of Trinity, Cambridge, for the Oxford case had not a leg to stand upon; but the Christ Church wits were at least successful in obscuring the issue and throwing dust in the eyes of their contemporaries: a cheap success, no doubt, but better than none at all. It is a pretty story; but the reader who is curious about it must be referred to Macaulay or Jebb, for there remain three other deans with clamorous claims upon our space.

Cyril Jackson is the greatest of them. He had been the tutor of the Regent and his brothers, who had “imbibed” from him, according to his biographer, “that elevation of sentiment, that pride of soul, and that generosity of spirit which teaches them, as it were innately, to look down upon everything which bears the semblance of mean, low, or sordid feeling.” In that eulogy, no doubt, the exaggerations of the courtier are combined with those of the necrologist; but it was not Cyril Jackson’s fault if the lovers of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Ann Clarke failed to imbibe all the virtues which one could wish them to have displayed. He was an excellent tutor and an admirable Dean, who raised the College to a pitch of efficiency never before attained. He joined with Parsons of Balliol and Eveleigh of Oriel in originating honours examinations, and his own men did strikingly well in them. Sir Robert Peel was one of his double-firsts. He was in correspondence with Sir Robert at the beginning of his public career, and advised him to perfect his oratorical style “by the continual reading of Homer.”

His courtly dignity may be said to have laid the foundation of the Christ Church manner—of the manner, at all events, which one associates with the Deans of Christ Church. They, more than the Heads of any other Houses, have aimed at fulfilling the ideal of the “magnificent man” of Aristotle’s “Ethics”—with what success those who have seen the towering figure of Dean Liddell, filling the aisles of the cathedral with the pageant of his presence, are aware. This personal majesty, it is understood, is rather the appanage of the office than the accidental attribute of any individual; and the serene and well-warranted self-sufficiency of Cyril Jackson, imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by his successors, is its source.

Cyril Jackson was so satisfied with his position that he refused all offers of ecclesiastical preferment. Probably he felt that no other office could be more exalted than that which he held and adorned. At all events he declined more than one bishopric, and his reply to one of the offers is historical. “_Nolo episcopari._ Try my brother Bill; he’ll take it.” But he did not, on the other hand, cling to the office from which he was unwilling to be promoted. He retired from it, at the age of sixty-three, when his reputation was at its highest, and spent his last years quietly in the country. Some Latin elegiacs in which he expressed his preference for the simple life are too delightful not to be quoted:

“Si mihi, si liceat traducere leniter ævum,
Non pompam, nec opes, nec mihi regna peto
Vellem ut divini pandens mysteria verbi,
Vitam in secreto rure quietus agam.
Curtatis decimis, modicoque beatus agello,
Virtutæ et pura sim pietate sacer.”

Dean Hall, who succeeded, may be passed over. Dean Smith, who came next, was known as “Presence of mind Smith.” While an undergraduate, it was said, he had gone boating, and had returned alone. His companion, he explained, had fallen into the river, and had clung to the side of the boat. “Neither of us,” Smith said, “could swim; and if I had not, with great presence of mind, hit him on the head with the boat-hook, _both_ of us would have been drowned.” That story, however, is only repeated, as the journalists say, “with reserve.” Having repeated it, one passes on to Gaisford, whose memory has left more lasting traces.

* * * * *

Gaisford was a protégé of Cyril Jackson, who is said to have said to him: “You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty as a scholar.” That he was not, at any rate, a man of the world, may be inferred from his reply to the letter in which Lord Liverpool offered him the Regius Professorship of Greek. “My lord,” he wrote bluntly, “I have received your letter and accede to its contents. Yours, &c.” That he succeeded as a scholar is attested by the fact that when he went to Germany and called on Dindorf, the great Teuton, though he had never been introduced to him, fell on his neck, and kissed him on both cheeks.