The refractory Headington stone crumbled, and while the classical buildings became yearly less handsome than when the masons left them, the Gothic gained by the rich inlay and delicate waste of weather and time. As if time and weather wrote the chronicles of the society, the walls came to have a singular influence upon each generation, and gave them, as it were, a common ancestry and blood—noble blood, for all. Even when they departed they had the irrefragable right of exiles to look back and salute.
And yet how different the life within those walls which some now living can remember! Sixty years ago, they lament, “no man was ever seen in the streets of Oxford after lunch without being dressed as he would have been in Pall Mall.” Charles Reade at Magdalen “created a panic even among the junior members” by wearing a green coat and brass buttons, as Dean of Arts. Sixty years before that, George Colman had matriculated in a grass-green coat, “with the furiously bepowdered pate of an ultra coxcomb.” And now, says the first-quoted authority, “shooting-[Pg 454]jackets of all patterns, in which it is not given to every man to look like a gentleman,” have taken the place of frock-coat, tall hat, and gloves, “in which every one looked well.” The change from knee-breeches to trousers early last century was made possible by the gross lenience of a proctor.
Without college or university games, the old Oxford day was very much unlike our own. Bonfires of celebration, almost alone among modern amusements, are of great antiquity, in street and quad. A hundred years ago the man who would now row or play cricket for his college, was hunting, or pole-jumping across the fields; or, if he was original, he took the long walks which were popular a few generations ago, but are now so exceptional that I know nobody who ever saw, and recognised, Matthew Arnold’s tree, though some are lazily inclined to believe that it is the one elm that dwells with the seven firs on Cumnor Hurst.
One of the few college games was confined to the fives courts, which lay within the walls and have long disappeared, and are inconceivable to-day, when competition and spectators on ground remote from the colleges are characteristic of Oxford sport. Earlier still, a form of college game was the “vile and horrid sport” of forcibly shaving those who were about to become Masters of Arts, and the “tucking” (i.e. scratching on the chin with the thumb nail) of freshmen, which the first Earl of Shaftesbury put down at Exeter. These customs cast but a feeble shadow to-day in the occasional solemnity of trimming a contemporar[Pg 455]y’s exuberant or ill-kept hair. A more appropriate form of celebrating the taking of degrees was an elaborate supper, which is now less often possible, when a man frequently takes his degree in solitude and leaves Oxford immediately. William Paston, in the fifteenth century, writes, that he was made bachelor on a Friday and had his feast on the Monday following. He was promised a gift of venison, and though disappointed, his guests “were pleased with such meat as they had.” Even William of Wykeham, who forbade every possible game to his scholars at New, and would not allow the post-prandial leisure to be spent on ordinary days around the fire in the middle of his great hall, provided that, after supper, “on festivals and other winter nights, on which, in honour of God, his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the fellows might indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and the wonders of the world.” Some of the college halls preserved their old central fireplaces, under a louvre, until early in the last century. While the fellows dined, a servitor stood there, and read aloud from the Bible, in the first days of the college; or, as at Trinity in 1792, recited a passage from Homer or Virgil or Milton. Southey records it as a rule, that every member of the University could go by right once a year to Balliol hall, and “be treated with bread and cheese and beer, and all on condition that, when called upon, he should either sing a song or tell a story.” Those who were unqualified doubtless stayed away. Yet there is little sign that the[Pg 456] temperate or secluded undergraduate suffered for his gifts. Whitefield himself, who cost his relatives £24 for his first three years, and wore “woollen gloves, a patched gown, and dirty shoes,” says that the other men left him alone when “he became better than other people,” as a “singular odd fellow,” at Pembroke. There was, however, one custom which must have left such men with a sore memory. For the “fresh night” was long the common doom of men soon after entering the University. There were fires of charcoal in the hall on All Saints’ eve, All Saints’ day and night, and onwards to Christmas day and Candlemas day; and the freshmen were brought in before an assembly of their seniors among the undergraduates. Anthony à Wood describes the ordeal thus:—
“On Candlemas day, or before, every freshman had warning given him to provide his speech, to be spoken in the public hall before the undergraduates and servants on Shrove Tuesday night that followed, being always the time for the observation of that ceremony.
“Feb. 15, 164⅞, Shrove Tuesday, the fire being made in the common hall before five of the clock at night, the fellows would go to supper before six, and making an end sooner than at other times, they left the hall to the liberty of the undergraduates, but with an admonition from one of the fellows (who was then principal of the undergraduates and postmasters [at Merton]) that all things should be carried in good order. While they were at supper in the hall, the cook (Will Noble) was making the lesser of the brass pots full of cawdel at the[Pg 458][Pg 457]
THE CLOISTERS, NEW COLLEGE
The great west window of the College Chapel shows above the Cloisters to the east. The window was painted from designs made by Sir Joshua Reynolds.