Rowlandson's Oxford

by A. Hamilton Gibbs

CHAPTER XI

’VARSITY LITERATURE (continued)

The Student—Cambridge included—Its design—The female student—Poem by Sir Walter Raleigh—Bishop Atterbury’s letter—The manly woman.

On the first day of January, 1750, there appeared the first number of The Student. The sub-title read: The Oxford Monthly Miscellany. For two years it ran successfully, and, at the beginning of the second, it was found that Cambridge took such an interest in its doings that the sub-title was enlarged. It then read: The Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany. In make-up it differed entirely from Terrae Filius, and contended to be a far more serious and high-minded journal, aiming not so much to amuse as to teach its readers. Thus it contained Latin prose and verse, religious discussions, essays, medical dissertations, and a carefully selected variety of lighter matter in English prose and verse. The tone of the work may be gathered from the sedate foreword to the public.

“In the course of this work particular care will be taken that nothing be inserted indecent or immoral, and as we are determined to give umbrage to no Person or Party, all political disputes and whatever is offensive to Good Manners will of consequence be avoided. Our design being only to promote learning in general, we shall not confine ourselves to any particular subject, but occasionally comprehend all the branches of polite literature. Each number will consist of such originals in Prose and Verse as we hope will prove agreeable to our readers. And tho’ we might with impunity comply with the common practice of preying indiscriminately on the labours of others, yet we shall not to our knowledge publish any thing that has been printed before, or without the consent of the respective authors: for the one we consider as a fraud upon the publick, and the other an invasion of private property. These considerations we presume will remove any prejudice which the Learned may conceive against our undertaking, and induce them not only to encourage, but assist us in the prosecution of it. And as we must necessarily depend on the publick for the Success of our work, we hope it will meet with their indulgence. No endeavours on our part shall be wanting to render it worthy their approbation; and we no longer desire their favour, than while we continue to deserve it.”

In the first number there were some five or six pages of Latin verse, a translation of the chorus at the end of the second act of Hecuba of Euripides, an elegy in imitation of Tibullus, an article on “Intellectual Pleasure”—the author of which was requested, in an editorial note, to favour the paper with his further reflections—the speech of John Fell, D.D., Bishop of Oxford, at his Triennial Visitation in the year 1685, an article entitled “Leaning of no Party,” and one or two lighter imaginative contributions, such as “The Speech of an Old Oak to an Extravagant Young Heir as He was going to be Cut Down,” and an “Address to an Elbow Chair Lately New Cloath’d.” As there were no advertisements to assist the editors with the printing bills, it speaks well for the literary taste of the period that the paper lived two full years—the period to which the editors limited themselves at the outset. Such a periodical at Oxford in the year of grace 1911 would prove to be a hopeless anachronism. It would arrive at a circulation of three copies per month—a free copy to the British Museum, another to the Bodleian, and the third to the editor’s mother. The Undergraduates might finger it casually on the bookshop counter, and the Dons read the first number on account of its novelty, but it would die a speedy death unless by the second issue the editor announced its coalition with the comic paper whose editor runs his motor-car on the earnings of butcher and express messenger boys.

One of the lighter features of The Student was a series of letters from Cambridge written by the female student. Her epistles were full of humour, and she poked fun at the Undergraduates quietly, and in a manner not wholly unlike Terrae Filius. Perhaps it is unfair to compare her efforts to those of Amhurst, because as he jested and quipped in every conceivable style and way, any one coming after him might be accused, quite unjustly, of plagiarism. That the female student was not guilty of any false modesty is easily to be seen from the account of herself in her preliminary letter; while the care with which the editors of The Student guarded the decencies and the moralities ensured that she did not in any way cause a breach in them by her broad-minded and outspoken contributions. She began by claiming the student as a brother, a claim based upon her birth, education, and the whole conduct of her life. She asserted that she, too, was a student, having sounded the depths of philosophy and made greater progress “in academical erudition” than most of the Dons whose profound knowledge consisted in a “little cap with a short tuft and a large pompous grizzle wig.” She was born and brought up in Cambridge in the care of an aunt. Her studies were directed by a grave Fellow of a college. Her aunt was so fond of her that she was suffered to “give a loose to her passion for literature,” and the girl absorbed information from curling papers and the lids of wig-boxes. When she was seventeen her tutor died of a surfeit occasioned by feeding too freely at a gaudy, and the secret at last came out that there had been a union between the Don and the aunt for nearly twenty years. The aunt became, therefore, a mother, and she produced documents to show that the Don’s possessions were hers. The result of the selling of the deceased’s effects did not raise the good woman to a condition of luxury.

“However,” said the girl, “she resolved to continue at Cambridge on my account, and we lived together in a manner much genteeler than our fortune would afford. My person (which, by-the-bye, I took as much pains to cultivate as my mind) now began to be cried up as much as my parts. I was a charming, clever, sweet, smart, witty, pretty creature, in short, I was as much feared for my wit as ador’d for my beauty. From hence I had vanity to fancy I could have anybody I pleased, and had therefore resolved within myself to be run away with by a nobleman, or a baronet at least.”

But this witty, pretty creature unfortunately over-estimated her possibilities. The next ten years passed in a round of gaiety which took the form of courtship by no one under the rank of gentleman commoner. With the baronet in view, however, such mere mortals fell in their hundreds. Some she rejected “because a better might offer, some because they had too much sense; others because they had too little; this was too old, that too young,” and, in consequence, she was gradually deserted, as her physical charms waned, until at last her name was never mentioned “without the odious reproach of ‘she has been’ added to it.”

At the moment of writing this first letter she was compelled to work for her bread and the support of her mother. This she did with her pen, turning out poems and novels; being, as she informed The Student, at present engaged in “composing sermons for a bookseller, which he designs to sell for the MS. Sermons of an eminent divine lately deceased, warranted originals.”