“I rise about nine, get to breakfast by ten,
Blow a tune on my flute, or perhaps make a pen,
Read a play till eleven or cock my lac’d hat,
Then step to my neighbour’s, till dinner to chat.
Dinner over to Tom’s or to James’s I go,
The news of the town so impatient to know,
While Low, Locke and Newton and all the rum race
That talk of their Modes, their ellipses and space,
The Seat of the Soul and new Systems on high,
In Halls as abstruse as their mysteries lie.
From the coffee-house then I to Tennis away,
And at five I post back to my College to pray,
I sup before eight and secure from all duns,
Undauntedly march to the Mitre or Tuns,
Where in Punch or good Claret my sorrows I drown,
And toss off a bowl to the best in the town.
At one in the morning I call what’s to pay?
Then home to my College I stagger away.
Thus I tope all the night as I trifle all day.”

Every one knows the various processes of slacking at the present time, so that there is no need for detail. But in essence the method is the same, and the result also. Our lunches at the Cherwell Hotel, at the riverside inns at Iffley and Abingdon; our “Grinds”; our slacking on the river in summer term—all these were done two centuries ago, and, just as some of the more energetic of us seek to immortalise these doings by contributing poems and articles to the ’varsity papers, so did the Undergraduates then send their sonnets and Latin verses to The Student, the Oxford Magazine, and Jackson’s Oxford Journal. In place of the musical comedy lady, whose silvery laughter floats down wind to-day, the Oxford toast flaunted it right merrily in the old days. The gownsmen’s tobacco accounts then amounted to quite as much as ours do, and they wrote home for further supplies of pocket money in almost the identical terms which we use to-day. Yesterday’s and to-day’s Oxford men are one and the same. Oxford herself and her Dons are changed, but the Undergraduate goes on doing and thinking the same things in the same way, and when he goes down now he feels very much as felt the eighteenth-century poet who, also down, sang:—

“Could Ovid, deathless bard, forbear,
Confin’d by Scythia’s frozen plains,
Cease to desire his native air
In softest elegiac strains?
Cursed with the town no more can I
For Oxford’s meadow cease to sigh....
Can I, while mem’ry lasts, forget
Oxford, thy silver rolling stream,
Thy silent walks and cool retreat
Where first I sucked the love of fame?
E’en now the thought inspires my breast
And lulls my troubled soul to rest.”

[Larger Image]

View of St. Mary’s Church & Radcliffe Library.

CHAPTER II

THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRESHER