A. Hamilton Gibbs

“ Schools do occupy us, it is true, but as a mere secondary item in the university scheme of things—and rightly so. A degree, however good, does not, by itself, make men of us and teach us how to live. It is the social life of the university which is the real education and which sends us out into the world ready to face anything and everything. By developing our bodies we develop our minds, and in this programme of athletics and sociability we are a replica of our eighteenth-century brethren. ”

“ At the end of the eighteenth century a man of this kidney named Crosse wrote to his mother: “Oxford is a perfect hell upon earth. What chance is there for an unfortunate lad just come from school with no one to watch and care for him—no guide? I often saw my tutor carried off perfectly intoxicated.” I can see the man crouching in a dark corner of the quad appalled at the sight of his fellows dancing round a bonfire, while his tutor rushes by on the arms of a festive crowd in full rejoicing at some college triumph. ”

“ Had Wesley not gone up to Oxford, his name might never have been added to the list of England’s famous men. It was Oxford which first showed him the narrowness of a small curacy, Oxford which set him contemplating greatness, Oxford which actually started him in command of disciples. Therefore it is to Oxford that must be attributed the foundation, growth, and fame of Methodism, the means by which John Wesley attained his ends, power, and celebrity. ”

“ But for all his brilliance Johnson went down without taking a degree. His father’s death rendered it impossible for him to remain at Oxford for the full course, and he never went in for the schools.
While at the university he did not form many great friendships. His was not the temperament. A highly sensitive man, surrounded for the most part by men of some wealth who were ever ready to incur expenses, he was always on the look-out for an objectionable glance of pity or sympathy, than which there was to him nothing worse or more heinous. ”

“ So long as the university has this rod in her hand, it is no wonder that high-church triumphs over her most powerful adversaries; nor can we be at all surpriz’d that Whiggism declines with the constitution club in Oxford, when we behold people stigmatiz’d in the Black Book, and excluded from their degrees for soberly rejoicing upon King George’s birthnight, and drinking his majesty’s health. ”

“ If we decline to bow the neck to convention, and declare for originality and freedom, society turns and rends us. At Oxford the punishment for such a crime as originality is swift. A horde of outraged seniors descends like an avalanche upon the sinner’s rooms. They visit their wrath not only upon his belongings but upon his person, and eventually they leave him in a condition of mental and physical chaos, to realise the utter futility of kicking against the pricks.
In the eighteenth century the same social creed was practised. ”

“ It would be possible to continue for ever with such a subject as Oxford. Oxford, filled with the mystic echoes of the past, and the life and movement of the present, where a man passes four of the best years of his life, making livelong friendships, feeling things, doing things, and seeing things which remain indelibly engraved in his mind. Memories of Oxford have moved singers and poets to ecstasies of emotional utterance, inspired great writers with beautiful thoughts, and have been the one ray of comforting light in dark and miserable lives. ”

“ It is, therefore, with great diffidence that I have attempted to resuscitate the life and moods of Oxford of the eighteenth century. Barely two years have elapsed since the days when I looked out from my windows into the quad of my college. All the work and play, the alarums and excursions which go to form the life of the average Undergraduate have not yet had time to fade into dim, half forgotten memories. Alma Mater still grasps me in her warm hand. ”

“ It is unnecessary to arraign further damning evidence against the Georgian tutor. He stands convicted on the cases which I have related. Were I called upon indeed to summon other witnesses for the prosecution, I have but to turn to any eighteenth-century authority. No one has a word to say in his favour. By every one he is pronounced to be an idle, self-indulgent, dishonest, utterly unintellectual creature, conspicuously lacking in “learning, probity, and sincere religion.” ”

“ Unlike our togger men who, like strange hairy creatures from another planet, hatlessly converge from all parts of the town through the Broad Walk to the Barges, emitting yards of muscular leg for all the world to view in amusement and admiration, the eighteenth-century wet-bobs went down to the river in square—or, as they called it, trencher—and gown. ”

“ No sooner have we finished with our public school days, when we are known as boys, and have either scrambled over the “Smalls” hedge with some humility and relief, or else have secured the privilege of lording it in a scholar’s gown, than we instantly become men. We may be anything between eighteen and twenty, but if a sister, brother, or cousin be unwary enough to refer to us as a boy—woe unto him or her! ”

“ You are the first audacious Wit-wou’d that ever call’d Oxford a boorish, uncivilised place: And demme, Sir, you ought to be hors’d out of all good company for an impudent praggish Jackanapes. Oxford a boorish place! poor wretch! I am sorry for thy ignorance. Who wears finer lace, or better linnen than Jack Flutter? who has handsomer tie-wigs or more fashionable cloaths or cuts a bolder dash than Tom Paroquet? Where can you find a more handy man at a tea-table than Robin Tattle? ”

“ I have endeavoured to show that from the beginning of their fresherdom, when they felt self-conscious, gauche, and timid, down to the days when they took their degrees and knew Oxford blindfold in all her moods and tenses, they possessed the same outlook, had the same aspirations and ambitions, and were filled with the same admiration and love of Alma Mater as the men of to-day. For instance, as a freshman the Georgian Undergraduate curiously watched the seniors who were responsible for the tone of their college. ”

“ Year follows year, and century, century, and the stream of men flows unceasingly in and out of the city’s gates. Does Oxford change, however? Another wrinkle on her face may betray the lapse of many decades, but her beauty remains. ”

“ The task of writing a book on Oxford University is by no means an easy one. If it be a novel there are countless pitfalls to entrap the author—points small and inconsequent to the reader who cannot proudly claim the City of Spires as his Alma Mater, but irritating beyond description to the man who knows and loves Oxford. ”

“ He could not do anything else but take on the colour of the surroundings of vice and intemperance which then reigned supreme.
How is it then that any man emerged from the Oxford of this period and succeeded in inscribing his name on the roll of fame? The reason is that Oxford was a mirror in which was reflected London life. The metropolis was simply Oxford on a larger scale, so that the Undergraduates were learning at the university to do the things which would be expected of them in after life; and the men who distinguished themselves at college were bound to achieve renown later. ”

“ It is awkward for an old stager in life to be thrown into a large company of strangers, to make his way among them, as he can—but to the poor freshman everything is strange—not only College society, but any society at all—and he is solitary in the midst of a crowd. ”

“ In publick, a serious and solemn hypocrite; in private, a ridiculous and lewd buffoon. An impudent pretender to sanctity and conscience, which he always us’d as a cloak for the most unjust and criminal actions. In short, he was so worthless and despicable a fellow, and had so scandalously overacted his part in his extravagant zeal against the constitution club, that at the expiration of his proctorship, when he appear’d as candidate for the professorship of history, there were not above ten persons, besides the members of his own college who voted for him. ”

“ The thought of the mercers, grocers, shoemakers, and the rest honestly believing themselves to have attained to a most unusual degree of learning, by reason of their propinquity to a university, and parading their monumental ignorance under that belief, is a very painful one. It is even more painful, looking to the fact that most tradesmen, connected in any way with Academic Oxford, read The Student regularly, to know that the above stream of ridicule did not enlighten them as to the truth. ”

“ Have a particular regard how you speak of those gaudy things which flutter about Oxford in prodigious numbers, in summer-time, call’d toasts; take care how you reflect on their parentage, their condition, their virtue, or their beauty; ever remembering that of the poet,
‘Hell has no fury like a woman scorned,’
especially when they have spiritual bravoes on their side and old lecherous bully-backs to revenge their cause on every audacious contemner of Venus and her altars.... ”

“ I observe, in the first place, that you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch, but you affect to distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new suit of drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new bob wig, and a brazen-hilted sword; in which tawdry manner you strut about town for a week or two before you go to College, giving your selves airs in coffee-houses and booksellers’ shops, and intruding your selves into the company of us men; from all which, I suppose you think your selves your own master, no more subject to controul or confinement—alas! ”

“ They early discover that gregariousness is one of the chief characteristics of an Oxford man. They find it exhibited in the extraordinary number of clubs and societies in each college. Their natural conservatism convinces them that as the forming of clubs is co-existent with university life, they must not hesitate to follow the admirable example of their seniors. With the untiring enthusiasm of youth they concentrate their brains and energies therefore to the formation of new clubs—having already become members of a great percentage of the long-founded university clubs which are open to them. ”

“ The originator of this wonderful theory is presumably the lady novelist who, with no deeper knowledge of Oxford than that obtained from a minute study of the coloured photographs in railway trains, has pictured the Don in her vivid imagination to be a crusty, inhuman, and gouty septuagenarian who, in the intervals of delivering abstruse lectures, passes his days in sending men down and otherwise suppressing all vitality and humanity.
Anything more completely ridiculous it would be impossible to imagine. ”

“ As a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse. Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal; their dull and deep potations excused the brisk intemperance of youth; and their constitutional toasts were not expressive of the most lively loyalty for the house of Hanover.... The example of the senior fellows could not inspire the undergraduates with a liberal spirit or studious emulation. ”

“ Whereas, on the contrary, if you despice and reject these wholesome admonitions, violence, disrest, and an ill name will be the rewards of your folly and obstinacy; it will avail you nothing, that you have enrich’d your minds with all sorts of useful and commendable knowledge; and that, as to vulgar morality, you have preserved an unspotted character before men; these things will rather exasperate the holy men against you, and excite all their cunning and artifice for your destruction; the least frailties, humanity is prone to, will be magnify’d into the grossest of all wickedness ”

“ Afterwards, when drowning his sorrows at the particular establishment in vogue at the time, the Smart exhausted himself in his efforts to dash off a sonnet to her eyelashes or a rhapsody in praise of her tip-tilted nose. He drank her health upon his knees, tossing off a non-heeltaps to every letter of her name. His day was considered wasted unless he were seen in all his delicate apparel in company with the acknowledged reigning queen among toasts. ”