“My whole advice, in a few words, is this:—
“Let your own interest, abstracted from any whimsical notions of conscience, honour, honesty or justice, be your guide; consult always the present humour of the place and comply with it; make yourselves popular and beloved at any rate; rant, roar, rail, drink, wh—re, swear, unswear, forswear; do anything, do everything that you find obliging; do nothing that is otherwise; nor let any considerations of right and wrong flatter you out of those courses, which you find most for your advantage. I have only to add, that if you follow this advice, you will spend your days there not only in peace and plenty, but with applause and reputation; if you have any secret good qualities they will be pointed out in the most glaring light, and aggravated in the most exquisite manner; if you have ever so many ugly ones, they will be either palliated or jesuitically interpreted into good ones. 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; and the best actions, our nature is capable of, will be debased and vilified away. And now do even as it shall seem good unto you. Farewell.
Terrae Filius.”
CHAPTER III
THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRESHER—(continued)
Ceremony of matriculation—Paying the swearing-broker—Colman and the Vice-Chancellor—Learning the Oxford manner—Homunculi Togati—Academia and a mother’s love—The jovial father—Underground dog-holes and shelving garrets—The harpy and the sheets—The first night.
The advice tendered to freshmen in Amhurst’s amazing and bitterly satirical letter is for those who have been matriculated. They must, therefore, fulfil all the rites of matriculation before they can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest it. As the process was vastly different in Georgian times, it is interesting to read the varying accounts of eighteenth-century freshmen. The gentleman who, “being of age to play the fool,” came up with his parents from Hoxton, has written a somewhat indiscreet but all the more laughable description of the ceremony.
“The master took me first aside,
Shew’d me a scrawl, I read, and cry’d
Do Fidem.
Gravely he shook me by the fist,
And wish’d me well—we next request
a tutor.
He recommends a staunch one, who
In Perkin’s cause has been his co-
adjutor
To see this precious stick of wood,
I went (for so they deem’d it good)
in fear, Sir.
And found him swallowing loyally
Six deep his bumpers which to me
seem’d queer, Sir.
He bade me sit and take my glass,
I answered, looking like an ass,
I, I can’t, Sir.
Not drink!—you don’t come here to pray!
The merry mortal said by way
of answer.
To pray, Sir! No—my lad, ’tis well,
Come! here’s our friend Sacheverell!
here’s Trappy!
Here’s Ormond! Marr! in short so many
Traitors we drank, it made my Cranium nappy....”