While on the subject of innkeepers there is an example of the consummate impudence of Terrae Filius which is most worthy of note. He compared the Rev. Dr Newton, Principal of Hart Hall, to an innkeeper, in a letter upon Dr Newton’s book entitled “University Education.”
“Some persons it seems,” wrote Amhurst, “have entertained a notion, that your hall is no more than an inn, of which you are the host, and your scholars the guests. I am sorry, sir, to say that there seems to be some reason in this notion, however merrily you may please to treat it. For do you not, like other innkeepers, get your living, and maintain your family by letting lodgings, and keeping an ordinary for all comers? Are you not licens’d for so doing, like other innkeepers and retalers of beer, though by a different hand? Indeed, you sell logick and other sorts of learning, as well as provisions for eating and drinking; but that cannot destroy the character of an innkeeper, which you certainly are in all other respects, but only proves that you deal in some particulars which your brethren of the trade do not.... You have, no doubt, the same right, with other innkeepers, to bring in a bill, and demand your reckoning, when you please; which I do not hear that Mr Seaman, or any other of your guests ever refused to pay; but I believe you are the only landlord in town who would offer to detain his guests by force, after they had paid their reckoning, and oblige them to spend more of their money in his house, whether they will or not.”
All these subtle parallels were, of course, not intended as compliments. To call a Head of a Hall an innkeeper is not exactly to take off one’s hat to him. But Amhurst forgot that in a previous chapter he made a proud confession of his own humble origin. His discourse was of great men sprung from small beginnings.
“What,” he asked, “was of old the famous Cardinal Wolsey but a butcher’s son?... Nay, to go no farther, even I myself, overgrown as I am in fame and wealth, stiled by all unprejudiced and sensible persons the instructor of mankind, and the reformer of the two universities, am by birth but an humble plebeian, the younger son of an ale-house keeper in Wapping, who was for several years in doubt which to make of me, a philosopher, or a sailor: but at length birthright prevailing, I was sent to Oxford, scholar of a college, and my elder brother a cabin boy to the West Indies.”
But why drag in Wolsey?
In King Charles’s letter against the women of the university of Cambridge he banned the houses of all taverners, inn-holders or victuallers. It was this class of tradesmen in Oxford who brought up their daughters as toasts. This was the reason why a statute was passed “Prohibiting all scholars, as well Graduates as Undergraduates, of whatever faculty, to frequent the houses and shops of any tradesmen by day, and especially by night....”
CHAPTER XV
THE DON