Chapter I: Part 1

THE ROMANCE OF THE OXFORD COLLEGES

_Photo. Hills & Saunders_

_Allen & Co. (London) Ltd. Sc._]

THE ROMANCE
OF THE
OXFORD COLLEGES

BY
FRANCIS GRIBBLE
SOMETIME SCHOLAR OF EXETER, AUTHOR OF “GEORGE
SAND AND HER LOVERS,” ETC.

WITH SEVENTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 WHITCOMB STREET
LONDON W.C.

_Published 1910_

PREFACE

This work does not purport to be either a history or a guide book. Of Oxford Guide Books, and of Histories of Oxford, there is already an adequate provision, and there is no dearth of Oxford Reminiscences, or of Studies of Oxford Life and Manners. But there may still be room for a modest volume which, while unscrupulously omitting whatever seems tedious, or of purely local interest, recalls the stories concerning which experience shows the average stranger to be most curious, and answers the questions which the average stranger, when visiting the various colleges, is most apt to ask.

The book, indeed, is the outcome of an experience which revealed the nature, and the limits, of that curiosity. It was lately the privilege of the writer to act as guide to some ladies who were visiting Oxford for the first time, and he made a mental note of the points on which they showed themselves most avid of information. They did not, he found, desire to burden their memories with dates, or to be entertained with lists of the names of the Heads of Colleges and Halls, and they were content to admire the architecture without entering into technical details. On the other hand, stories of human interest—stories introducing well-known names—stories of events in which the history of Oxford came into close touch with the history of England—were constantly and eagerly demanded.

Why was Shelley expelled from University? Why did Dr. Johnson throw the boots out of his window at Pembroke? What is the truth about the Brasenose Hellfire Club, and the ghost? What was the origin of town and gown rows? Is it true that Froude’s book was publicly burnt at Exeter? What was Oxford like at the time of the Civil War? What sort of people were the Tractarians, the Wesleyans, the Æsthetes and the Positivists? Why was Jowett so famous? Why are so many Jesus men called Jones? Which was Gladstone’s college, and which was Lord Randolph Churchill’s? Why do they have boar’s head for dinner on Christmas Day at Queen’s? Is it true that Beau Nash was an Oxford man? Can you tell me any stories about Charles Reade—or Sir Richard Burton—or Southey—or de Quincey—or Pater?

Such were a few of the questions asked. The book answers them, and answers a good many other questions of the same sort. It proceeds on the assumption that every college, at some period of its history, through some notable name on its books, has been profoundly interesting, not only to the University, but to the world, and it dwells on those interesting moments and those interesting incidents as fully as space permits.

FRANCIS GRIBBLE.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17

Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of
Durham—The Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord
Herbert of Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The
screwing up of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His
unpopularity with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship
with Hogg—His conversation with the Baby—His Religious
Opinions—His publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His
expulsion.

BALLIOL COLLEGE 36

The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His
introduction to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their dream
of Pantisocracy—College “Rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—Of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.

MERTON COLLEGE 55

Antiquity of Merton—The model of subsequent
foundations—Friction between the University and the town—The
great “town and gown row” of 1354—The scholars of Merton
save the University—The wardenship of Sir Henry Savile—The
visit of Queen Elizabeth—Oxford during the Civil War—Queen
Henrietta Maria at Merton—How Merton ceased to be a reading
college—Scandalous proceedings in the gardens—Mandell
Creighton and Lord Randolph Churchill.

EXETER COLLEGE 70

The West Country College—A Whig College—“Debauched by a
drunken Governor”—Eminent Alumni—“Parson Jack”—His bout
at fisticuffs—Garibaldi’s Englishman—His prowess on the
river—James Anthony Froude—His innate Protestantism—The burning
of his “Nemesis of Faith”—Burne Jones and William Morris.

ORIEL COLLEGE 86

Foundation by Adam de Brome—Butler and his
“Analogy”—Causes of the efficiency of Oriel—The
“Noetics”—Eveleigh—Coplestone—Whately—The Tractarians—Who
started the Tractarian Movement?—What did the Tractarians
want?—The logical weakness of their position—The attitude of
the bishops—The stampede to Rome—The honest doubters—Matthew
Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough—Cecil Rhodes at Oriel.

QUEEN’S COLLEGE 106

What little Mr. Bouncer said of Queen’s—The inwardness of his
criticism—The boar’s head and the Canticle—Another song on
the same subject—The Provost and the alarm of fire—The Black
Prince at Queen’s—Wiclif at Queen’s—The first of the Oxford
Movements inaugurated by his poor preachers—Later times—Jeremy
Bentham—Walter Pater.

NEW COLLEGE 118

William of Wykeham—A self-educated man—His liberality and
his elaborate Statutes—The College depressed by too much
founder’s kin—“Golden scholars, silver bachelors, and leaden
Masters”—Notable New College men—Sydney Smith—Sir Henry
Wotton—Canon Spooner and “Spoonerisms”—Stories of Warden
Shuttleworth and others.

LINCOLN COLLEGE 129

A small college with many outstanding names—Mr. D. S.
Maccoll and his Newdigate—“Shifter” of the _Sporting
Times_—A reminiscence of “Shifter”—John Wesley and the
Methodists—Wesley’s meeting with Beau Nash of Bath—Mark
Pattison—His early connection with the Tractarians—His
abandonment of superstition—His great learning—His treatment of
undergraduates.

ALL SOULS COLLEGE 145

Peculiarities of the Constitution—A College without
undergraduates—Court favourites jobbed into
fellowships—Fellowships bought and sold—All Souls Fellows,
a link between Oxford and the outside world—Sir William
Blackstone—Edward Young—The song of the All Souls Mallard and
the scandal connected therewith.

MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153

The College which withstood James II.—President Routh—His great
age and eccentricities—Slackness of the College—The careers of
Addison—Of Gibbon—Of Charles Reade—Oscar Wilde and the æsthetic
movement at Magdalen—Persecution of Wilde and suppression of
the movement.

BRASENOSE COLLEGE 171

The eponymous nose—The Hell Fire Club and its ghost—The
Phœnix—Dean Hole as the typical Brasenose man—Bishop Heber
and his prize poem—His _jeux d’esprit_—The note of satire in
his missionary hymns—Richard Heber the greatest bibliophile
that the world has ever seen—The author of “Ingoldsby
Legends”—Robertson of Brighton—Oxford objections to private
initiative in religion—Walter Pater and his philosophy of life.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192

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 injudicious marriage—The Duke of
Monmouth—General Oglethorpe—Keble, and Arnold of Rugby—An
estimate of their work—Celebrities of modern times.

CHRIST CHURCH 209

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 Fellses—Famous Deans of Christ Church—John
Fell—“I do not like you, Dr. Fell”—Aldrich—Atterbury—Cyril
Jackson—Gaisford—Eminent undergraduates—Sir Robert Peel’s
practical joke—Gladstone and Martin Farquhar Tupper.

TRINITY COLLEGE 226

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 gentleman
adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.

SAINT JOHN’S COLLEGE 241

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.

JESUS COLLEGE 255

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.

WADHAM COLLEGE 267

Nicholas and Dorothy Wadham—A miscellaneous list of
Wadham men—The story of the great Wadham “Rag”—Wadham
Evangelicalism—Stories of Warden Symons—The Wadham
Positivists—“Three persons and no God”—Richard Congreve—Comte,
Clotilde de Vaux, and the Positivist schism—The last Oxford
Movement—Canon Barnett and Toynbee Hall.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE 278

Broadgates Hall—Its illustrious and fashionable _alumni_—The
Hall becomes Pembroke College—Dr. Johnson at Pembroke—He rags
the servitors and argues with the dons—His “spirited refusal of
an eleemosynary supply of shoes”—He shows Hannah More over the
College—George Whitefield at Pembroke—His relations with the
Methodists and his religious excitability.

WORCESTER COLLEGE 289

Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College
for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s
palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote
situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable
Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F.
W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.

HERTFORD COLLEGE 303

Hart Hall—The principalship of Dr. Richard Newton—Hart Hall
becomes Hertford College—Decline, fall, and dissolution of the
College—The buildings purchased for Magdalen Hall—Magdalen
Hall once more transformed into Hertford College—Famous
men at Hertford and Magdalen Hall—Charles James Fox—George
Selwyn—Robert Stephen Hawker.

KEBLE COLLEGE 316

“Keble College, near Rome”—A memorial of the author of the
“Christian Year”—The ideals of the College—How far they have
been realised—Diversified results of the experiment—The Bishop
of London and Mr. Herbert Trench.

EPILOGUE 321

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

MERTON COLLEGE _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE 17

BALLIOL COLLEGE 36

EXETER COLLEGE: FELLOWS’ GARDEN 70

ORIEL COLLEGE 86

QUEEN’S COLLEGE CHAPEL 106

NEW COLLEGE CLOISTERS AND TOWER 118

REREDOS, ALL SOULS CHAPEL 145

MAGDALEN COLLEGE 153

BRASENOSE KNOCKER 171

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE 192

TOM QUAD AND TOWER, CHRIST CHURCH 209

TRINITY COLLEGE 226

ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE 241

WADHAM COLLEGE 267

WORCESTER COLLEGE 289

KEBLE COLLEGE 316

_All the above are from photographs by Messrs. Hills & Saunders, Oxford._

The Romance of the Oxford Colleges

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE

Founders and benefactors—Alfred the Great—William of Durham—The
Statutes—The conversion of Obadiah Walker—Lord Herbert of
Cherbury—Lord Eldon’s examination in Hebrew—The screwing up
of the Senior Proctor—Shelley—A “Stinks Man”—His unpopularity
with the dons—His “printing freaks”—His friendship with
Hogg—His conversation with the baby—His religious opinions—His
publication of “The Necessity of Atheism”—His expulsion.

It has often been asserted, but it has never been proved, that University College was founded by Alfred the Great.

The principal evidence for the statement consists of a deed which is known to have been forged and a quotation in Camden’s “Britannia” from an alleged manuscript which cannot be found and probably never existed. On the strength of that testimony the Court of King’s Bench ruled, in 1726, that Alfred was the founder; but the judgment seems to have been based upon sentiment rather than evidence. “Religion,” it was argued by the Fellows, “would receive a great scandal” if the Court decided that “a succession of clergymen” had, for many generations, made the mistake of thanking the wrong benefactor for their endowments. The Court was moved by the plea and gave official sanction to the legend; but history, as distinguished from legend, recognises the founder in William of Durham, who, dying in 1249, bequeathed 310 marks to the University for the benefit of Masters of Arts studying theology. A house was built for the students to live in in 1253, and statutes for the governance of the community were first drawn up in 1280.

[To face p. 17.]

Fifty shillings a year was the stipend of a student in those days, and the bursar received a further five shillings a year for keeping the College accounts. As rooms could then be rented for 6s. 8d. a year, however, their condition was less penurious than the figures might seem to indicate. It was provided that they should converse in Latin and comport themselves “as becomes holy persons,” not interrupting one another’s studies by “noise or clamour,” and resisting the temptations of such light literature as “Ballads or Fables about Lovers”—with a good deal more, on the same severe disciplinary lines, which one need not trouble to recite.

The College, as Mr. Wells[1] states, “has been famous in the history of Oxford rather for the careers of its sons than for any movements of which it has been the centre”; and he might have added that the most notable movement of which it has been the centre was a movement for the expulsion of the most illustrious of its sons.

[1] “Oxford and its Colleges.” By J. Wells (Methuen).

Other interesting things, no doubt, have happened there. It was at University that the junior members of the college resented the conversion of their Master to Roman Catholicism by chanting, outside his door, the impertinent refrain:

“Old Obadiah
Sang Ave Maria,
But so would not I—a.
If you ask me for why—a,
I’d as soon be a fool as a knave—a”—

a course of conduct which must have been very annoying to Obadiah Walker, and very compromising to his dignity, if persisted in for long.

It was to University, again, that Lord Herbert of Cherbury brought a bride in his second year of residence; “and now,” he writes in his Autobiography, “I followed my book more close than ever.” But this particular stimulus to diligence in study is one with which modern undergraduates must, as a rule, dispense.

University, furthermore, was the scene of Lord Eldon’s memorable examination in Hebrew. “What is the Hebrew for ‘the place of a skull’”? the examiner asked him. “Golgotha,” he answered, and they let him through, without even troubling him to translate “_Eloi, eloi, lama sabacthani_” into English.

At University, to continue, the Senior Proctor—the “_Big_ Shaver” as men called him to distinguish him from his brother, the Bishop of Liverpool, who is of smaller stature—awoke one morning, some thirty years ago, to find himself “screwed up.” He cut a noble figure as he descended by a ladder into the High, amid the encouraging cheers of the populace; and the authors of the outrage were not discovered until after the Master—the late Dean Bradley, of Westminster—had sent the whole College down.

Every one of these stories has its merits, and some of them would be worth relating at greater length if space allowed; but they all seem trivial and local when set side by side with the story of the expulsion of Shelley.

Shelley is not the only poet of whom the College boasts. Father Faber, who believed too much to please his College, was, curiously enough, of the same household as Shelley, who believed too little. So was Sir Edwin Arnold, who is said to have found spiritual balm in Buddhism, and so is Mr. Saint John Lucas, whose conformity to the golden mean in matters of faith may perhaps be inferred from the fact that he was lately awarded a prize for a poem on a sacred subject. But Shelley was, of course, by far the greatest of the four, as well as the only one of them who set the dons deliberately at defiance.

His defiance of the dons, indeed, assumed more forms than one, and the publication of his notorious pamphlet, “The Necessity of Atheism,” was, as it were, a last straw breaking the back of a patience which had long been too severely tried. So, at all events, says Mr. Ridley, who was a junior Fellow at the time, and so also says a Miss Grant, who happened to be then on a visit to the Master.

“There were few, if any,” says Mr. Ridley, “who were not afraid of Shelley’s strange and fantastic pranks.”

“The ringleader,” says Miss Grant, “in every species of mischief within our grave walls was Mr. Shelley. He was very insubordinate, always breaking some rule, the breaking of which, he knew, could not be overlooked.... He was slovenly in his dress. When spoken to about these and other irregularities, he was in the habit of making such extraordinary gestures, expressive of humility under reproof, as to overset, first the gravity, and then the temper, of the lecturing tutor.”

The dons would have been more than human if they had liked an undergraduate who received their admonitions in that style, and they would have been in advance of their times if they had been conciliated by Shelley’s predilections for scientific study. His science was of the crude, experimental sort which has caused its devotees to be stigmatised as “Stinks Men.” He charged the knob of his door with electricity for the confusion of those who tried to open it, and he demonstrated his knowledge of chemistry by spilling a corrosive acid on the carpet of a tutor who reprimanded him. Naturally, therefore, authority was disposed to seize the first handle that he might give, and the first handle given was the perverse pamphlet above referred to.

* * * * *

The pamphlet was not, of course, Shelley’s maiden literary effort. While still at Eton, he had written a “penny dreadful,” and found a publisher willing to give him £40 for it; and he had cherished the naïve hope of achieving fame at a bound by the simple device of bribing the reviewers. Of the staff of the _British Review_ in particular he had written that they were “venal villains” who might be relied upon, if well “pouched,” to lavish the praise which he desired; and he seems to have thought that £10, judiciously distributed, would suffice to corrupt the whole of Fleet Street.

Moreover, his literary ambitions were smiled upon by a blameless and unsuspecting father. Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., when he brought his son to Oxford, took him to the shop of Messrs. Munday and Slatter, booksellers, in the High Street, and introduced him to one of the partners.

“My boy here,” he said, pointing proudly to the long-haired, wild-eyed youth—“my boy here has a literary turn. He is already an author, and do pray indulge him in his printing freaks.”

Only a few months later, in that very shop—— But we must not anticipate, but must first present Mr. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, also an undergraduate of University.

* * * * *

Hogg was Shelley’s most intimate friend—and, indeed, practically his only friend—at Oxford, and his “Life of Shelley” is our principal authority for the incidents of Shelley’s Oxford career. Trelawny speaks of him as a hard-headed man of the world who looked upon literature with contempt, and he may have given that impression in later life, when he was a Revising Barrister and a Municipal Corporation Commissioner, whatever that may have been. Even then, however, he said that he regarded the Greek language as “a prime necessary of life,” and in 1810 he would have been remarked, not only as an ebullient but also as a romantic and chivalrous young man.

He and Shelley made each other’s acquaintance by sitting next to each other in hall, though Hogg assures us that “such familiarity was unusual”—an interesting precedent for the alleged rule that one Oxford man must not presume even to rescue another from drowning unless he has been introduced to him. They fell into conversation on the comparative value of German and Italian literature, and, after hall, they continued the discussion in Hogg’s rooms, and sat up nearly all night over it. On the following afternoon they met, by appointment, in Shelley’s rooms—the typical rooms of a prehistoric “Stinks Man,” furnished with “an electrical machine, an air-pump, a galvanic trough, a solar microscope, and large glass jars and receivers,” and pervaded with “an unpleasant and penetrating effluvium”; and after that they were inseparable.

Their Oxford, it must be remembered, was the early Oxford in which no games were played. There was no “tubbing” in those days, and no practising at the nets. Unless men haunted the prize ring and the rat pit, their one way of amusing themselves was to walk and talk, and no sporting “shop” could cast its monotonous shadow over their conversation. The question whether the college was more likely to bump or to be bumped did not arise, and no man burdened his brain with tables of “records” or “averages.” The talk was about literature, about philosophy, and, sometimes, about religion; and daring young thinkers hammered out for themselves a good many subjects in which they were not called upon to be examined.

Shelley, as we have seen, began with literature, but he soon got on to philosophy. In particular he was fascinated by the Platonic doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul—the doctrine popularised in Wordsworth’s famous “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”; and he proceeded, as one would expect a chemist to do, to try, as it were, to test the doctrine by experiment.

He snatched a baby, so Hogg tells us, out of its mother’s arms, on Magdalen Bridge, and while the mother clung desperately to its swaddling clothes, in an agony of terror lest it should be dropped into the Cherwell, he gravely questioned her.

“Can your baby tell us anything about pre-existence, madam?” he asked, in a piercing voice and with a wistful look.

“He cannot speak, sir,” answered the mother stolidly.

“Surely he can speak if he will,” Shelley insisted, “for he is only a few weeks old. He cannot have entirely forgotten the use of speech in so short a time.”

But the mother was as firm as the poet.

“It is not for me to argue with college gentlemen,” she rejoined, “but babies of that age never do speak as far as _I_ know”; and with that she begged that her infant might be returned to her before harm befell it, and so the incident terminated.

* * * * *

The bearing of the baby story on the subject before us is only indirect, but there is a reason for telling it. It shows in what spirit Shelley, as an undergraduate, approached the profoundest problems of philosophy, and there is no reason to suppose that the spirit in which he approached the profoundest problems of religion was widely different. Just as he had got a “rise” out of the Oxford matron, so he proposed to get a “rise” out of the Oxford dons; and the dons being clergymen, atheism was the obvious card to play. A profession of atheism might fairly be expected to affect clergymen as a red rag affects a bull.

That he was not actually an atheist at this time is as nearly demonstrable as anything can ever be. The evidence is in his own letters—not in one letter only, but in several.

“It is impossible,” he wrote, “not to believe in the Soul of the Universe, the intelligent, and necessarily beneficent, actuating principle.”

“Can we suppose,” he asked in another letter, “that our nature itself could be without cause—‘First Cause’—a God?”

In these expressions, as they were not written for publication, we may presume that we see the real Shelley. But, on the other hand—

1. Shelley, though not an atheist, fell short of the contemporary standards of orthodoxy. He had been reading Hume, and felt that the current answers to Hume were insufficient.

2. Shelley had been conducting a philosophical correspondence with his cousin, Harriet Grove. The correspondence had been broken off because his philosophical opinions were unsatisfactory; and he was embittered, being in love with his cousin, and regarded himself as a persecuted martyr.

3. The temptation to exaggerate, and so “pull the legs” of grave and reverend seniors, was irresistible.

He began by writing, under an assumed name, to strangers—the most grave and reverend strangers whom he thought likely to reply to him—submitting brief abstracts of Hume’s arguments, and appealing for assistance in rebutting them. If the person to whom he wrote “took the bait,” says Hogg, Shelley “would fall upon the unwary disputant and break his bones.” Once, it is said, by pretending to be a woman, he lured a bishop into controversy, and handled him as the impertinent have delighted to handle the pompous from the beginning of the world. It was splendid fun, he thought, but it would be still better fun if he could “get a rise” out of the Vice-Chancellor, the Proctors, the Regius Professors, and the Heads of colleges and halls. So, Hogg agreeing, he and Hogg put their heads together, and “The Necessity of Atheism” was produced, and advertised in the _Oxford Herald_ of February 9, 1811, and copies of it were posted to several of the dons, “with the compliments of Mr. Jeremiah Stukeley.”

Nor was that all. There was the off-chance that the dons, scenting a practical joke, might ignore the outrage, and Shelley, avid of publicity, was determined to compel them to take notice. So he came down, with a bundle of his pamphlets under his arm, to Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop—the very shop in which an indulgent parent had given out that his “printing freaks” were to be encouraged. He wished those pamphlets, he said, to be offered for sale at sixpence each; he wished them to be well displayed on the counter and in the window; in order that the window might be dressed properly, he proposed to dress it himself.

He did so with an obliging readiness which overwhelmed the amiable bookseller’s assistant. In a minute or two “The Necessity of Atheism” was displayed in Messrs. Munday and Slatter’s shop, much as the first number of a new magazine with a gaudy cover might be displayed on one of the railway bookstalls to-day.

It remained so displayed for about twenty minutes; and then the Rev. John Walker, a Fellow of New College, passed the shop, looked into the window to see what new publications had arrived, read the title of Shelley’s pamphlet, and, after being surprised and shocked, was moved to action. He walked into the shop, demanded the proprietors, and gave them peremptory instructions:

“Mr. Munday, and Mr. Slatter! What is the meaning of this?”

“We beg pardon, sir. We really didn’t know. We hadn’t examined the publication personally. But, of course, now that our attention is drawn to it——”

“Now that your attention is drawn to it, Mr. Munday and Mr. Slatter, you will be good enough to remove all the copies of it that lie on your counter and in your window, and to take them out into your back kitchen and there burn them.”

Such was the dialogue, as one can reconstruct it from Mr. Slatter’s recollections, contained in a letter addressed to Robert Montgomery, the poet.

Mr. Walker, of course, had no legal right to give the instructions which he gave. From the strictly legal point of view, he was ordering a man over whom he had no jurisdiction to destroy property which did not belong to him; he would never have presumed to give such orders in, say, Mr. Hatchard’s shop in Piccadilly. At Oxford, however, his foot was firmly planted on his native heath, and Messrs. Munday and Slatter knew it. He might speak to the Vice-Chancellor; and the Vice-Chancellor might forbid undergraduates to deal at their establishment. So they were all bows and smiles and obsequious anxiety to oblige.

“By all means, Mr. Walker. An admirable idea, sir! Just what we were ourselves on the point of suggesting. You may rely on us to carry out your wishes.”

“You will be good enough to carry them out in my presence. I will accompany you to your kitchen for that purpose.”

“That will be very good of you, Mr. Walker. It will be a great honour to our kitchen. Will you please walk this way, sir?”

So the holocaust was effected; and Messrs. Munday and Slatter begged Shelley to call on them, and told him what they had been obliged to do.

“We are really very sorry, Mr. Shelley. We really could not help ourselves. Mr. Walker was so very firm in the matter; and even in your own interest, you know——”

_Et cetera._ There was to be no further publicity for Shelley through the instrumentality of the booksellers; and as no one was likely to trouble about the authorship of an anonymous brochure which had been reduced to ashes, that would have been the end of the matter if Shelley had not circulated his pamphlet through the post. But then he _had_ so circulated it, and the covering “compliments of Jeremiah Stukeley” were very obviously in his hand-writing; and the recipients of the presentation copies, who included every bishop on the bench, were saying that something really ought to be done; and the dons were not only willing but anxious, and not only anxious but eager, to lay hold of the handle which Shelley had given them.

He was a “Stinks Man,” and he was a rowdy man; he made malodorous chemical experiments, and he was impertinent when he was “ragged.” The Senior Common-room was not going to stand atheism or any other nonsense from such a man as that. So Shelley was sent for “with the Dean’s compliments”—those compliments of evil omen—and the rest of the story may best be told in the words of that Mr. Ridley already quoted, who is a less prejudiced witness than Hogg.

“It was announced one morning at a breakfast party towards the end of the Lent Term,” writes Mr. Ridley, “that Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had recently become a member of University College, was to be called before a meeting of the common-room for being the supposed author of a pamphlet called ‘The Necessity of Atheism.’ This anonymous work, consisting of not many pages, had been studiously sent to most of the dignitaries of the University and to others more or less connected with Oxford. The meeting took place the same day, and it was understood that the pamphlet, together with some notes sent with it, in which the supposed author’s hand-writing appeared identified with that of P. B. S., was placed before him. He was asked if he could or would deny the obnoxious production as his. No direct reply was given either in the affirmative or negative.

“Shelley having quitted the room, T. J. Hogg immediately appeared, voluntarily on his part, to state that, if Shelley had anything to do with it, he (Hogg) was equally implicated, and desired his share of the penalty, whatever was inflicted. It has always been supposed that Hogg wrote the Preface.

“Towards the afternoon a large paper bearing the College seal, and signed by the Master and Dean, was affixed to the hall door, declaring that the two offenders were publicly expelled from the college _for contumacy in refusing to answer certain questions put to them_. The aforesaid two had made themselves as conspicuous as possible by great singularity of dress, and by walking up and down the centre of the quadrangle, as if proud of their anticipated fate,”—and, in modern times, they would doubtless have driven to the station in triumph on the roofs of hansoms, escorted by a long procession of uproarious admirers, though, as it was, they went away quietly on the coach.

That is all; for the subsequent picture of Mr. Timothy Shelley, M.P., pursuing his peccant son to his London lodging, sending out for a bottle of port, and reading aloud extracts from Paley’s “Evidences of Christianity” while he drank it, belongs to Shelley’s Life, but not to Oxford history.

* * * * *

Robert Montgomery, of Lincoln, who tried to compensate by the piety of his sentiments for his lack of distinction as a poet, has recorded his opinion that the offenders thoroughly deserved their punishment. “Strange and unnatural as it may appear,” he writes, “there are many in Oxford who think that a University, based on the immortal truths of the Gospel, ought not to license or encourage blasphemy, however gilded by genius.”

No doubt there are many, not in Oxford only but elsewhere as well, who agree that this limitation of the functions of Universities is desirable. The general proposition, at any rate, shall not be disputed here. Jowett himself, an advanced thinker if the Church of England ever included one, appears to have endorsed it when circumstances brought him face to face with an undergraduate who declined to attend chapel on the ground that he did not believe in a God. “If you do not believe in a God by eight o’clock to-morrow morning, you will be sent down,” the Master of Balliol is said to have chirruped on that occasion; and it is difficult to applaud his keen sense of the necessity of discipline and condemn that of the Master of University.

It does not follow, however, that it is necessary to take the grave Robert Montgomery’s solemn view of Shelley’s offence. His case was not that of the conscientious and convinced blasphemer, but rather that of a practical joker who over-reached himself and accepted martyrdom rather than confess that he had been joking. And that, one concludes, was the view of those later dignitaries of the college who permitted the erection of a monument to Shelley within the college precincts—albeit in a dark corner of those precincts, only to be reached by way of an obscure passage which looks as if it led to a coal-hole wherein an unwary visitor would run a serious risk of being arrested and charged with loitering with intent to commit a felony.

BALLIOL COLLEGE

The birching of Robert of Balliol by the Bishop of Durham—He
founds a College to make atonement for his fault—Insignificance
of the College in early times—Snell Exhibitioners—Adam
Smith—His scornful criticism of Oxford—Southey—His introduction
to Coleridge of Jesus, Cambridge—Their joint dream of
Pantisocracy—College “rags” in the dark days—The dawn of
civilisation—Mastership of Parsons—Of Jenkyns—of Jowett—Jowett
as tutor—His reforms—His conversation—His sermons—The
inscrutable secret which he guarded.

Balliol is the tangible and enduring product of one of the most interesting of the abuses (as Protestants esteem them) of the Roman Catholic religion.

The story begins on the day on which Robert of Balliol—a lord of many lands in the North of England—“got drunk,” as the chronicler puts it, “in a manner unbecoming his station in life,” and insulted the Bishop of Durham. It is resumed on the day on which Robert apologised to the Bishop, and consented to do penance. The Bishop then “birched him in the presence of the populace on the steps of the cathedral,” and sent him forth with a tingling cuticle and an injunction to make amends for his fault by spending money on a benevolent undertaking. So he hired a house for the accommodation of sixteen poor scholars of Oxford, and allowed them eightpence a day each for their expenses. After his death, his widow, the Lady Devorguilla of Balliol, bearing no malice against the Bishop for his treatment of her husband—having reason to know, perhaps, that it had done him good—supplemented the endowment by a further substantial donation.

[To face p. 36.]

Such were the picturesque beginnings of the College in the reign of Henry III. Other gifts and legacies enriched its chest from time to time. The Snell Exhibitions connected it with the University of Glasgow. The Blundell Endowment introduced a steady flow of scholars from Tiverton. But the college remained unimportant. Its great period—a period which began under the mastership of Dr. Parsons and culminated under the mastership of Benjamin Jowett—belongs to the nineteenth century. Before that time it has no history worth relating; and the few great men who, by accident, went there to be educated, owed nothing to their tutors, but were left to educate themselves as best they could.

Adam Smith, who was up from 1740 to 1746, was the greatest of them; and, if Adam Smith’s ghost still haunts the Balliol quadrangles, we may be quite sure that it is an ungrateful and a growling ghost.

He was one of the Snell Exhibitioners above-mentioned; and the Snell Exhibitioners of the eighteenth century had a very uncomfortable time. They came from Scotland; and the College took Dr. Johnson’s view of Scotsmen, regarding them as pauper aliens, who ought to be repatriated, and “smugs,” unfit to mix with civilised mankind. The worst rooms in the college were invariably allotted to them by the dons; and their weird accents and barbarous dress were the subject of the ribald mirth of undergraduates.

Things got, indeed, to such a pass, at one time, that the Exhibitioners sent a formal complaint to Glasgow, and Glasgow made formal representations to the Master of the College; but the Master’s answer was unsatisfactory and curt. He said that he did not particularly want the Snell Exhibitioners at Balliol and would raise no objection if they liked to transfer themselves to another college. He even went so far as to suggest that perhaps they would feel more at home at Hertford; and as the hint was not taken, his relations with them continued to be strained.

Such was the tone of the college when Adam Smith’s name was entered on the books. The only friend whom he made there was Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, a Snell Exhibitioner like himself. We know little of the circumstances of his career except that he habitually took tar-water as a remedy for “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head”; that undergraduates gibed at him for his poverty, exhorting him to gorge himself in the hall on the ground that his long-delayed chance of eating a full meal had come to him at last; and that a don reprimanded him for reading Hume’s “Treatise on Human Nature” and confiscated the pernicious book. It is not much; but it is enough to lead us to expect to find him regarding his University with feelings of disgust and contempt; and there is abundant evidence that he did so.

Adam Smith, indeed, is a far more convincing witness than Gibbon, who was at Magdalen a few years after he had gone down, of the deplorable state of learning at Oxford in the eighteenth century. He was older; he was longer in residence; he was more anxious to learn. But he sought in vain, he says, for “the proper means of being taught the sciences which it is the proper business of these incorporated bodies to teach”; and his generalisation about the college tutors is that “every man consented that his neighbour might neglect his duty provided he himself were allowed to neglect his own.” Moreover he passed one criticism on Oxford which is a delightful variant on a more famous utterance of another Balliol man of a later date.

Oxford, Matthew Arnold has told us, is the home of “lost causes” and “impossible loyalties.” Adam Smith said pretty much the same thing, but he said it very differently, speaking of the most venerable of our seats of learning as “a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world.” The sentiments are practically identical; and there could be no more charming example of truth changing its aspect as men change their point of view.

* * * * *

The only other name which counts in the annals of eighteenth century Balliol is that of Southey, who was up in 1793.

He was by way of being a reading man; but though the dark ages were almost over and the dawn of civilisation was near at hand, the College did little, if anything, to direct his studies. “Mr. Southey,” said one of his tutors in a burst of candour, “you won’t learn anything from my lectures sir, so if you have any studies of your own, you had better pursue them.”

He did so. He rose at five in order to do so, quickening his diligence with “negus.” One suspects that he must have been drinking negus on the morning of the day on which he went on the river “in a little skiff which the least deviation from the balance would upset,” and “did not step exactly in the middle,” with the result that “the boat tilted up” and its occupant only saved himself from complete submersion by clinging to the side of a barge. The incident does certainly seem to give colour to his reflection that “temperance is much wanted at Oxford,” and that “the waters of Helicon are too much polluted by the wine of Bacchus.”

Nor did the studies pursued under the cheering influence of matutinal negus belong to the ordinary curriculum of the place. Southey neglected his Aristotle. He preferred, he says, “the brilliant colours of fancy, nature, and Rousseau” to “the positive dogmas of the Stagirite”; and though the _Contrat Social_ may serve as a substitute for the “Politics,” the presumption is strong that Southey preferred “_La nouvelle Héloise_” which can by no means be regarded as a worthy alternative to the “Ethics.”

We may let that pass, however; and we may also let pass Southey’s denunciation of the “waste of wigs and wisdom” which he discerned among the dons and the “abandoned excess” which he detected among those undergraduates who did not rise early to drink negus. The importance of Southey’s Oxford career resides neither in these trifles nor even in his refusal to have his hair powdered by the college barber before sitting down to dinner. The most significant thing that happened to him was that he made the acquaintance of a young man from a neighbouring University—Mr. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of Jesus College, Cambridge, who was introduced to him by a bookseller.

The young Cantab. and the young Oxonian took to each other at once, and proceeded to see visions and dream dreams in concert. Rousseau and the Revolutionists, with their cry of “Back to Nature!” and their belief in the “perfectibility of the human race,” appealed to their imagination and inspired it. The world, they agreed, was weary of the past. Why not escape from it? So they sat in Southey’s rooms at Balliol—no doubt with steaming tumblers of negus on the table—and discussed the ways and means of doing so.

America, of course, was to be the scene of the experiment. They would cross the Atlantic, and settle on the banks of the Susquehanna—how could they fail to be happy on the banks of a river with such a melodious name? Land, they had been informed, was cheap there. An American land agent had offered to sell them some, and had assured them that the danger alike from buffaloes and from mosquitoes was much exaggerated. So they would borrow money, and get married, and go there. They themselves would till the soil, and their wives should “cook and perform all domestic offices.” It would be delightful, Southey thought, “to go with all my friends; to live with them in the most agreeable and most honourable employment; to eat the fruits I have raised, and see every face happy around me; my mother sheltered in her declining years from the anxieties which have pursued her; my brothers educated to be useful and virtuous.”

It came to nothing. The Pantisocracy, as it was to be called, was never formed. Perhaps “the females of the party” did not take so kindly to the idea of cooking and domestic offices—far away from bonnet-shops—as had been expected; and there was, at any rate, the difficulty that the capital required was not forthcoming. But the dream was a generous one and sheds a golden glamour on the closing years of a dark age. Southey, whether one cares about his poetry or not, is the most engaging figure in eighteenth-century Balliol.

The darkness of the dark age at Balliol could be illustrated by many anecdotes of many “rags.” On one occasion the Dean was ragged—though it does not appear that he was put on the bonfire, as once happened, in quite recent times, to the Dean of an adjacent college. On another occasion some Balliol Jacobites celebrated the birthday of Cardinal York by sallying forth into the streets and ragging every notable Hanoverian whom they met, including a Canon of Windsor, and cheering for King James III.—an offence for which, after the Master had let them off with a Latin imposition, they were brought to trial in the Court of King’s Bench, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment with hard labour.

It was exploits of that order, and not any idle impulse to play upon words, which first caused Balliol men to be spoken of as Men of Belial. They were of frequent occurrence, and the bad name which they gave the College was not redeemed by any intellectual distinction; but presently, in 1798, Dr. Parsons became Master, and then a memorable change began. Dr. Parsons organised the tutorial system, and cast his vote for throwing Balliol fellowships open to outsiders. He also collaborated with the Provost of Oriel and the Dean of Christ Church in the institution of the Honours Schools, in which firsts were presently taken by two very remarkable Balliol men, Sir William Hamilton, the philosopher, and J. G. Lockhart, the author of the Life of Scott. And then came Dr. Jenkyns.

* * * * *

Undoubtedly Jenkyns was a great man, as much greater than Parsons as Jowett was to be greater than himself. Judging him by results, one is led irresistibly to that conclusion. Yet how he managed to be so great, and to accomplish such results, is a perplexing puzzle; for among all the stories of him which have been preserved there is hardly one in which he does not cut a grotesque and undignified figure.

There is the story, for example, of his encounter with Blaydes of Balliol, who was afterwards to change his name to Calverley. Blaydes, it is said, was taking ladies over the college, and wished to show them all the lions. “That,” he said, pointing, “is the Master of Balliol’s study window”; and he picked up a stone and threw it. The missile went crashing through the glass, and an angry countenance became visible, glaring through the aperture. “And that, I rather fancy,” Blaydes continued calmly, “is the Master of Balliol himself.”

Then there is the story of Jenkyns’s passage of arms with Sir William Hamilton. Sir William, it is related, coming hurriedly out of his room, discovered Jenkyns listening at the keyhole. Furious at this prying curiosity, he clutched the spy by his coat collar, lifted him over the balustrade, and held him howling in mid-air. Then, having terrified him sufficiently, he lifted him back again, and apologised: “Good gracious, sir! I’m so sorry, but I had no idea that it would possibly be you!”

Finally, since there is no room for all the stories, one may recall, on Jowett’s authority, the story of Jenkyns’s comic sermon. He gave out the text, “The sin that doth so easily beset us”; and then he dropped into bathos. “I mean,” he explained in severe and acid tones, “the habit of contracting debts.” The undergraduates looked at each other and wondered. Had the Master actually said this thing, or had he only seemed to say it? They realised, at last, that he had actually said it; and then, for the first and only time in its history, the walls of the College chapel shook with the inextinguishable laughter of an insolvent congregation. It was several minutes, Jowett tells us, before the preacher could proceed with his discourse.

Decidedly it is not in anecdotes such as these that the greatness of Jenkyns comes out. But he took his position as Head of a college very seriously, at a time when most Heads of colleges preferred their wine, their ease, or their theology; and he was an astoundingly good judge alike of a competent tutor and of a clever undergraduate. Hence his success. The Balliol tutors, in his time, were the best. They taught the men, with rare exceptions, instead of worrying them about “movements”; and the Balliol scholarship became, at this time, the blue riband for which the chief public schools most eagerly competed. Presumably it is so still; and it certainly was so when, after the colourless interlude of Scott, Jowett succeeded to the Mastership in 1870.

* * * * *

Jowett’s is the one name of supreme and outstanding consequence in Balliol annals. He was elected to a scholarship there from St. Paul’s School in 1836; he was promoted to a fellowship while still an undergraduate; he became a tutor of the College at the age of twenty-five; he continued to be associated with its fortunes, without a break, until his death in 1893. He not only did more than any other man to make Balliol just what Balliol is; he also aspired, as he said, to “inoculate England with Balliol.”

In that ambition he succeeded, for Balliol under Jowett was a nursery of almost every kind of talent. Perhaps it was weak in divinity—it was a Balliol man, according to the story, who told the examiner that Gamaliel was “a hill at the foot of which Paul was brought up”—but it surpassed all the other colleges in its “output” of statesmen, pro-consuls, professors, and men of letters. Mr. Asquith, Lord Lansdowne, and Lord Peel are Balliol men; so are Lord Milner and Lord Curzon. Balliol has largely staffed the Universities of Scotland. At Jowett’s funeral seven of the pall-bearers were Heads of Oxford houses who had been at Balliol, and the list of Balliol representatives in recent and contemporary literature includes the names of A. C. Swinburne, John Addington Symonds, Mr. Andrew Lang, Mr. W. H. Mallock, Mr. J. A. Godley, Canon Beeching, Mr. Anthony Hope Hawkins, and the late G. W. Steevens—“the Balliol prodigy,” as they called him—who became a journalist and succeeded in sounding a new note on the brazen trumpet of the _Daily Mail_. One could easily extend the list, but to what end? We have no need of further witnesses.

Jowett, as the table of results proves, was a great educator, and a great organiser and director of education, but he was also something more than that—a great personality, who fought a hard fight and won it, wearing down opposition and smiling down detraction.

He was not a particularly great scholar. “Hullo! Another howler!” is said to have been the refrain occasionally uttered automatically in his presence by friends to whom he submitted the manuscript of his translations of Plato and Thucydides; and it was maliciously said that his appointment to the Regius Professorship of Greek was a case of the “endowment of research”—a pecuniary inducement held out to him to learn the language. Nor was he a great philosopher, or, in spite of “Essays and Reviews” and the Commentary on the Epistle to the Thessalonians, a great divine. But he was, nevertheless, emphatically a great man, who grew into a great institution. One could not hear of Oxford without hearing of him; one could not live at Oxford without feeling that his presence pervaded it. He was, in the end, the very _genius loci_, and one would no more have spoken disrespectfully of him than of the Equator.

It is said to have been Mrs. Grote who christened him “the cherub.” His bust in the Bodleian certainly looks like the bust of a cherub, and the sound of his voice was like a cherub’s chirp. It gave one the impression of an innocent man who had never known anything of the passionate temptations which distract the young, and for whom all the riddles of the painful earth could be solved, without reference to such passions, by the dry light of intellect alone. He seemed to come down to breakfast from a higher plane of thought—an intellectual tribunal before which his guests were summoned, and from which there was no appeal. He was criticism—as a rule destructive criticism—incarnate. His praise was approbation from Sir Hubert Stanley; his blame could make the cleverest man feel a fool.

It followed that he could not be widely popular. Criticism, especially if it be unemotional, is not very popular as a literary art, and is still less popular as a social accomplishment; and though, if we may believe the biographers, the Master was not really unemotional, he generally contrived to seem to be so, being, in fact, very shy, and very much afraid of his emotions. One may think of him most justly, perhaps, as a man full of the milk of human kindness, but profoundly conscious that milk makes a mess when it boils over, and firmly resolved to prevent that catastrophe by keeping it in a refrigerator. He gave generously out of his later abundance, and with a positive shrinking from advertisement. But he did not suffer fools gladly, and he could even snub the deserving, if they gave him the opportunity, in the knock-down style of Dr. Johnson.

Nor was he an equally sound critic of all kinds of intellectual promise. He divined, for instance, the potentialities of Mr. Asquith, but failed to discern those of Mr. Andrew Lang. “Asquith is sure to succeed, he is so direct,” was his verdict on the former; but to the latter, as Mr. Lang has himself recorded, he tendered the advice: “Don’t write as if you were writing for a penny paper.” And there is a story of a scholar of the eighties, now an eminent teacher of youth, who shall be nameless here, who suffered even more severely at his hands.

It was at breakfast, and the conversation flagged, as it was a little apt to do when parties of undergraduates breakfasted with the Master. The scholar tried to stimulate it by a literary remark which he hoped might give the silent Master something to talk about. “Master,” he ventured, “I have been reading Matthew Arnold’s poems, and I think he is a great poet.” There was a dead silence while the company waited for the Master to follow up the theme. “We all think so, Mr. X.,” he piped in his high treble, and it was felt that he could not have blanketed the conversation more effectively if he had left the room, slamming the door behind him.