One of the most interesting things to study at the university is the way in which a man gets into a certain set. Let me take for example a group of freshmen who come from the same public school, who have played together in the school games, possibly invited each other home for the holidays. Their tastes and ideas are apparently the same. On coming up to Oxford each man is differently affected. For the first few weeks they meet in one another’s rooms and discuss their impressions freely and without any reserve. Then suddenly, after the manner of mushrooms which spring up in a single night, it is found that one of them has got into the racing set which despises everybody who does not ride a horse; another into the working set, which lives, eats, and sleeps with its books; a third into the religious set, which in a quiet, unostentatious manner goes out of its way to help the poor, attends frequent religious meetings and, unfortunately and quite undeservedly, is somewhat scorned by the rest of the college; a fourth has got into the smart set, and has become a “blood”; and others into the thousand and one little groups which go to the composition of a university.

This curious sudden upheaval of ideas and habits which is brought about in one short term is to be found in every college every year, just as it appertained in the eighteenth century. I have shown the way in which some of these freshmen came to feel ashamed of their clothes and crept into the back entrances of barber’s and tailor’s shops, while their friends remained perfectly satisfied with their appearance, and jogged along without any desire for silks and satins.

The Georgian “blood,” however, was a person of tantamount importance. It was he who provided the university with food for mirth, envy, satire, recrimination. In a previous chapter I quoted Amhurst’s description of how a Smart might be distinguished when he sauntered along, languidly twirling his clouded amber cane and smelling philosophically of essence. His main objects in life were apparently to avoid the accusation of being ill-mannered, to consume daily as much liquor as possible, to be ardent in singing the praises of the latest toast, and to expend in finery far more money than he possessed. He thought himself to be a model of culture and was, in fact, the man of the period who put on the most “side.”

Amhurst, with an editorial genius that was without parallel in those times, wrote an attack on the good manners of Undergraduates in order that he might criticise, or better, satirise, that “large body of fine gentlemen call’d Smarts.” Under the name of Valentine Frippery he answered his own attack with a bitter reply, taking up the cudgels stoutly on behalf of the attackees, and wound up his article by riddling all men of the Frippery type.

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Bucks of the First Head.

Allowing that Terrae Filius was ever a caricaturist, and that all his tirades and jibes must be taken cum grano salts, nevertheless the picture he draws of the Bucks of the first head is a very true one. “Valentine Frippery” wrote in answer to the accusation of ill-breeding as follows:—

“To Terrae Filius.

“Christ Church College, July 1.