‘Since in religion all men disagree,
And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three.’
This production ‘was voted heretical,’ and burned by the hands of the small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled. In the author’s advice to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary creatures. The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University sermon, ‘never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly’; but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up in what he conceived to be gorgeous attire. ‘I observe, in the first place, that you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword.’ As soon as they arrived in Oxford, these youths were hospitably received ‘amongst a parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in honour and common civility, to make you damnable drunk, and carry you, as they call it, a CORPSE to bed.’ When this period of jollity is ended, the freshman must declare his views. He must see that he is in the fashion; ‘and let your declarations be, that you are Churchmen, and that you believe as the Church believes. For instance, you have subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses; so many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and no true Churchman in that which the words bear, and in that which they were written.’
This is pretty plain speaking, and Terræ Filius enforces, by an historical example, the dangers of even political freethought. In 1714 the Constitution Club kept King George’s birthday. The Constitutional Party was then the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though, thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon the same. The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club, sallying forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as seen in our illustration), where the ‘silly statue,’ as Hearne calls it, was about that time erected. The Whigs took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted the gates, and an Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman of Brasenose. The Tories, ‘under terror of this dangerous and unexpected resistance, retreated from Oriel.’ Yet such was the academic strength of the Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a ‘Constitutioner,’ could scarcely take his degree.
Terræ Filius, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed, dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan’s report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. Terræ Filius thus describes a ‘smart,’ as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery:
‘He is one of those who come in their academical undress, every morning between ten and eleven, to Lyne’s Coffee-house; after which he takes a turn or two upon the park, or under Merton Wall, whilst the dull regulars are at dinner in their hall, according to statute; about one he dines alone in his chamber upon a boiled chicken or some pettitoes; after which he allows himself an hour at least to dress in, to make his afternoon’s appearance at Lyne’s; from whence he adjourns to Hamilton’s about five; from whence (after strutting about the room for a while, and drinking a dram of citron), he goes to chapel, to show how genteelly he dresses, and how well he can chaunt. After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast, and then waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and back again. He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but novels and romances.’
The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets more gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating men.
‘He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his waist]; a broad bully-cock’d hat, or a square cap of about twice the usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes. His clothes lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well as at the wrists.’
These ‘smarts’ cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn stockings, flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-cloths run with red at the bottom.
After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the contemporary account-book of a Proctor. In 1752 Gilbert White of Selborne was Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen, who little thought that Oxford boasted an official who was to become an English classic. White paid some attention to dress, and got a feather-topp’d, grizzled wig from London; cost him £2, 5s. He bought ‘mountain wine, very old and good,’ and had his crest engraved on his teaspoons, that everything might be handsome about him. When he treated the Masters of Arts in Oriel Hall they ate a hundred pounds weight of biscuits—not, we trust, without marmalade. ‘A bowl of rum-punch from Horsman’s’ cost half a crown. Fancy a jolly Proctor sending out for bowls of rum-punch, and that in April! Eggs cost a penny each, and ‘three oranges and a mouse-trap’ ninepence.