I had delightful old panelled rooms on Number 7 staircase—a chance fact, which won me a great honour and pleasure. One afternoon, when I came in from playing football, the College messenger met me, saying, “Grand company in your rooms this afternoon, Mr. Sladen—the President, and all the Fellows, and Cardinal Nooman,” and he added, “When the President looked at your mantelpiece, sir, he corfed.” My mantelpiece was strewn with portraits of Maud Branscombe, Eveleen Rayne, Mrs. Rousby, and other theatrical stars of that day—about a couple of dozen of them.
Shortly afterwards the President’s butler arrived with a note, which I supposed was to reproach me with the racy appearance of my mantelpiece, but it was to ask me to spend the evening with the President, because Cardinal Newman had expressed a desire to meet the present occupant of his rooms.
The Cardinal, a wan little man with a shrivelled face and a large nose, and one of the most beautiful expressions which ever appeared on a human being, talked to me for a couple of hours, prostrating me with his exquisite modesty. He wanted to know if the snapdragons, to which he had written a poem, still grew on the wall between Trinity and Balliol; he wanted to compare undergraduate life of his day with the undergraduate life of mine; he asked me about a number of Gothic fragments in Oxford which might have perished between his day and mine, and fortunately, I had already conceived the passion for Gothic architecture which pervades my books, and was able to tell him about every one. He told me the marks by which he knew that those were his rooms; he asked me about my studies, and hobbies, and aims in life; I don’t think that I have ever felt any honour of the kind so much.
At Oxford I spent every penny I could afford, and more, on collecting a library of standard works, and I have many of them still. I remember that the literary Oxonians of that day discussed poetry much more than prose, and could mostly be classified into admirers of William Morris and admirers of Swinburne, and I think the Morrisians were more numerous. All of them had an academic admiration for Matthew Arnold’s poems, and could spout from “Thyrsis” and the “Scholar Gipsy,” which was compared with Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.”
Thackeray’s daughter (Lady Ritchie) was at that time the latest star in fiction, as I occasionally remind her.
I had the good fortune to know some of the greatest of the authors who lived at Oxford when I was an undergraduate—Max Müller, Bishop Stubbs the historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, Lewis Carroll, Dean Kitchin, Canon Bright and W. L. Courtney.
Oxford in those days (as I suppose it does still) revolved largely round “Bobby Raper,” then Dean of Trinity, a man of infinite tact and kindness, swift to discern ability and character in an undergraduate, and to make a friend of their owner, and blessed with a most saving sense of humour. When they had finished at Oxford, a word from him found them coveted masterships, or secretaryships to Public Men. He was the link between Oxford and Public life, as much as Jowett—the “Jowler” himself—who sat in John Wycliffe’s seat at Balliol. Lord Milner, St. John Brodrick and George Curzon have gone farthest of the Balliol men of my time. Asquith was before me, Edward Grey after. Trinity ran to Bishops. Most of the men who sat at the scholars’ table at Trinity in my time who went into Holy Orders are Bishops now, Archie Robertson, now Bishop of Exeter, being the senior of them, Bishop Gore of Oxford, who had rooms on the same floor as I had, and was one of my greatest friends in my first year, was the Junior Fellow. He was a very well-off young man, and used to spend huge sums on buying folios of the Latin Fathers, and then learn them by heart. There is no one who knows so much about the Fathers as the Bishop of Oxford. The present Archbishop of Canterbury was at Trinity, but before my time, and so was Father Stanton, who went there because he came of a hunting family, and it was a hunting College, and he was a Rugby man. Bishop Stubbs and Freeman were also Trinity men, and generally at the College Gaudies, where the Scholars used to dine at the same table as the Dons and their guests. Sir Richard Burton came once to a Gaudy when I was there, and told me that he was very surprised that they had asked him, because he had been sent down.
I said, “You are in very good company. The great Lord Chatham and Walter Savage Landor were sent down from Trinity as well as you.”
But one well-known literary man of the present day holds the record over them all, because he was sent down from Trinity twice.
Although I was a classical scholar, I refused to go in for Classics in the Final Schools. “Greats,” otherwise Literæ Humaniores, as this school is called at Oxford, embraces the study of Philosophy in the original Greek and Latin of Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, and Philosophy and Logic generally. I was sick of the Classics, and I never could take the smallest interest in Philosophy, so I knew that I should do no good in this school, and announced my intention of going in for the School of Modern History. This was too revolutionary for my tutor. He said—