Chapter VII: Part 7

“The first method Mr. Nash took to distinguish himself at
college was not by application to study, but by his assiduity
in intrigue. In the neighbourhood of every University there are
girls who, with some beauty, some coquetry, and little fortune,
lie upon the watch for every raw amorous youth more inclined
to make love than to study. Our Hero was quickly caught, and
went through all the mazes of a college intrigue before he was
seventeen; he offered marriage, the offer was accepted, but
the whole affair coming to the knowledge of his tutors, his
happiness, or perhaps his future misery, was prevented, and he
was sent home from college, with necessary advice to him and
proper instructions to his father.”

His case, if correctly reported, is a warning to those young men of the present day—supposing that there still are such—who listen to the lure of the siren in the photographer’s shop; but the exactitude of the narrative has been disputed. A contemporary reviewer of Dr. Goldsmith’s work had heard from a Fellow of Jesus that “Mr. Nash, being too volatile to relish the sober rules of a college life, took the opportunity of receiving his quarter’s returns, and went off, leaving a debt behind him of about three pounds eighteen shillings, which remains undischarged on the College books to this day.” Which of the two stories is the true one it is, at this distance of time, impossible to say; but the records which remain of the Beau’s volatility do certainly indicate a manner of life for which a University city was no proper setting.

In the days before he went to Bath and found his _métier_, he earned his living in very curious ways, but chiefly by undertaking, for a wager, to do some ridiculous thing. One of his feats, accomplished from this pecuniary motive, was to strip himself naked and ride through the streets of a village on the back of a cow. That, it will be generally admitted, is a thing which it is better to do in the remote country than in the High, or the Broad, or even the Turl.

* * * * *

Next—and perhaps last—on the roll of Jesus celebrities comes the name of John Richard Green, the historian of the English People; and his debt to Jesus—and even to Oxford—does not seem to have been a heavy one.

His place among the historians is undoubtedly better assured than the place of Lewis Morris among the poets; but as an undergraduate he did not shape so well. Instead of taking first class honours, he only took a pass degree; instead of writing a prize essay, he wrote for a local paper. His tutors thought him idle, and his contemporaries had some reason to complain of him. He was part author of a satire—the “Gentiad,” an imitation of the “Dunciad”—which ridiculed some of the characteristics of Jesus men. This brought him unpopularity, and he passed through Oxford without making many friends.

One good and great friend, however, he did make, almost by accident; and that story may be best told in the words of the Life by Leslie Stephen:

“During his University career Arthur Penrhyn Stanley was
Professor of Ecclesiastical History. Green, during his last
term, went accidentally into the lecture-room where Stanley
was discoursing upon the Wesleys. The lecture fascinated him,
and he never missed another. In one lecture Stanley concluded
with the phrase, ‘_Magna est veritas et prævalebit_, words so
great that I could almost prefer them to the motto of our own
University, _Dominus illuminatio mea_.’ As Stanley left the
room, Green, who had been deeply interested, exclaimed, ‘_Magna
est veritas et prævalebit_ is the motto of the town!’ Stanley
was much pleased, invited his young admirer to walk home with
him, and asked him to dinner. The day appointed was early in
November (1859), and the ‘town and gown’ riots of the period
made the passage through the streets rather hazardous. ‘How
could you come at all?’ asked Stanley. ‘Sir,’ replied Green in
the words of Johnson, ‘it is a great honour to dine with the
Canons of Christ Church.’”

The friendship thus formed was of great importance to Green. It put heart into him, as he afterwards told Stanley, at a time when he “found no help in Oxford theology,” and was apparently the influence which stimulated him to the point of taking orders. Afterwards, of course, he found that Oxford theology was not the only theology which puzzled instead of satisfying his intelligence. He had very little of the theological mentality, and he had a severe historical conscience. He could neither believe what he knew to be untrue, nor could he pretend to believe it; and consequently—but that has nothing to do with Jesus College.

* * * * *

And so the Jesus pageant passes—a pageant in which, as we see, the apparently inevitable name of Jones does not appear.

WADHAM COLLEGE

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.

The founders were Nicholas Wadham and Dorothy, his widow. Nicholas accumulated the funds, and Dorothy applied them after his death, at her discretion, in accordance with his wishes. The discreet and delightful Wadham Gardens are said to have been due to her initiative; and she also had the happy thought of exempting Fellows of the College from the disconcerting necessity of taking Holy Orders. Though one knows little else of her, one cannot but be prepossessed in her favour by the beautiful euphony of her name. Mistress Dorothy Wadham—it is a name which falls on the ear like the soft melody of silver bells.

[To face p. 267.]

The date of the Charter is 1610—an early year in the reign of the comic King who loved learning almost as much as he hated tobacco. Its Jacobean architecture is a serene and perfect poem in grey stone, though the grass in the quadrangle which contrasts so effectively with the grey was added by one of the Wardens at a later time. It seems natural and proper that it should have been the College of the two greatest of the Oxford architects—Sir Christopher Wren and T. G. Jackson. It is also the College of Admiral Blake, Nicholas Love, the regicide, Thomas Sydenham, the physician, Speaker Onslow, the “wicked” Earl of Rochester, Lord Chancellor Westbury, who won his scholarship as a prodigy of fourteen in “jacket and frills,” Dean Church, who, according to Mark Pattison, was elected to an Oriel Fellowship on account of his “moral beauty,” Father Maconochie of Saint Alban’s, Holborn, those great athletes, Messrs. T. A. Cook (now the editor of the _Field_) and C. B. Fry, Mr. F. E. Smith, and many other men of note.

It is of the others that we will speak here, prefacing comment with the remark that Wadham has been successively a Whig College, an Evangelical College, a Positivist College—and also the College of the man who launched the latest of the Oxford Movements, and the College which was the scene of the last of the really historic Oxford “rags.” It may clear the ground if one begins by saying a word about the “rag.”

* * * * *

The “rag” occurred as recently as 1880; and one must not pretend to disentangle the rights and wrongs of it with the precision of a scientific historian. In a general way, however, one may say that it originated in an attempt on the part of authority to tighten the reins of discipline at a time when pride at success on the river had made the College restive. So first there were skirmishes, and then there was a battle royal.

A bonfire seems, as usual, to have been the first overt act; and the lighting of a bonfire on the grass—that beautifully kept Wadham grass—is an act no more to be condoned by the historian than by the dons. The answer to it—surely a justifiable answer—was the prohibition of the annual College Concert. But then tempers were lost, and fur began really to fly. The wrath of the junior members of the College was vented upon “Unbelieving Dick”—a don so called because he professed himself sceptical of the articles of the Christian Faith. There was a sudden irruption of youth, flown with insolence and wine, into Unbelieving Dick’s apartments at the dead of night. Unbelieving Dick had no power to eject his visitors, and no time to dress in order to receive them. He fled, it is related, across the quadrangle in his night-shirt—for none, in those days, wore pyjamas—pursued with missiles and howls of execration.

Things, it was evident, could not be allowed to rest there. The ring-leaders must be discovered and an example must be made. An appeal to them to surrender themselves, however, met with no response; and the dons presently engaged the services of a detective. The detective was himself detected, and was severely punished under the pump. It only remained for the dons to play their last card and send the whole College down. They did so. Wadham, in the Autumn Term of 1880, was a howling wilderness, with only a few freshmen in residence—a sorrowful spectacle indeed for Dorothy Wadham, if she looked down on it from another world. The rehabilitation of the College, though since fully accomplished, was only a gradual process.

And now we will leave the rag, and speak of the religious (and irreligious) history of Wadham.

* * * * *

Religion, as has been said, appears at Wadham chiefly in the form of Evangelicalism. The College was the stronghold, or the hotbed—whichever be the better word—of Evangelicalism in the fiery days of the Tractarian Movement. Warden Symons, who ruled over it from 1831 to 1871, appears to have conformed, so far as a scholar could, to the type which one associates with missionary meetings, tea, hassocks, and well buttered crumpets. His wife held prayer meetings in the drawing-room, and kept a “missionary cow,” the proceeds of whose milk—supplied to undergraduates at specially high terms—were allocated to the propagation of the Gospel in foreign parts. He himself altered the hour of the services in the Wadham Chapel for the express purpose of preventing his young men from attending Newman’s sermons at Saint Mary’s. On one occasion he knocked at the door of Newman’s retreat at Littlemore and asked if he might be shown over the monastery. “We have no monastery here,” was the reply; and the door was slammed in his face.

The Warden’s scorn of ceremonial observance was illustrated by his manner of receiving the contents of the collection plate at the Communion Service. It was his habit simply to shovel the money into his pocket and walk off with it; and this brusque and indecorous proceeding naturally furnished the basis of a legend. The Warden, it was said, had annexed the offertory as a perquisite of his office, and exhorted undergraduates to generosity in order to gain his private ends. “Gentlemen,” he was reported to have said, “must really give a little more liberally; I have been quite out of pocket by the last two or three collections.” It was not true, of course; but it served him right. Every Warden becomes the hero of the myths that he deserves. And, no doubt, it was largely in consequence of the saponaceous slovenliness of Wadham religion that, whereas the serious undergraduates of other colleges went over to Rome, the serious undergraduates of Wadham, and the serious dons too, went over to Paris and joined Comte in erecting Temples of Humanity on the ruins of the Temples of God.

* * * * *

Those were the days in which it was said that Wadham was governed by a Trinity consisting of Three Persons and No God; but the three persons in question are differently identified by different cynics. The names of Richard Congreve, Edmund Spencer Beesley, and Mr. Frederic Harrison are those most commonly mentioned; but Mr. Harrison has stated, in an autobiographical note, that he did not definitely adopt the Positivist Religion until some years after he had gone down. It does not matter—or, at all events, it does not matter very much. Wadham, in fact, has harboured several generations of Positivists, so that there generally have been at least three heads there which the caps fitted, right down to the time of the Unbelieving Dick whose misadventures have been referred to; and they all acknowledged Richard Congreve as their spiritual father.

He was a Rugby boy who acted, for a time, as a Rugby Master. His case may be taken as a fresh exemplification of that “moral seriousness” of which Rugby boasts. The beliefs in which he had been brought up slipped away from him; but he continued to respect the sacred impulse of the human heart which impels people to dress in their best and go somewhere to be edified on Sundays. Just as Comte had arranged for them to do so in Paris, so he arranged for them to do so in Lamb’s Conduit Street; and so, at a later date, Mr. Frederic Harrison arranged for them to do so in Fetter Lane. Really intellectual people, he felt, having passed beyond theology and beyond metaphysics, might nevertheless kneel to Humanity—that abstraction of what was noblest in their noblest selves—and invoke Saints carefully selected from

“The choir invisible
Of the immortal dead who live again
In lives made better by their presence.”

At a later date there was to be trouble among the Positivists—an outburst of heresy, schism, and dissent. Comte, it turned out, was not the easiest Master for rational and self-respecting disciples to follow blindly. He had been in a lunatic asylum and was supported by the voluntary offerings of the faithful. Fully persuaded that he who preached the gospel was entitled to live by the gospel, he solicited contributions and quarrelled with subscribers whose contributions seemed to him inadequate. Moreover, being separated from his wife, he fell in love with a lady who had been separated from her husband, and insisted upon incorporating his romance in his religious system. The worship of Humanity in general might, he claimed, be most happily symbolised by the specific worship of Clotilde de Vaux.

His relations with Clotilde de Vaux were, his biographers tell us, “pure.” No doubt they had his word for it, and perhaps they also had hers; but that detail cannot have mattered much to any one except the philosopher and his affinity. To be called upon to worship another man’s affinity, whatever the precise nature of his relations with his affinity, is always a strain upon devout allegiance. It proved so in this instance. There was a split, broadly speaking, between the Positivists who had a sense of humour and the Positivists who had none; but we need not enter into the rights and wrongs of the disruption. Enough to note the fact, and to note also that, so far as England is concerned, Positivism has been an Oxford Movement which Wadham has practically monopolised.

* * * * *

This brings us to the last of the Oxford Movements, with which Wadham is also very definitely associated—the Social Movement which succeeded the Æsthetic Movement, in or about the year 1884.

Something has already been said about it in the Magdalen chapter which related the æsthetic collapse. The principal thing to be added here is that the man who had most to do with the launching of it was Barnett of Wadham, who had taken a Second in History in 1865, and was then the incumbent of Saint Jude’s, Whitechapel.

Other forces were, indeed, indirectly at work. Sir Walter Besant’s advocacy of a People’s Palace in “All Sorts and Conditions of Men” was one. Mr. George R. Sims’s tract entitled “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” was another. Here, at all events, were the elements of stir, if not of movement in the narrow sense—the vague suggestion that “something ought to be done,” and that the people who had culture owed a debt of some sort to the people who were trying to get along without it. Barnett of Wadham, with many earnest helpers from other colleges, focussed the Movement at Oxford in a memorable speech delivered in the Union Debating Hall.

The only hope for the East End of London, it was then laid down, was for Oxford men to colonise it. They alone, or almost alone, possessed the secret of culture. A number of them, therefore, must settle there, and set good examples, illuminating Whitechapel by their shining influence. Forthwith they jumped at the idea, and carried it out, almost in the twinkling of an eye. Toynbee Hall was the result, and Barnett of Wadham, now Canon Barnett, was its first Warden.

Oxford, in those days, was, it must be admitted, a very serious University indeed—as serious a University as even the Rugby men could have wished to see it. Even unbelievers took to going to church, and gravely envisaged the question whether a lack of belief was really a sufficient excuse for not taking Holy Orders. The _Oxford Magazine_ became the ponderous organ of the seriously minded, and, for a season, no sermon was too tedious to be reported verbatim in its columns, until one day there appeared a protest in the shape of a rhymed letter to the editor:

“Mr. Editor, surely some lightness of touch
Would be not unbecoming your famed magazine.
Of lectures and sermons you give us too much;
Toynbee Hall gets to pall, and I _loathe_ Bethnal Green.”

The author of those lines was Mr. Quiller Couch of Trinity, whom the world knows as “Q.” The immediate effect of them was to clear the air at Oxford; though Mr. Barnett’s Oxonian procession continued to carry the lamps of culture down the Mile End Road, with results which, according to the latest reports, are eminently satisfactory.

PEMBROKE COLLEGE

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.

In the eyes of the average visitor to Pembroke, one fact outweighs all other facts in importance. Pembroke was the college of Dr. Johnson. It is much more profitable to tell a visitor that than to dwell on the circumstances in which Pembroke College grew out of the earlier Broadgates Hall.

Broadgates Hall, it is true, had cut a considerable figure in the early social history of Oxford. Christ Church men who could not be accommodated in the House often had rooms there—a fact which the modern Christ Church men should remember when they are tempted to their traditional gibe: “Is that Pembroke? I always thought that was where the Christ Church coals were kept.” John Pym, too, the great Parliamentary leader, was at Broadgates Hall; and the Hall was “a nest of singing birds” long before the greatest of her sons claimed that distinction for Pembroke. George Peele, Francis Beaumont (of the Beaumont and Fletcher combination), and Sir Fulke Greville were all poets of Broadgates Hall; but it is not easy to arouse the curiosity of the visitor concerning them. He keeps most of his curiosity for Dr. Johnson; and if he has any curiosity left over, he bestows it upon George Whitefield, the Methodist preacher.

Let us consider Dr. Johnson first.

* * * * *

Johnson went up in 1728; but his career was brief—about fourteen months from start to finish. Carlyle says he was a servitor; but he was, in fact, a commoner. A friend who offered him financial help did not fulfil his promise. His father fell into financial difficulties, and he had to go home, leaving his caution money to defray his dues.

Old Michael Johnson brought him up, and took him to call upon his tutor. He astonished the common-room, after a modest silence, by interjecting a quotation from Macrobius, thus proving himself to be precocious and well-read, though he was not to turn out to be the sort of model scholar whom the donnish mind approves. Laziness was to be his besetting vice through life. He was already lazy while an undergraduate; and he shared with many men of meaner intelligence a disposition to cut his lectures, and to excuse himself on grounds which the lecturers could not but regard as inadequate. Of the Christ Church man it has been written by an Oxford humourist that “he goeth not to lectures, for he saith: ‘How can a man lecture in bags cut like that?’” Johnson was guilty of a more outspoken rudeness. Summoned to account for his absence from the classroom, he explained that he had been skating on Christ Church meadows. Fined for his neglect of the obligation, he said: “Sir, you have sconced me twopence for a lecture that was not worth a penny.” And the biography continues:

“BOSWELL: That, Sir, was great fortitude of mind.

“JOHNSON: No, Sir; stark insensibility.”

He was poor; but the picture of his poverty has sometimes been overdrawn. His account for battells, which remains in the College archives, shows that he had enough to eat and drink, and that, in that important respect, at all events, he lived on the same scale as the majority of his compeers. Nor did his lack of means compel him to an isolated and unsociable existence. He joined with the other commoners in ragging the servitors whose duty it was to knock at the doors of commoners and ascertain whether they were in their own rooms at the appointed hour. He hunted them down the stairs, it is recorded, “with the noise of pots and candlesticks”; and there are contemporary recollections which show him to have been somewhat of a leader of men.

“I have heard,” wrote Bishop Percy, “from some of his
contemporaries, that he was generally to be seen lounging at
the College Gate with a circle of young students round him,
whom he was entertaining with wit, and keeping from their
studies, if not spiriting them up to rebellion against the
College discipline, which in his maturer years he so much
extolled. He would not let these idlers say ‘prodigious’ or
otherwise misuse the English tongue.”

Dr. Adams, too, then a tutor, and afterwards Master of the College, told Boswell that Johnson, as an undergraduate, was “a gay and frolicsome fellow,” and was “caressed and loved by all about him”; but Boswell proceeds:

“When I mentioned to him this account, he said: ‘Ah, Sir, I
was mad and violent. It was bitterness which they mistook for
frolick. I was miserably poor, and I thought to fight my way by
my literature and my wit; so I disregarded all power and all
authority.’”

Very likely, however, that recollection was coloured by later memories of the struggle for bread in Grub Street. Between the manifestations of bitterness and frolic the average undergraduate can, as a rule, discriminate; and Pembroke was not a rich man’s college. The pangs of poverty only became intense when Johnson crossed the road to Christ Church, to see his friend Taylor. Then contrast made him conscious of his shabbiness. As Boswell writes:

“Mr. Bateman’s lectures were so excellent that Johnson used
to come and get them at second hand from Taylor, till his
poverty being so extreme that his shoes were worn out, and
his feet appeared through them, he saw that this humiliating
circumstance was perceived by the Christ Church men, and he
came no more. He was too proud to accept of money, and somebody
having set a pair of new shoes at his door, he threw them away
with indignation.”

This “spirited refusal of an eleemosynary supply of shoes,” as Boswell calls it, is the best known of all the stories of Johnson’s Oxford career; but there is no evidence that the memory of the incident mortified him in after life. He never vilified Oxford, as did Gibbon and Adam Smith. On the contrary he was always proud to remember that he was an Oxford man; he spoke very highly of the tutors whose instruction he had neglected; and he delighted to revisit the University in his prosperous and famous period. We have a graphic account of one such visit from the pen of Hannah More:

“Who do you think is my principal cicerone in Oxford? Only Dr
Johnson! And we do so gallant it about! You cannot imagine
with what delight he showed me every part of his own College,
nor how rejoiced Henderson looked to make one of the party.
Dr. Adams had contrived a very pretty piece of gallantry. We
spent the day and evening at his house. After dinner Johnson
begged to conduct me to see the College; he would let no one
show it me but himself. ‘This was my room; this Shenstone’s.’
Then, after pointing out all the rooms of the poets who have
been of his College, ‘In short,’ he said, ‘we were a nest of
singing-birds. Here we walked, there we played at cricket.’
He ran over with pleasure the history of the juvenile days he
passed there.”

That may be, indeed, the language of a man whose undergraduate days had been passed in poverty; but it assuredly is not the language of a man whose poverty had made life unbearable in the manner which Carlyle suggests. Johnson, it is hardly to be doubted, enjoyed himself at Oxford as much as his constitutional tendency to melancholia ever permitted him to enjoy himself anywhere; and one may even conjecture that the condition of his shoe-leather was as much due to untidiness as to indigence. To find a Pembroke man who was really poor, and really miserable and morbid, we have to turn to the case of that eminent Methodist divine, the Reverend George Whitefield.

* * * * *

Whitefield came up just after Johnson had gone down; and there was one interesting link between them—a link which also associates them with that eminent Magdalen man, the historian of the Roman Empire. They both read, and were affected by, Law’s “Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life”; and Law had been tutor to Gibbon’s father and was to end his days as a sort of domestic chaplain to one of Gibbon’s aunts. It is curious to observe how differently his exhortations influenced the minds of the three men.

Gibbon devotes a good deal of space, in his Autobiography, to Law’s “theological writings which our domestic connection has tempted me to peruse”; and he holds the scales with a rigid impartiality. Law’s “sallies of religious frenzy,” he says, “must not be allowed to extinguish the praise which is due to Mr. William Law as a wit and a scholar.” He thinks that, “had not his vigorous mind been clouded by enthusiasm, he might be ranked with the most agreeable and ingenious writers of the times.” His conclusion is that:

“If he finds a spark of piety in his reader’s mind, he will
soon kindle it to a flame; and a philosopher must allow
that he exposes, with equal severity and truth, the strange
contradiction between the faith and practice of the Christian
world.”

Gibbon, that is to say, looks at Law solely with the eye of a literary critic, damns him with faint praise, but leaves his propositions unexamined as childish conceptions which he has long since put away, and does not propose to be concerned with any more. His tone is that of a head-master who praises, while he corrects, a set of Latin verses. Johnson read the book, expecting it to afford him ribald amusement, but was “over-matched” by it, and even frightened by it some distance along the road which leads to religious mania. Whitefield read it with real Methodistical enthusiasm.

* * * * *

About the Oxford Methodists in general enough has already been said in the chapter on Lincoln; but Whitefield is of sufficient importance to be detached from the group and considered separately.

He was not the originator of the movement, though he came to be a force in it. The Wesleys were several years his seniors, and had set Methodism going before he came into residence. But though he was their disciple he was hardly of their type. They were scholars, gentlemen, and organisers. He was a man of the people, half-educated, brought up in the tap-room of his mother’s inn, a religious demagogue, a rhetorician, whose mouth, foaming with sanctimonious phrases, suggests the froth on the tankards of his mother’s beer. The dignity which compels even those who differ from the Wesleys to respect them was entirely wanting in Whitefield. He emerged from his humble station with the defects of his origin clinging to him, and he never shook them off. It is impossible to think of him as a man whom one would have liked to know at Oxford. It is, indeed, difficult to think of him as anything but mad.

His position at Pembroke was that of a servitor; and he was the exaggerated type of the “pi-man” of his period. He had no joy in his youth, and no power of concealing his abject terror of hell-fire. He made himself conspicuous about it; it is not too much to say that he made himself ridiculous. Here are a few extracts from his own admissions on the subject:

“I always chose the worst sort of food, though my place
furnished me with variety. I fasted twice a week. My apparel
was mean. I thought it unbecoming a penitent to have his hair
powdered. I wore woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty
shoes.”

“Satan used to terrify me much, and threatened to punish me if
I discovered his wiles. It being my duty, as servitor, in my
turn to knock at the gentlemen’s doors by ten at night, to see
who were in their rooms, I thought the devil would appear to me
every stair I went up. And he so troubled me when I lay down to
rest that, for some weeks, I scarce slept above three hours at
a time.... Whole days and weeks have I spent in lying prostrate
on the ground and begging for freedom from those proud hellish
thoughts that used to crowd in upon and distract my soul.”

“It was suggested to me that Jesus Christ was among the wild
beasts when He was tempted, and that I ought to follow His
example; and being willing, as I thought, to imitate Jesus
Christ, after supper I went into Christ Church walk, near our
college, and continued in silent prayer under one of the trees
for near two hours, sometimes lying flat on my face, sometimes
kneeling upon my knees, all the while filled with fear and
concern lest some of my brethren should be overwhelmed with
pride. The night being stormy, it gave me awful thoughts of the
day of judgment. I continued, I think, until the great bell
rung for retirement to the College, not without finding some
reluctance in the natural man against staying so long in the
cold.”

And so forth. All things considered, it is not surprising that the “polite students,” as Whitefield calls them, laughed, and even “threw dirt,” or that his tutor advised him to take medicine. Academic authorities are seldom sympathetic towards undergraduates who, as Whitefield did, neglect their studies for their devotions—presumably because the religious uneasiness of their pupils seems to them a reflection on their own assured composure.

WORCESTER COLLEGE

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.

The buildings and the site of what is now Worcester College have in their time played many parts.

First of all, in the very early days, a year after the foundation of Merton, Gloucester College was instituted there. It was a monastic establishment for the benefit of Benedictines who wanted to “live properly” at Oxford, in cells, and with facilities for praise and prayer, instead of mixing with the common herd in inns or lodgings; but abuses crept in, and the monks ceased to live as properly as founders and benefactors could have wished. We read of monks admonished for “noctivagation,” for the haunting of taverns, for theft, and for assault and battery, to say nothing of the neglect of the Lenten fast. On one occasion, it is recorded, “four turbulent Benedictines” tried to kill the Proctor; and a State Paper of 1539 exposes the fact that another Benedictine, with a bookseller to help him, got through “twenty legs of mutton, five rounds of beef, and six capons” between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

[To face p. 289.]

The dissolution of the monasteries implied, of course, the dissolution of Gloucester College as its corollary. It served, for a time, as a Palace for the Bishop of Oxford, but was afterwards separated from the see and turned into Gloucester Hall—a Hall in which, at first, not only students, but also miscellaneous lodgers were allowed to have rooms. Even women were permitted to reside within its walls; and it had a bad name as a place of refuge for Papists, open or concealed. It prospered under these conditions for a season, but, after the Restoration, fell upon evil days. There came a time when there were absolutely no undergraduates in residence, when the grass overgrew the paths, when the Principal, sitting alone in his glory, was distrained upon for arrears of taxes, and when burglars broke into the Hall and carried off the plate.

In William III.’s reign, however, under the principalship of Benjamin Woodroffe, the Hall pulled up again. There was an attempt to turn it into a special college for Greek students from Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—a kind of precedent, though an imperfect one, for the endowment of the Rhodes Scholars. The experiment failed—partly for lack of funds, and partly because the Principal offended his Oriental pupils by trying to proselytise them; but Gloucester Hall was not involved in the collapse, for Woodroffe had other irons in the fire. He found a benefactor in Sir Thomas Cookes, who was proposing to bequeath £10,000 to Oxford; and this £10,000 was devoted, after long negotiations, to the transformation of Gloucester Hall into Worcester College in 1714.

* * * * *

If Worcester is more famous for one thing than another, it is for its remoteness from the centres of academical activity; and there are plenty of stories bearing on this branch of the subject. Letters have been addressed to Worcester College, _near_ Oxford; the nickname of Botany Bay has been bestowed. A member of Gloucester Hall was once excused for being late at a ceremony at Saint Mary’s “because of the distance, and, the wind being against him, he could not hear the bell.” A Worcester Proctor, summoning offending undergraduates to his presence at a later period, had to find a means of coping with similar excuses. The men whom he proctorised, and bade call on him, always made a point of asking him where Worcester was; and when they kept the appointment, they generally began with: “I’m so sorry, sir. I fear I’m behind my time; but the fact is I had the greatest difficulty in finding my way. I made ever so many inquiries, but no one was able to direct me.”

And, if Worcester seems remote now that one can approach it on a tramcar by way of Beaumont Street, it must have seemed much more remote in the old days before Beaumont Street was made. A graphic picture has been preserved of Provost Landon, as Vice-Chancellor, going and coming with difficulty. Preceded, Coxe tells us, by his bedels with their gold and silver maces, he proceeded:

“through Gloucester Green, then the acknowledged site of the
pig-market, and down the whole length of Friars’ Entry, at the
risk of being besprinkled by trundled mops in those straits of
Thermopylæ, of stumbling over buckets, knocking over children,
of catching the rinsings of basins, and ducking under linen
lines suspended across from the opposite houses.”

Enough, however, of that ancient gibe. We will next note that Worcester, the only Oxford college founded in the eighteenth century, is able to furnish a striking illustration of the academic manners and customs of that age.

What reading men thought of Oxford, and how they behaved themselves there, in the eighteenth century, we have already remarked in the cases of Adam Smith of Balliol, Gibbon of Magdalen, Joseph Butler of Oriel, and Jeremy Bentham of Queen’s. The attitude and deportment of men of a different type is illustrated by the career of Foote of Worcester, who was no other than Samuel Foote the comedian.

His great-grandfather having been the founder’s second cousin, Foote put in a claim to a scholarship as founder’s kin. The claim, after consideration, was allowed. He came into residence in 1737, and devoted the whole of his time to the neglect of his duties and the defiance of the dons. He acted Punch through the streets of Oxford. Finding a bell-rope hanging in a church porch which opened on a field in which cattle were turned out to graze, he tied hay round it, with the result that a hungry cow, in her attempts to eat the hay, set the bell tolling at the dead of night, and the Provost, half fearing that supernatural agencies were at work, sat up, with the sexton, into the small hours, to solve the mystery.

He solved it, and Oxford laughed at him. He sent for Foote and reprimanded him; but Foote was insolent, after an ingenious fashion of his own.

The Provost, Dr. Gower, was a pompous and pedantic person who picked his words carefully and preferred polysyllabic vocables to any others; and Foote appeared before him carrying an enormous dictionary under his arm. The reprimand began; but, as soon as a long word occurred, Foote begged the Provost to stop.

“One moment, if you please, sir. You said ‘ebullitions,’ I think? It was ‘ebullitions,’ was it not? ‘Ebullitions’ means—ah, yes, I have it. Now, if you will continue, sir, I am at your service.”

And so forth. As often as the Provost used a word of more than ordinary length, Foote, with a gravely submissive and apologetic air, arrested the harangue by pleading ignorance of its meaning, searched for it in the lexicon, read out the definition, and repeated his formula: “Ah, yes, I see. That means—— Now I am once more ready, sir, and if you will please proceed——”

So that the lecture was turned into a farce; and Foote might perfectly well have been sent down for so transmuting it, though, as a matter of fact, his disappearance was due to an offence of a different character.

He kept joyous company, and he kept it openly. In fact, he was one day discovered driving a gay and painted “actress” through the streets of Oxford, on the box seat of a coach and six—himself attired in garments so far removed from the “subfusc” that he compelled the attention of all beholders. It was useless for him, this time, to try to brazen matters out with the help of a dictionary; and the entry regarding his conduct in the College Register runs as follows:

“Whereas Samuel Foote, Scholar of Worcester College, by a
long course of ill-behaviour has rendered himself obnoxious
to frequent censures of the society publick and private, and
having whilst he was under censure for lying out of college
insolently and presumptuously withdrawn himself and refused to
answer to several heinous crimes objected to him, though duly
cited by the Provost by an instrument in form, in not appearing
to the said citation for the above-mentioned reasons, his
scholarship is declared void, and he is hereby deprived of all
benefit and advantage of his said scholarship.”

So Samuel Foote departed, though he does not seem to have been actually expelled, and, in due course, became a public buffoon—which was what he was most fitted to become; and though one would not venture to say, with the example of Mr. Arthur Bourchier before one, that Oxford is no proper place for comedians, it can hardly be denied that Oxford—even eighteenth-century Oxford—was no proper place for Samuel Foote.

* * * * *

Our next interesting name is that of Thomas de Quincey, essayist and opium-eater.

His mother sent him up in 1803, with fifty guineas in his pocket, and liberty to choose his own college. Professor Saintsbury, speaking from the lofty standpoint of Merton, protests that wise guardians would have counselled him to go anywhere rather than to Worcester; but one does not quite know why. He was poor, and Worcester was one of the cheaper colleges. In the matter of “caution money,” in particular, it let its members off lightly. That fact appears to have been the determining consideration; and de Quincey had too many queer experiences behind him to be likely, in any case, or at any college, to acquire the Oxford manner, and settle down into a typical Oxonian.

He had run away from school and wandered about Wales, with a duodecimo Euripides in his pocket, camping out on the hillsides in a tent, which he carried on his back during the day. He had starved in a Soho lodging and rubbed shoulders with the submerged tenth. After that, it was hardly to be expected that he would have either the notions or the behaviour of the ordinary public schoolboy who blossoms into the average University man. There were three sets for him to choose among—sets known respectively, according to the manner of their lives, as the Saints, the Sinners, and the Smilers; but though he sat with the Smilers—with the men, that is to say, who affected to be studious without being glum—in hall, his soul dwelt almost as far apart from them as from the others. “I,” he has written, “whose disease was to meditate too much and observe too little, upon my first entrance upon college life, was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings I had witnessed in London.”

It was while at Worcester, too, that de Quincey first took to opium, as a remedy against neuralgia, and continued to take it because he liked it, and came to believe that “here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages.” And the opium habit, of course, like the more modern morphia habit, tends to make a man self-sufficing and uncompanionable, and careless of clean collars and other particularities of the toilet; and there are stories to show that that was its effect upon de Quincey.

“I neglected my dress habitually,” he says, “and wore my
clothes till they were threadbare, partly under the belief
that my gown would conceal defects, more from indisposition
to bestow on a tailor what I had destined for a bookseller.
At length, however, an official person sent me a message on
the subject. This, however, was disregarded, and one day
I discovered that I had no waistcoat that was not torn or
otherwise dilapidated, whereupon, buttoning my coat to the
throat and drawing my gown close about me, I went into hall.”

And, of course, undergraduate opinion was not going to stand that sort of thing even from a man of genius. It was an occasion for the Smilers to smile, and they smiled—and also chaffed. Evidently, they said, de Quincey had seen the Order in Council, printed in the _Gazette_, interdicting the use of waistcoats. It would be a good idea if it were followed by another Order interdicting the use of trousers. Trousers were such costly garments, and so very troublesome to put on. Et cetera, et cetera, until de Quincey learnt his lesson.

Most curious also was de Quincey’s conduct when the time came for him to try to satisfy the examiners. He handed in remarkably good papers. One of the examiners spoke of him to one of the Worcester tutors as “the cleverest man I ever met with.” But then, just as he seemed about to triumph, he “scratched” and disappeared. It has been suggested that he had some imaginary grudge against the examiners; but it seems more likely that his nerves gave way before the prospect of the _viva voce_. It was not in him to face the trial with the theatrical self-assurance of Sir Robert Peel. He feared that his hair would stand up and his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. So, without saying anything to any one, he turned and fled; and for that incident also the opium was probably responsible.

* * * * *

The interest of the remarkable Worcester names which remain to be mentioned is chiefly theological.

Among novelists, indeed, the College educated Henry Kingsley; but of him little is recorded except that he was a boating man, and presented the College with a pair of silver oars, to be competed for. He was by way of being the bad boy of the Kingsley family, though most critics incline to think that he was more inspired than his famous and earnest brother Charles. Among economists, again, the College can boast of both Bonamy Price, who was Arnold’s favourite pupil at Laleham and one of his assistant masters at Rugby, and of Thorold Rogers, who quitted Holy Orders, wrote a “History of Prices,” and was distinguished for his Aristophanic humour. People are interested in them up to a point; but they are more interested in F. W. Newman and Dean Burgon.

* * * * *

F. W. Newman, of course, was the famous Cardinal’s brilliant younger brother—the grave dialectician who shocked the world, at a time when it was more easily shocked than it is at present, by writing “Phases of Faith.” He fought his way through theology as grimly as men fight their way through the “Ethics,” and, starting from the Evangelical standpoint, ultimately arrived at a creed of which one need say no more than that its exceeding vagueness did not prevent him from being exceedingly earnest about it.

How, in the days of his early orthodoxy, he went out, together with a dentist and a stonemason, as a missionary to Baghdad; how he and the dentist and the stonemason sang hymns together on the ship which conveyed them to the scene of their labours; how he was chased by a mob for distributing copies of the New Testament in a Mohammedan centre; how he was impressed by the remark of an Aleppo carpenter that the English people, though skilled in the mechanical arts, were lacking in spiritual insight; how he came to the conclusion that his hymn-singing was making him ridiculous; how he found it impossible to speak the evangelical jargon of his associates; how he quarrelled with the dentist and the stonemason, and separated from them—all these matters may be studied by the curious in his biography. It is not on account of any of these exploits that Worcester is proud of him. Worcester’s pride depends upon the fact that he is, so far as is known, the only undergraduate to whom the Public Examiners ever made a present of books in order to testify to their appreciation of his exceptional attainments.

* * * * *

Similarly with Burgon. Though he was a theologian, his theology has nothing to do with Worcester, and Worcester has nothing to do with his theology. His principal contribution to theological thought was his famous criticism of Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” For his own part, he said, he was quite content to look for his first parents in the Garden of Eden; but if his opponents preferred to look for theirs in the Zoological Gardens, they were perfectly welcome to do so. That is the _mot_ which people generally have in mind when they say of Burgon that buffoonery was his forte and piety his foible. Perhaps the one epigram fairly warrants the other; but the fame of both epigrams is eclipsed by the fame of Burgon’s Newdigate.

He won that prize for English verse in his last year, having been beaten in previous years by Matthew Arnold and Principal Shairp; and it is hardly too much to say that his Newdigate is the best Newdigate ever written. The one wonderful line which made it famous has already been quoted in a reference to Newdigates contained in an earlier chapter; but the present chapter may fairly end with a presentation of the jewel in its setting:

“Not virgin white—like that old Doric shrine
Where once Athena held her rites divine:
Not saintly grey—like many a minster fane
That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain:
But rosy red—as if the blush of dawn
Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn:
The hues of youth upon a brow of woe,
Which men called old two thousand years ago.
Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime—
_A red-rose city—half as old as time_.”

It will not be denied that Worcester has every title to be proud of Burgon for writing that.

HERTFORD COLLEGE

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.

The present Hertford College is the heir and successor of an earlier Hertford College, and also of Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall; and one must begin with a word on the strange vicissitudes of these various foundations.

Hart Hall came first, dating from some time in the thirteenth century; but the founders of the halls of those days are no more to be confounded with the benefactors of learning than are the keepers of the boarding-houses in which the majority of University students reside on the Continent. They were merely landlords who desired a particular class of tenant; and the so-called Principal of the Hall was not a person set in authority over the students, but a student reputed to be solvent and elected by his fellow students, for that reason, to make himself responsible to the landlord for the rent. It was not until a later date that he was nominated from outside and charged to direct the studies and control the conduct of the inmates.

That was the first stage. The second began with the appointment to the principalship of Dr. Richard Newton. He was a man of ambition and energy; and he made it the object of his life to get Hart Hall incorporated as a College. There was considerable opposition; but, after a long fight, he got his way; and Hart Hall became Hertford College in 1737.

The College was a success as long as Newton was at the head of it. He had a reputation as a disciplinarian. Parents heard of him as a Head who could compel even rich young men to work and to behave themselves. Hence the College attracted a good many gentlemen-commoners, whose high fees kept the place going. Two of those gentlemen-commoners were George Selwyn and Charles James Fox.

By degrees, however, after Newton’s death, the fashion changed, and gentlemen-commoners went elsewhere. The endowments of the College were scanty, and it could not stand the stress of evil times. The fellowships were only worth £15 a year, and nobody wanted them. The headship itself was only worth about £60 a year, and the day came when no fit and qualified person would be satisfied with so small a stipend. So matriculations ceased, and the men who had already matriculated finished their course and left; and presently there remained nothing but an empty college building, devoid alike of Principal, tutors, and undergraduates—devoid of everything except an obstinate elderly gentleman named Hewitt, who had elected himself to the vice-principalship, and clamoured to be allowed to die in the enjoyment of that office. And then a strange thing happened.

A certain solicitor named Roberson, having no house of his own, but wanting one, boldly, without asking any man’s leave, moved, with his goods and chattels, into the late Principal’s vacant apartments. To those who questioned him as to his doings, he said that he had assumed the office of caretaker of an ancient building which seemed in danger of falling into ruins. He had, of course, no shadow of a right to be there; but he knew as a solicitor—a master of useful knowledge—that, unless and until the extinct corporation was reconstituted, no one would have the right either to turn him out or to compel him to pay rent.

His example was quickly followed by other people, who argued that a legal position which was good enough for a solicitor was good enough for them. Any man who desired to live rent-free proceeded to appoint himself caretaker of one of the vacant sets of rooms in Hertford College. Before very long, the whole college was filled with self-appointed caretakers, who took so little care that, at last, one of the buildings—a lath and plaster affair containing at least a dozen sets of rooms—collapsed “with a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.” Then, and not before it was time, the University took it upon itself to interfere.