Chapter VI: Part 6

Discipline, however, did not flourish in Gaisford’s time, or in that of his immediate predecessors, as it had flourished in the time of the great Cyril. This was the period in which an undergraduate was killed in a “rag”—his back broken across a chair by the too athletic Lord Hillsborough, he who, together with Peard of Brasenose (Garibaldi’s Englishman), cleared the streets of bargees in “town and gown rows.” This was also the period when the Marquis of Waterford and his company painted the door of the Deanery, and the doors of the canons’ residences, red, because of the objection taken to their hunting in pink. It was the period, too, when the flowers were dug up out of the Deanery garden and scattered about the quad—whence the expression “planting Peckwater” as a picturesque synonym for a Christ Church rag. It was the period, finally, when the statue of Mercury, formerly standing in the centre of the fountain in Tom Quad, was dressed in the robes of a Doctor of Divinity. The thing happened in the dead of winter, when the water in the fountain was frozen hard. After the deed had been done, the ice was broken, so that none could get to Mercury without wading through freezing water, five feet deep.

Though these things happened, however, there was a dignity about Gaisford, none the less. It came out when he received a letter beginning: “The Dean of Oriel presents his compliments to the Dean of Christ Church”; on which communication Gaisford’s classical comment was “Alexander the coppersmith sends greeting to Alexander the Great!” It came out again in the sermon in which he exhorted his congregation to the study of the Greek language on the ground that a knowledge of that tongue would enable them “not only to read the oracles of God in the original, but also to look down with contempt upon the vulgar herd.”

* * * * *

Leaving the deans, and turning to the undergraduates, one hardly knows where to begin; for the great names are as thick as bilberries, and belong to every department of activity. One might begin a very miscellaneous list with the names of Hakluyt, John Locke the philosopher, and William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania—a list which does not become any the less miscellaneous by the addition of the names of John and Charles Wesley, and Canon Liddon. Or one may recall that Christ Church has educated three successive Viceroys of India in Lords Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, and three successive Premiers in Gladstone and Lords Salisbury and Rosebery, and various other Prime Ministers, including Lord Liverpool, and George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel.

Peel, it is to be remembered, was the first Christ Church man to take a double first; and he took it with remarkable _éclat_. The _viva voce_ part of the examination was much more important in those days than in these. Theoretically it still takes place in the presence of spectators; but the benches are usually empty. Then there often were crowded houses to listen to the entertainment; and the examining of Peel was a great occasion, like a first night at an important theatre. There was “standing room only”; and when the examinee distinguished himself there was “loud and prolonged applause,” if not actually an _encore_ and a “call.” One wonders whether there were any who divined the verbosity of the future orator when they heard him render _suave_ in _suave mari magno_, “It is a source of gratification.”

Yet Peel, prematurely solemn as he was, could sometimes unbend, and once played a practical joke. The victim of it was a timorous freshman, known to be a scholar of poor quality. The unhappy youth received a message to the effect that the Vice-Chancellor, having heard of his ignorance, and desiring to test it, proposed to examine him privately, in his rooms, in the Greek Testament. The supposed Vice-Chancellor, who duly visited him, was Peel in disguise, attended by a scout disguised as an Esquire Bedell. Peel put the freshman through his paces, denounced his blunders in a severe tone of voice, and told him that he would probably be expelled. The freshman, so the story concludes, fled from the College without waiting for the confirmation of this sentence of expulsion, and was never heard of again.

Gladstone, who was to be so ardent a disciple of Peel in many things, imitated him, in the first instance, by taking a double first—he was one of the five first-class men in both the classical and mathematical lists; but his failures are quite as interesting as his successes. He was beaten for a Divinity Prize by Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, whose acquaintance he had made as the result of their common habit of attending the Communion Service at the Cathedral. He also competed unsuccessfully for the Ireland; and he has related how one of the examiners explained his defeat to him. “He abused me,” he says, “for my essay, on which he said his own memorandum was ‘desultory beyond belief’; also for throwing dust in the examiners’ eyes, like a man who, when asked who wrote ‘God save the King?’ replied, ‘Thompson wrote “Rule, Britannia.”’”

That, it will be allowed, was characteristic; and there is something not less characteristic in the story which Lord Morley tells of his “Greats” examination:

“The excitement,” Lord Morley writes, “reached its climax when
the examiner, after testing his knowledge of some point of
theology, said: ‘We will now leave that part of the subject,’
and the candidate, carried away by his interest in the subject,
answered: ‘No, sir; if you please, we will not leave it yet.’”

One could tell other stories, of course, if there were room for them; but Gladstone’s life at Oxford was not, except for his success in the schools, either sensational or eventful. His diary shows that he gave, or went to, a wine-party nearly every night; that he was very pleased with himself when he succeeded in making a speech of three-quarters of an hour’s duration at the Union; and that he “haunted sermons,” as the Consistory of Geneva ordered the Prisoner of Chillon to do. That is practically all that there is to be said; but one may conclude by quoting Gladstone’s mature opinion of his University. “Oxford,” he wrote, two generations later, “had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human excellence cannot grow up in a nation without it.”

Oxford, it is not to be denied, does sometimes tend thus to confound and obscure the human spirit. That is one of the defects of the qualities of its atmosphere. It not only clings to lost causes—it gets stuck to them, as it were with glue; and it allows reactionary obscurantists like Pusey—to take the first Christ Church instance that occurs—to have too much to say. Gladstone evidently came to feel that, in later life, when he had left the “weeds,” as he called them, of ecclesiasticism behind him. But his deep love for his University was never affected by the discovery. To say of any one, he once declared, that he was “a typically Oxford man” was to pay him the highest possible compliment; and it will readily be believed that that is not a proposition which this work is written to dispute.

TRINITY COLLEGE

Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of
Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long
hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil
War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter
Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The Gentlemen
Adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.

Trinity was founded with the spoils of monasteries, in 1554; and the property of the “buzzing monks” was thus put to better uses than ever before. The founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was Princess Elizabeth’s guardian at Hatfield, in Queen Mary’s reign; and he interested the Princess in his educational enterprise. It is on record that our virgin ruler interceded on behalf of two early Fellows of Trinity who had got out of the College by night by climbing over the wall—for what purpose the chronicler does not relate. They had been expelled; but—“at my Lady Elizabeth her Grace’s desire”—they were readmitted on payment of a fine.

[To face p. 226.]

The College, though a small one, and not very richly endowed, has always had a claim to distinction. If one cannot say of it, as one can of some of the other colleges, that, at a given moment, it stood for Oxford, supplying the mind, or the energy, which set the mass in motion, one can, at least, say that it preserved its intellectual activity in times of sloth, and has an exceptionally long list of illustrious names on its books—largely, perhaps, because it has been less hampered than some other colleges by “close scholarships” and provisions for showing preference to “founders’ kin.” It has educated statesmen like the Earl of Chatham and Lord North; such prominent Parliament men as Ludlow and Ireton; poets of varying degrees of merit from Elkanah Settle to Walter Savage Landor; divines, of whom John Henry Newman is the most famous; a number of gentlemen adventurers, of whom more presently; a number of men of letters, among whom Mr. Quiller Couch must on no account be overlooked.

* * * * *

In the case of so small a College maintaining so high a standard, one naturally looks for Presidents of commanding personality; and one finds such a President in Dr. Kettell, who flourished in the reign of Charles I., and whose memory is still preserved by Kettell Hall in the Broad. Dr. Kettell, it is recorded, “had a very venerable person and was an excellent governor”; and the chronicle of his governorship is happily full of those picturesque details which make it interesting to realise what the academic life of the past was like.

In his gown and surplice and hood, he had, says Aubrey, “a terrible, gigantic aspect with his sharp grey eyes”; but the impressiveness of his appearance must have been of a different order when he was seen on horseback, on Sundays, riding out to preach at Garsington, “with his boy Ralph before him, with a leg of mutton and some College bread.” He loved his College, and lived for it, and, where deeds of charity were concerned, let not his right hand know what his left hand did. One of the happy deeds done by his left hand was to thrust money secretly in at the windows of students whom he knew to be poor; and one of his modes of promoting sobriety was to see that the Trinity beer was the best in Oxford, so that no Trinity man should have any excuse for visiting a tavern.

One of the best known of his idiosyncrasies was his objection to long hair; for the wearing of long hair was not, as is sometimes carelessly assumed, first introduced into Oxford by the æsthetes. Whereas they wore their hair long as a mark of the sensibility of their souls, the imitators of the Cavaliers had done so, long before them, in vanity, and for the purpose of proving themselves to be men of fashion. President Kettell was “irreconcilable” to the habit. He went about with a pair of scissors for the purpose of cutting men’s hair when he found it offensively long; and when he happened not to have his scissors with him, he used a knife.

“I remember,” says Aubrey, “he cut Mr. Radford’s hair with the knife that chips the bread on the buttery hatch, and then he sang,

“‘And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d?
Tonedi, Tonedi.’”

That was at dinner in hall—a curious incident; but times have changed, and many things happened at Oxford in the reign of Charles I. which happen there no longer. Probably, too, when the Court came to Oxford at the beginning of the Civil War, the President’s hostility to long hair relaxed. His principal trouble then was with the Court ladies who attended Divine services in the Trinity chapel, “half-dressed,” to the great scandal of the undergraduates, and walked in the Trinity Grove with their gallants. Some of them, it seems, used to play the lute there—a disconcertingly unacademical proceeding, most disadvantageous to discipline; and the climax was reached when two specially audacious ladies—“my Lady Isabella Thynne and fine Mistress Fenshawe, her great and intimate friend”—carried frivolity to the point of calling on the President.

That, indeed, is a scene worth picturing: on the one hand the “Oxford character,” neither accustomed to the society of ladies nor desirous of it, a man of dignity and authority, though unpolished, very wroth at the intrusion of “minxes” in the paths of academic peace; on the other hand high-spirited and mischievous beauties, to whom great academic names were nothing and great academic potentates were only so many “musty old professors.” Their idea, apparently, was to ogle the President—to make him flirt with them—and, failing that, to overwhelm him with satirical reproaches as a cross-grained old gentleman. And, no doubt, the President was cross-grained, and entirely indisposed to flirt; but he was a match for his visitors none the less.

“Madam,” he said, addressing himself to Mistress Fenshawe, “your husband and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather. I know you to be a gentlewoman, and I will not say you are a baggage; but get you gone for a very woman!”

And, so speaking, he drove the giggling intruders from his presence, as summarily as Benjamin Jowett, at a later date, expelled a deputation of the Balliol washerwomen from the Master’s lodge. He makes a characteristic exit speech in that scene, and leaves us free to call up ghosts of other men.

* * * * *

The ghost of Dr. Johnson would readily appear if called. He stayed at Kettell Hall while working at his Dictionary; he said that he would rather live at Trinity than anywhere else at Oxford; his young friends Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk were both Trinity men. Dr. Johnson, however, will be waiting for us when we come to speak of Pembroke; so we may put him on one side, and recall the memory of the greatest of the Trinity poets, Walter Savage Landor. He was one of the many Oxford poets who, like Shelley and Swinburne, have left the University without a degree; and his manner of leaving, like Shelley’s, was violent, and the result of variance with the dons.

Landor of Trinity, be it observed, was the contemporary of Southey of Balliol. Like Southey, he distinguished himself by refusing to have his hair powdered, in the conventional style, for dinner; but Southey only knew him by repute, as he told Humphry Davy on the publication of “Gebir.” Landor, Southey then wrote, was “notorious as a mad Jacobin.” He would have sought his acquaintance, he said, for the sake of the Jacobinism, if the concomitant madness had not deterred him; and he concludes, giving chapter and verse for the madness: “He was obliged to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through the window.” But that was not quite true. The story, after the way of stories, had both gained and lost something on its short journey from Trinity to Balliol; and Landor himself has left a record of the rights of it in a letter written shortly after the occurrence.

He was a Rugby man, of the days before Rugby had gone in for “moral seriousness.” He exhibited the roughness of Rugby, together with a spasmodic uncertainty of temper which was all his own; and, though he was an excellent Grecian, he did not imitate the Greeks in mixing water with his wine. In the rooms opposite to his there lived a man named Leeds whom he did not like—a man of whom he writes that “with a figure extremely disgusting, he was more so in his behaviour,” and that “he was continually intruding himself where his company was not wanted.”

One evening it happened that Leeds and Landor were both giving wines; Leeds’s party consisting, according to Landor, of “servitors and other raffs of every description.” The weather was warm, and both parties had their windows open. Neither party, one suspects, was more than relatively sober; and so, feelings running high, the two parties began to express their opinions of each other in a slanging match, until presently Leeds’s party, tired of the wordy war, closed the window, and fastened the shutters. Then Landor, as a final expression of his contempt, discharged a shot-gun at the shutters.

Nobody was hurt—nobody could have been hurt; but Leeds complained and the President sent for Landor; and Landor’s awkward temper was his undoing. Availing himself of the fact that the shot had proceeded, not from the sitting-room, but from the bedroom, he told the President that no gun had been fired from the room in which his company were assembled; and he added that, as no definite person was accused of the offence, he did not feel called upon to reply to this vague charge. The President, however, as it happened, was not the sort of man to be fooled or bluffed.

“Have you got a gun, Mr. Landor?” he asked; and Landor admitted that he had.

“Will you show it to me?”

“Certainly.”

“Has it been fired lately?”

“Yes.”

“In that case, Mr. Landor, and as I have also taken occasion to question your guests——”

So the dialogue ran; and the cross-examination established, if not the legal proof, at least the moral certainty of Landor’s guilt. But he still tried to bluff.

“Mr. President,” he said, “it is against the law of England to require a prisoner to incriminate himself”; but the President retired to consult the Senior Common-room, and returned to pronounce sentence.

“Mr. Landor,” he said, “it is the opinion of the Fellows that you be rusticated for two terms.” And so it happened; and Oxford lost another of her poets—more through the poet’s fault, it must be admitted, than through her own.

* * * * *

The link of poetry, though there is no other, may couple Landor’s name with Newman’s. The most momentous events of Newman’s Oxford career have been spoken of in the Oriel chapter; but he was a Trinity undergraduate, and Trinity’s claim to him must be recognised. “Trinity,” he has written, “has never been unkind to me”; and in 1885 he presented the College library with a set of his works, expressing the hope that the yearly festival of the College might be “as happy a day to you all as in 1818 it was to me.”

Yet there are indications that Newman’s happiness at Trinity was diversified by spiritual distress, and by pained disapproval of the frivolity of others. He had but lately been “converted”; and his conversion made him a wet blanket in merry company. His thoughts, apart from his studies, were not confined to the “snapdragon growing on the walls opposite my freshman’s rooms” of which he afterwards spoke with a poet’s grateful recollection. His Evangelicalism (for he was then an Evangelical) was shocked by the too bibulous propensities of his fellow-men. He could not share in such jollities, like Landor; and at the approach of the College Gaudy, his letters take the tone of a Commination Service:

“To-morrow is our Gaudy. If there be one time of the year in
which the glory of our College is humbled, and all appearance
of goodness fades away, it is on Trinity Monday. Oh, how the
angels must lament over a whole society throwing off the
allegiance and service of their Maker, which they have pledged
the day before at His table, and showing themselves the sons of
Belial!”

Is it really well, one wonders, for a young man to be quite so good as that at quite such an early age? Probably not. The sentences seem to echo the artificial ring of the Evangelicalism of the decadence, which is a displeasing sound; and one turns, not without relief, from Newman to the Gentlemen Adventurers.

* * * * *

It has been mentioned that the first Earl of Chatham was once Pitt of Trinity; and it was under his direction that England conquered the Empire “in a fit of absence of mind”—an Empire which, by the way, Lord North of Trinity went the right way to lose. His name, therefore, though no stories of his Oxford adventures have been preserved, fittingly introduces our list.

The first name on the list is that of Sir Francis Verney, of whom many interesting stories may be read in the “Memoirs of the Verney Family”; he was, in turn, a galley-slave, a common soldier, and a pirate on the Barbary coast, and died miserably in the hospital at Messina in 1615. The second name is that of Calvert, of Trinity, who became Lord Baltimore, and founded the colony of Maryland. The third—to pass over minor names—is that of Richard Burton.

“Readers must be prepared,” says Lady Burton, writing of her husband’s Oxford curriculum, “not to hear the recital of the College course of a goody-goody boy of yesterday”; and though Burton did row in the Trinity torpid, and compete for two scholarships, which he failed to win, his proceedings were, on the whole, irregular. He had lived much abroad, and came to Oxford with ideas somewhat different from those of the ordinary public school boy.

The first thing that happened to him on his arrival was that the College authorities requested him to shave off his moustache. He declined to do so unless they put their request in the shape of a formal written order. Some undergraduates then laughed at his moustache; and he handed them his card, and called them out, though the threatened duel was prevented from taking place. He was next advised to sport his oak, lest he should be ragged; but instead of doing that, he left the door wide open, and thrust the poker in the fire, prepared to give his persecutors a warm reception if they came. The opinion gained ground that he was a desperate character, and he was left unmolested.

His studies were as unconventional as his behaviour—he began to learn Arabic—and so also were his recreations. Those were the days of rowdyism—the days in which, as has just been related, the Marquis of Waterford painted the door of the Dean and Canons of Christ Church red; and Burton thoroughly enjoyed diversions of that order. He once caused himself to be let down with a rope into the garden of the Master of Balliol, pulled up that old gentleman’s choicest flowers, and planted staring marigolds in their place. He also, when the Master of Balliol was watering his flowers, shot at the watering-pot with an air-gun. But, taking one consideration with another, nothing was quite so characteristic of his life at Oxford as his leaving of it.

He had told his father, during the vacation, that he would like to take his name off the books; but his father had insisted on his returning. He returned with the firm resolve of overreaching the parental authority by doing something that would bring about his expulsion; and a race-meeting in the neighbourhood gave him his opportunity.

Undergraduates were not only forbidden to attend that race-meeting; they were ordered to be present without fail at lectures, at the hour at which the races took place. “Tyranny! Unjustifiable interference with the liberty of the subject!” exclaimed Burton and a few other of the wilder spirits; and they ordered tandems to be in waiting for them, behind Worcester, and drove out of Oxford at a spanking pace at the very hour at which the roll was being called.

Of course they were missed; and of course they were sent for, and asked for explanations. The explanations of the others were of a humble character; but Burton’s explanations made matters worse. He blurted out that he saw no harm in attending a race-meeting, and was aware of no reason why undergraduates should be treated like babies in arms; and he not only said that, but went on to moralise.

“Trust begets trust,” he solemnly said, “and they who trust us elevate us”; and it was not to be expected that the dons would put up with that.

Nor did they. They expelled Burton, while contenting themselves with rusticating his companions; and he received the sentence with the same imperturbably high moral tone. He hoped, he said, “that the caution money deposited by his father would be honestly returned to him.” At that there was “movement.” It seemed, for the moment, as if the dons proposed to expel Burton not only from the College, but from the room. He brought his heels together, bowed to them in the courtly Austrian fashion, wished them happiness and prosperity, and withdrew. Then he went down.

But not immediately, and not without a demonstration; and the description of the final scene may be taken from the Life by Mr. Francis Hitchman:

“One of his rusticated friends—Anderson of Oriel,” writes
Mr. Hitchman, “had proposed that they should leave with a
splurge—‘go up from the land with a soar.’ There was now
no need for the furtive tandem behind Worcester College: it
was driven boldly up to the College doors. Richard’s bag and
baggage were stowed away in it, and, with a cantering leader
and a high-trotting horse in the shafts, carefully driven
over the beds of the best flowers, they started for the High
Street and the Queen’s highway to London, Richard energetically
performing upon a yard of tin, waving adieux to his friends,
and kissing his hand to the pretty shop-girls.”

SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE

Founded by Sir Thomas White—Raised to fame by Archbishop
Laud—Calvinistic opposition to Laud—He triumphs over it and
makes Oxford a High Church University—His disciplinarian
regulations—His magnificent entertainment of royalty—The
entertainment of Admiral Tromp—He gets drunk and is taken home
in a wheelbarrow—Dean Mansel—His pugnacious Bampton Lectures
and his excruciating puns.

Saint John’s College was founded in the reign of Queen Mary, a year after the foundation of Trinity, by Sir Thomas White, a City merchant of the Dick Whittington type, and one of the originators of the Muscovy Company. Its connection with the Merchant Tailors’ School was early established; and merchants generally recognised it as the most fitting college for them to send their sons to. It blossomed into glory under its second founder, Archbishop Laud, who added, among other things, that “garden front” which is one of the architectural gems of Oxford.

[To face p. 241.]

Laud’s, in fact, is the chief name to be reckoned with in the College annals. He occupied almost every position there, from the humblest to the highest. He was, successively, commoner, Scholar, Fellow, Tutor, President. While Tutor, he was also, for a time, Proctor. After being President, he became Visitor of the College and Chancellor of the University. One associates his name, in politics, with reaction; but he was, in University matters, a reformer. He and his successor Juxon—the Juxon who attended Charles I. on the scaffold—raised the College to its highest pinnacle of honour. It led the van in education, and gave the country two successive Primates.

* * * * *

Born in 1573, Laud matriculated in 1589, won his scholarship in 1590, was elected to his fellowship in 1593, took deacon’s orders in 1600 and priest’s orders in 1601, became a Doctor of Divinity in 1608, and was chosen President in 1611. He held that office until he became Bishop of St. David’s in 1621; but his interest in the College did not cease with his preferment, as the new Statutes which Oxford owed to him bear witness.

His period, as the dates show, was chiefly that of the first two Stuart Kings; and the Stuarts, whatever their defects, were always full of regard for the most ancient of the English seats of learning. They valued its loyalty and liked to visit it in state; and Oxford repaid the attention which it received from them by modifying its theological point of view. Laud was the moving spirit of the transformation. The Oxford to which he went was a Calvinistic Oxford. The Oxford which he left was a High Church Oxford; and the change was more due to his influence than to that of any other man. He got his way there by firmness and tact, wearing down opposition, and making his enemies his friends.

The records of his early Oxford days are scanty; but we know him always to have been on the side of ceremony, alike in academic and in religious observances. Of the former kind of ceremony we find a quotable example in the account preserved of the reception of James I., on his visit to Oxford, at the gate of Saint John’s:

“Three young youths” (we read) “in habit and attire like nymphs
confronted him, representing England, Scotland, and Ireland,
and talking dialogue-wise each to other of their state, at last
concluding yielding themselves up to his gracious government.
The scholars stood all on one side of the street, and the
strangers of all sorts on the other. The Scholars stood first,
then the Bachelors, and at last the Masters of Arts.”

Laud, we cannot doubt, had a hand in that performance; and we may also presume him to have had something to do with the management of the comedy which was played before the King, two days later—not, it is true, with such unqualified success as the company might have desired:

“It was acted” (we are told) “much better than either of
the others that he had seen before, yet the King was so
over-wearied that after a while he distasted it and fell
asleep. When he awaked, he would have been gone, saying,
‘I marvel what they think me to be,’ with such other like
speeches, showing his dislike thereof. Yet he did tarry till
they had ended it, which was after one of the clock.”

It was in connection with religion, however, that Laud’s appreciation of splendid ceremony was most important. There is a legend to the effect that he kept a set of Roman vestments in his rooms, and dressed up in them and admired himself before the looking-glass when he thought that he was alone and unobserved; but that story is probably untrue. Certainly the fact that the College treasures include Roman vestments is no proof of it. Personally, Laud was a man of very simple tastes. Fuller says so, and illustrates the statement with an anecdote.

“Once” (Fuller writes) “at a visitation in Essex, one in
orders (of good estate and extraction) appeared before him
very gallant in habit, whom Dr. Laud (then Bishop of London)
publickly reproved, showing to him the plainness of his own
apparel. ‘My Lord’ (said the minister), ‘you have better
cloaths at home and I have worse,’ whereat the Bishop rested
very well contented.”

That is not the language of a man who desired priests to simulate birds of paradise; and Laud’s chief anxiety was that the conduct of public worship should be decent, decorous, and dignified. He found the administration of the Holy Communion conducted in a slovenly manner. The table was kept in the middle of the Church, and communicants had acquired a habit of putting their hats and sticks on it. Laud railed it off, at the East end, so that it could no longer be used as a hat-rack and umbrella-stand; and he also preached sermons before the University in favour of the doctrine of baptismal regeneration, and of the divine origin of the episcopacy.

This, at first, made him very unpopular. His election to the office of President was only effected in the face of strenuous opposition—one vehement antagonist presuming to seize the voting papers and tear them up, in the vain hope of invalidating the election; and he was preached at by the Regius Professor of Divinity in the University Church. “What!” exclaimed the preacher, pointing at the future Archbishop. “Do you think there be two heavens? If there be, get yourself to the other, and place yourself there, for into this where I am ye shall not come.”

To that sort of abuse Laud had to listen for hours together. It is said that he listened patiently. Perhaps he listened with a smile. At any rate he was in a position to smile, for he could see that he was winning.

Probably other people did not see it; for Laud was neither overbearing in manner nor formidable in appearance. Fuller describes him as “low in stature, little in bulk.” When he was Proctor, a citizen of Oxford, whom he discovered drunk on a bench and accosted with the voice of authority, addressed him as “thou little morsel of justice” and bade him go away. Apparently he went away. The Proctor’s Black Book contains no record of punishment in his time, and in his college he had a reputation for lenity. One can only in short, infer him to have been a disciplinarian from the fact that he did, somehow or other, enforce discipline.

He not only enforced discipline, indeed, but conciliated the recalcitrant. The very man who had tried to invalidate his election to the Presidency by destroying the voting papers became one of his most loyal supporters, served as Vice-Chancellor during his Chancellorship, and sent him regular reports of the progress of University affairs. In the end, therefore, he was able to carry matters with a high hand, informing the Heads of the other colleges that, if they did not institute the reforms suggested to them, “his Majesty’s commissions will reform whatsoever you do not,” and “this breach once made upon your privileges might lay open a wider gap in many other particulars,” and “it will be ordered in a sourer way not so agreeable to your liberties.”

Laud, in short, was, like Lord Curzon, a Chancellor who took his Chancellorship seriously; and no matter was too great or too little to receive attention from him. He enriched the University with gifts of rare and precious manuscripts; he procured fresh privileges for the University Press; he revised the relation of the colleges to the University; and, in addition to all that, he drafted regulations as to the conduct of junior members of the University which we may assume to have been as necessary in his time as they would be out of place in ours.

He forbade, for instance, long hair, top boots, and slashed doublets, and all garments of “light and garish colours.” He also forbade “the hunting of beasts with any sort of dogs, ferrets, nets or toils,” and any use or carrying of “muskets, crossbows or falcons,” and prescribed that “neither rope-dancers, actors, nor shows of gladiators” should perform in the precincts of the University without special leave. His schedule of prohibited games included football and knuckle-bones; and the sanction of his Draconian rules was to be “corporal punishment if, by reason of age, it be becoming, fines, postponement of the degree, expulsion for a time or for ever”; and though it is difficult for us to picture the state of things which required to be amended by this drastic code, there is testimony that the change which it introduced was for the better. Sir John Coke may be our witness.

“Scholars” (writes Sir John in 1636) “are no more to be found
in taverns nor seen loitering in the streets or other places
of idleness or ill-example, but all contain themselves within
the walls of their colleges and in the schools and public
libraries.”

It is a picture of an Oxford very different from the Oxford which we know—a picture of an Oxford of old heads on young shoulders. Let Laud be given all the credit that is due to him for creating such an Oxford, even though the elements of permanence were lacking to his creation. He did not altogether ignore the need for recreation, though he thought rough games undignified, and would have been appalled by the spectacle of an undergraduate in a blazer. He admitted plays and pageants; and as our account of him began with a pageant, so it may end with one. Only three years before his arraignment and execution, he organised a pageant of triumphant splendour for the entertainment of the King and Queen, the Elector Palatine, and Prince Rupert.

There was first a dinner of a unique description, with “baked meats” disguised by the cook to look like Archbishops, Bishops, and Doctors of Divinity. Then there was a play—“very merry,” Laud writes, “and without offence.” He was very proud to think that Saint John’s was able to stage the piece without needing to borrow a single actor from any other college; and the costumes were so tasteful that the Queen borrowed them for a subsequent performance by her own players at Hampton Court. All things, in short, were in such very good order that “no man went out at the gates, courtier or other, but content,” and all passed off “to the great satisfaction of the King and the honour of that place.”

It was a great day for Saint John’s, and a great day for Laud. He proceeded to Oxford for the occasion with a retinue of from forty to fifty horsemen, and he defrayed the whole cost of the entertainment—£2,666—out of his own pocket. But the glory was like the glory of the sunset which precedes the dark. Laud’s further progress was to be to the prison and the block; and the College was presently to be called upon, like the other colleges, to yield up its plate to the King, and to devote a portion of its revenues to the payment of the King’s soldiers. The King promised “on the word of a king” to repay the money advanced within a month; but he did not keep his promise; and presently the Parliamentarians began bombarding, and a cannon ball which lodged in the gateway tower is still preserved.

* * * * *

Having had its day, Saint John’s was never again to be so pre-eminent a college as under Laud’s administration. Intellectually, it was to be surpassed by Balliol; socially it was to be surpassed by Christ Church. The Methodism of the eighteenth century was to have no repercussion within its walls. Ecclesiastically—though Mark Pattison speaks of it as “corroded with ecclesiasticism”—it was never to attain to the interest of Oriel. It fell, in short, with the fall of Charles I., into that place in “the ruck” from which it is given to few colleges to emerge for more than a little while.

One distinction which may be claimed for the days of its obscurity is that, once, it had a soldier for its President. President Mews had attained the rank of captain during the Civil War, and it is related that, while President, he lent the horses from his stable to draw the royal artillery at the Battle of Sedgmoor, and himself not only watched the engagement from the top of a hill, but gave advice as to the tactics—an example which we may expect to see followed by Professor Spenser Wilkinson (whose college was Merton) if ever the necessity should arise.

Another incident which diversified the annals of the College in the latter part of the seventeenth century was a visit from the Dutch Admiral Tromp. He is described by a contemporary as “a drunken greasy Dutchman”; but he did not get drunk alone. A drinking match was arranged by Dr. John Speed of Saint John’s, and five or six others, “as able men as himself.” It is recorded that, though the contest was a severe one, the Oxonians triumphed, and at the close of a merry evening, the ancient mariner was conveyed to his lodgings in a wheelbarrow.

And so forth, there being no other name on which it is necessary to pause until we come to that of Dean Mansel.

* * * * *

Mansel is the divine whom Herbert Spencer claimed for his philosophical ancestor. He had, he said, carried the speculations of Mansel a step further—that was how he had arrived at the agnosticism expounded in “First Principles.” Whether the one philosopher’s conclusions are really deducible from the other philosopher’s premises is a thorny question about which the mere historian may be contented to leave theologians and metaphysicians wrangling. For him it is enough that Mansel was a notable figure—a philosopher whom the average undergraduate of his period forgave freely for being incomprehensible because he was so unmistakably pugnacious.

In his examination for his degree, Mansel distinguished himself by arguing with his examiner, before an admiring audience, and putting him to shame; and Dean Burgon’s “Twelve Good Men” contains a delightful description of the delivery of his controversial Bampton Lectures. He was much too deep, Burgon tells us, for his congregation—not one in a hundred of them understood a word of what he was saying. But they understood, in a general way, what he was about.

“He was, single-handed, contunding a host of unbelievers—some
with unpronounceable names and unintelligible theories; and
sending them flying before him like dust before the wind.
And _that_ was quite enough for _them_. It was a kind of
gladiatorial exhibition which they were invited to witness: the
unequal odds against the British lion adding greatly to the
zest of the entertainment; especially as the noble animal was
always observed to remain master of the field in the end. But,
for the space of an hour, there was sure to be some desperate
hard fighting, during which they knew that Mansel would have to
hit both straight and hard: and _that_ they liked. It was only
necessary to look at their Champion to be sure that _he_ also
sincerely relished his occupation; and this completed their
satisfaction. So long as he was encountering his opponents’
reasoning, his massive brow, expressive features, and earnest
manner suggested the image of nothing so much as resolute
intellectual conflict, combined with conscious intellectual
superiority. But the turning-point was reached at last. He
would suddenly erect his forefinger. This was the signal for
the decisive final charge. Resistance from that moment was
hopeless. Already were the enemy’s ranks broken. It only
remained to pursue the routed foe into some remote corner of
Germany and to pronounce the Benediction.”

Truly there must have been theological giants in the land in those days; and the spectacle must have been even more sublime than that of Tatham of Lincoln contributing to Christian apologetics his famous wish that he might see “all the German critics at the bottom of the German Ocean.” And the curious thing is that, when Mansel was not confounding the Teuton metaphysicians, he was engaged in building himself up a second reputation as the most brilliant punster in the English language. Burgon credits him with the delightful saying—sometimes attributed to Douglas Jerrold—that “dogmatism is the maturity of puppyism”; and Burgon, in fact, fills several pages with Mansel’s puns, setting them forth with a gusto which may partially explain and justify the criticism once passed on Burgon himself, to the effect that “buffoonery was his forte and piety his foible.”

JESUS COLLEGE

Statistics concerning the Joneses of Jesus—A Welsh
_enclave_—Rarity of great names at Jesus—Henry Vaughan the
“Silurist”—Sir Lewis Morris—Beau Nash—John Richard Green.

The belief currently entertained about Jesus College in the other colleges is that the Principal, the Fellows, the Scholars, and the Commoners—to say nothing of the porter, the cook, and the scouts—are all alike called Jones. It is also generally understood that such Christian names as David and Llewellyn occur too frequently to be of any use for the denotation of individuals, with the result that it is only possible to distinguish a given Jones from other Joneses by means of a reference to his personal idiosyncrasies. “I mean,” people say, “the Mr. Jones who ...” &c.

Legends of that sort, though seldom literally true, are seldom quite devoid of foundation in fact; and the best thing to do is to take a census. It appears from Foster’s “Alumni Oxonienses” that, between 1715 and 1886, there were 716 Joneses at Oxford, and that 299 of them were Joneses of Jesus. Jesus, that is to say, whose just share of Joneses would be one twenty-first, has, as a matter of fact, educated rather less than one-half and rather more than one-third of the total number of Joneses available. Yet, by one of those curious ironies which make life interesting, it so happens that the greatest of the Oxford Joneses—Sir William Jones, to wit—was not at Jesus, but at University, and that the most memorable of the Jesus ghosts are not the ghosts of Joneses, but of a Vaughan, a Nash, a Green, and a Morris, while only one Jones has ever risen to the dignity of Principal.

So much for statistics. They are very interesting, but they do not carry us very far. Our next step must be to picture Jesus—not the present Jesus, of course, but the unreformed Jesus of old times—as a horrible example of the evil (or perhaps it would be better to say the undesirable limitations) of what may be called “hole-and-corner” educational endowments.

Jesus has always been, in a special sense, the Welshman’s college—a Welsh _enclave_, as it were, in the midst of England. Benefactors made it so by confining their benefactions to Welshmen; and one may feel that this was a mistaken policy without speaking disrespectfully of Welshmen—which has always, since Shakespeare’s time, been a dangerous thing to do. The results have been somewhat like those which Matthew Arnold deplored in the case of special schools for the education of the sons of licensed victuallers and commercial travellers. The Welshmen brought their own atmosphere to Oxford and formed their own circle there. Their peculiarities, instead of being toned down, were crystallised; and their many excellent qualities were consequently lost upon Oxford. Men of other colleges gazed at them, as it were, across a social gulf, and regarded them pretty much as they might have regarded Wild Men from Borneo.

Nor did the Welshmen often bridge the social gulf by means of intellectual achievement. They might have done so if they had been fairly representative of Wales; but they were not. Jesus suffered more than almost any other college from the dog-in-the-manger policy of theologians in high places. While the College was the preserve of Welshmen, the University was the preserve of members of the Church of England; and Wales, as all the world knows, is a citadel of Nonconformity. The intellect of Wales, therefore, was not justly represented at Jesus; while the intellect of England, Scotland, and Ireland was hardly represented there at all.

It followed that even the people who regarded the religion at Jesus as “true” could not allow that the learning there was “sound.” Fellowships were frequently awarded to men who had taken only third or fourth-class honours. The scholars could learn no more than the Tutors could teach them; and the list of _alumni_ is singularly lacking in distinction. A list of sixteen bishops can, indeed, be made out—with not a Jones among them; and there have been a good many Cymric lexicographers, Cymric grammarians, and Cymric antiquaries. But such names as a non-Cymric public values are very scarce indeed. Archbishop Ussher—he who computed that the world must have been created in the year 4004 B.C.—had some connection with the College, though the precise nature of that connection cannot be discovered; and then comes Henry Vaughan—the poet who called himself “the Silurist,” because the country in which he lived and worked was the ancient territory of the Silures.

* * * * *

Henry Vaughan is a charming religious poet, with a vein of mysticism. The Reverend Alexander Grosart has written his life in a prose style of his own, which suggests a careful man picking his way across a muddy road in patent-leather shoes. But the life, when written, amounts to very little. Hardly anything is known of the poet except that he began to study law, but afterwards became a country doctor, and practised in Brecknockshire; and the most interesting statement made concerning him is that, when the war between King and Parliament broke out, he suffered a short term of imprisonment as a royalist, but afterwards went home and “followed the pleasant paths of poetry and philology.”

Some will, no doubt, denounce him, on that account, as a poor, mean-spirited person; but there are no known facts on which to base the charge. Fighting, after all, is not an end in itself; and a man may refrain from fighting, not because he is afraid of being killed, but because he does not feel strongly enough to desire to kill the people who do not share his opinions. A mystic, full of the belief that God is manifested in all His creatures—King’s men and Parliament men alike—might well sigh for quiet in the midst of civic storms, and prefer to realise his Pantheism in a lonely place rather than draw the sword and let himself be carried away by evil passions which his heart told him were unprofitable and vain.

The Silurist was, we may take it, a “God-intoxicated” man, and one on whom the intoxication exercised a narcotic rather than an exciting influence: a man, therefore, not to be roused from meditative torpor by the thought that the King’s rights or the people’s liberties were in peril. He could see visions and dream dreams which were worth infinitely more to him than any of the objects of contention between Cavaliers and Roundheads. He not only fancied that he could see—he actually saw:

“Dear, beauteous death! the jewel of the just,
Shining nowhere, but in the dark;
What mysteries do lie beyond thy dust;
Could man out-look that mark!

“If a star were confin’d into a tomb,
Her captive flames must needs burn there;
But when the hand that lock’d her up gives room,
She’ll shine through all the sphere!”

One does not picture the man who wrote those lines galloping about with a sword in his hand and charging with the drunken troopers who followed Rupert of the Rhine. One could not so picture him if one would, and one would not if one could. He was of a finer as well as a more sober temper than any of those roystering men-at-arms; and in his “Retreate” he anticipated Wordsworth’s more famous “Intimations of Immortality.” Perhaps it is not without significance that he and Wordsworth both divined that “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting,” and that “Heaven lies about us in our infancy,” in an age in which progress seemed to have called a halt while wild men cut each other’s throats.

All that, however, has nothing to do with the career of Vaughan the Silurist at Jesus; and, indeed, there is nothing to be said on that branch of the subject, except that Vaughan left the University without taking his degree. The only other Jesus poet worthy of remark—one has named, of course, Lewis Morris—not only took his degree, but also took firsts in Moderations and in Greats, and won the Chancellor’s Prize for an essay on “The greatness and decline of Venice,” and would have been elected to a fellowship if he had not been disqualified by the possession of private means. “Perhaps,” writes the official historian of Jesus, “what the College lost the rest of the world may have gained by this disqualification.”

It may be so. Yet Sir Lewis Morris has left it on record that he wrote most of his poetry on the underground railway before it was electrified; and if the atmosphere of Jesus was less inspiring than that of the unreformed District Line, it must have been more uninspiring than that of any of the other colleges. The essential thing is, however, that Morris did write his poetry, and gained his knighthood, and was at one time a possible poet laureate.

He had been much admired. His admirers had, at one time, numbered tens, if not hundreds of thousands; and if the laureateship had fallen vacant then, it would probably have been given to him amid acclamations. It fell vacant too late, however, and was allowed to remain vacant too long to please him. The demand for his poetical services was not vociferous. It even seemed to him that he was the victim of a conspiracy of silence; and he said as much to Oscar Wilde.

“Oscar,” he asked, “what would you advise me to do in the face of this conspiracy of silence?”

“I would advise you to join the conspiracy,” was his brother poet’s cruel reply.

* * * * *

Another—and one may even venture to say an unexpected—Jesus man was Beau Nash, the uncrowned King of Bath: the autocratic dandy who directed the etiquette of the Bath Assembly Rooms, where he ordered Duchesses to take off their aprons and noblemen to take off their boots. All things considered, it seems improbable that Beau Nash was very much like the other Jesus men, or that the other Jesus men were very much like Beau Nash; and it may be added that the example which he set them was not an example which it would have been good for them to follow.

The Beau, like the Silurist, left Oxford without a degree, after having demonstrated, as his biographer, Dr. Oliver Goldsmith of Trinity College, Dublin, puts it, that “though much might be expected from his genius, nothing could be hoped from his industry.” And Dr. Goldsmith continues: