Laurence Hutton

“ No man, Graduate, Undergraduate, or Visitor, who leaves Oxford, voluntarily or involuntarily, in these days, ever feels that he does not want to go back to it, in the spirit, if not in the flesh.
No one knows whether Henry Kingsley was precocious or dull at Oxford. Nobody seems to know anything about Henry Kingsley, at Oxford or anywhere else. ”

“ John's College; and here, during the next year, he died. He lies in the Cemetery of the Holy Cross, commonly known, in Oxford, as Holywell Cemetery.
For many years, however, Pater's real home in Oxford was in his rooms at Brazenose. He is described as disliking the society of strangers; as hating all unnecessary noise and all extravagance of any kind; as loving to surround himself with beautiful things, caring nothing for their association or for their money-value, only for their beauty. ”

“ Corporal punishment was introduced within the walls of Brazenose before it became habitual in any of the other Institutions of Learning in Oxford, and the undergraduate complained that he was stripped of all his mediaeval liberty and reduced to the school-boy level. If his lessons were unprepared, if he whispered in chapel, or if he was guilty of "odious comparisons"—whatever that last may mean—he was liable to be soundly birched, not by the upper-class men, who would naturally resent comparisons of any kind as being particularly odious, but by the tutors and masters in charge. ”

“ A contemporary of the respectable Bishop of Rochester, at Wadham, was the wicked Earl, who bore the title of Rochester. He went up in 1660, at the age of twelve; he was dubbed a Master of Arts when he was fourteen, and he eloped with a very rich wife at the age of eighteen, to die, when he was thirty-two, owing bad debts to everybody, even to posterity. He was, perhaps, too young in his Wadham days to have developed a great deal of evil, although no doubt he tried his best to be wicked even then. ”

“ And there are men still living who would like to have known Charles Lamb himself in the flesh. There is one man still living, in Princeton, New Jersey, who, when he has kissed his Father and his Mother—in the spirit— when he has patted his dogs, and has talked with his friends, is going to hang around the Golden Staircase until he can catch the eyes of Charles Lamb, and of Mary Lamb, the Sister of Charles! ”

“ In 1723 Hearne wrote in his Journal: "It hath been an old custom in Oxford for the Scholars of all houses to go to dinner on Shrove Tuesday at ten o'clock, and to supper at four in the afternoon; and it was always followed in Edmund Hall, as long as I have been in Oxford, till yesterday, when they went to dinner at twelve, and to supper at six, nor were there any fritters at dinner, as there used always to be. When laudable old customs alter, 'tis a sign that learning dwindles," he added. ”

“ Mr. Southey, you won't learn anything by my lectures, sir. So, if you have any studies of your own, you'd better pursue them."
When our tutors begin to talk that way to our freshmen, who make "Epictetus" a steady diet, we may congratulate ourselves that we have a Southey among us.
Southey goes on to say that he never dreamed at Oxford;—a sure proof, to him, of how little it had entered into his moral being. ”

“ When the local historians call Christ Church "the most magnificent House of Learning in Europe," they are not so far astray. Royalty and aristocracy have made it magnificent by their presence and by their support; and Men of Mind, from Sir Philip Sidney to John Ruskin and Gladstone, have made it magnificent by their learning. ”

“ It is not an easy matter, even for the Oxford man himself, to say exactly what a Fellow is. There are, in Oxford, all sorts of Fellows. Good Fellows, Bad Fellows, Odd Fellows, and just plain Fellows. "The Century Dictionary" thus defines him: "In England [a Fellow is] a graduate member of a college, who shares its revenues." ”

“ Anthony Wood tells a story of Bacon, in Oxford, which is probably the parent of many similar stories, told of many other Men of Mind. It seems, according to the gossipy Annalist, that when certain scholars of Cambridge went to play a game of brains and learning with the Oxford students, the latter sent out Bacon, disguised as a thatcher, to meet them, and to paralyze them, on the road, with a display of that knowledge of the Dead Languages, which was supposed to be possessed then, even by the hedgers and ditchers of the University Town on the banks of the Thames. ”

“ He must be a single man; he may marry a wife. He must be in residence; he may board and lodge wherever he sees fit. He cannot leave Oxford; he need not remain in Oxford. He may be a Tutor, a Lecturer, a Professor; he may be a Fellow and nothing more. He must be a Graduate of the college in which he holds his Fellowship; he may be a Graduate of one college and a Fellow of another. He may be an Honorary Fellow, with no Oxford degree at all. But he must, in most cases, have taken at least the degree of Bachelor of Arts, or of a Student in the Civil Law, from some College or University. ”

“ They always "go up" to Oxford, and they invariably "go down," when they are not "sent down," to any point of the compass, be it in the neighborhood of Edinburgh, Rome, or Greenland's Icy Mountains. So Sydney Smith "went up" to New College when he was in his eighteenth year; but it seems, notwithstanding his subsequent wonderful wit and brilliancy of conversation, that he made no particular impression upon his tutors and fellow-students at Oxford, either in the College or out of it. ”

“ The higher University walks are, undoubtedly, trod by certain men who not infrequently know all about the Dative Case and about the Birds of Aristophanes, but who often know nothing, and scorn to know anything, about the Dreyfus Case or about the sparrows who flit and flitter in their own back yards; men who are absolutely familiar with all the details of the Second Punic War, and who are utterly unfamiliar with the Transvaal ficulties and with the American-Philippino imbroglio of to-day.
The Colleges of Oxford, in the histories and in the guide-books, have been variously treated ”

“ He was Mathematical Lecturer from 1855 until 1881, and his rooms at Christ Church are still pointed out. They were the large suite, in the Tower, on the First Quadrangle, Staircase No. Seven, on the left as one enters the establishment.
He must have been, if all the stories still told about him are true, one of the most eccentric of Eccentrics. He did not care for young men, it seems, but he liked young women, who all liked him; and Oxford is now full of women, mature and immature, who adore the gentle memory of the creator of " Alice." ”

“ Merton was a marked step forward in the modern University system, as it exists in Oxford to-day; but its Founder left the system in a state of transition, which the New College, with its wealth and grandeur of architecture, and its mode of imparting knowledge, brought to a state of what was considered culmination at the end of the Fourteenth Century. And, as it was the first to force its members to go to Mass daily, it was the parent of what now is called Compulsory, or Required, Chapel.
New College was good to the poor and to the needy. ”

“ The plague raging in Oxford in 1571, Sidney left the University hurriedly, never to return. He left his degree behind him, and he had no time, in later years, to go back to claim it.
Fuller sent Benjamin Jonson to Trinity College, Cambridge, upon what authority is not now known, for Jonson himself, the son of a bricklayer in London, told Drummond, of Hawthornden, once, that he was taken from school, and put to a trade; and that the degree he possessed from each University was given by favor, and not by study. ”

“ Matthew Arnold went to Oriel as a Fellow in 1844; but his biographers dismiss his association with that College and with the University, by the remark that he made no post-graduate stay, of any length, in Oxford.
"Tom Brown at Rugby," in his "School Days" a boy's boy, is a much more interesting character than is "Tom Brown" a man's man, "at Oxford"; and his later educational experiences are not so highly regarded by the general masculine readers of his own country and University, as they are by the Boys and the Men who are his cousins across the Ocean. ”

“ John Keble became a Fellow of Oriel in 1811, after leaving Corpus with all the honors of a Double First. In 1813 he was a Public Examiner, and a Tutor of Oriel. In 1823 he resigned, and left Oxford; but he returned to be Professor of Poetry from 1831 to 1841. A shy, homely man, and unambitious, he was, strangely enough, nevertheless, a prime factor in the great religious movement of his time; and Keble College, at Oxford, erected as a tribute to his memory, and opened in 1869, is his most enduring monument ; but it is too young in years yet to have Literary Landmarks of its own. ”

“ Alas, there are more bores than Aristotles. And most of our students find themselves bored by Aristotle himself.
"While we are on the subject of Old Customs," added Mr. Wade, "we are also reminded of another, also peculiar to this College. On the morning of every New Year's Day, the Bursar presents to each member of the Society a needle and thread, accompanying his gift with the injunction, 'Take this, and be thrifty.'"
There are things to be learned from Queen's, in Oxford. Threads and needles are almost as unfamiliar in some colleges to-day as are Aristotles. ”

“ He was peculiarly kind and devoted to animals— which is not particularly a sign of eccentricity—but he gave almost all of his spending money to the poor—which is, perhaps, eccentricity carried to an extreme! He drank nothing but water; he lived sparingly; he boxed with everybody who came along; he studied philosophy; and he left college at the end of three years, without a degree, to begin, in rather an unusual way, the active practice of the philosophy he had studied. He believed that the natural woman was not the proper mate for a philosopher of his kind ”