Two or three bicycles are shown, and the time is early noon.
attempt to discourage them; “so now they may be sots by authority.” The disorder was winked at because it increased the “natural stupidity” of the Balliol men of the day. But the attitude of the University towards humour two centuries ago was a wily mixture of patronage and ferocity. The terræ filius was only not official in his reckless bombardment of order and authority at the annual University Act. It was as though a jackdaw should be invited to church. He and his companion (for they hunted in couples) were chosen, as regularly as proctors, by election; and to become terræ filius must have been the blue riband of the wilder sort of University wits. Year after year pairs of terræ filii fired their random shots at great and small, always with audacity, sometimes with the utmost scurrility; and year after year one or both of the pair suffered expulsion, or, like Addison’s father, public humiliation, for their scandalous and opprobrious words, which no doubt earned the gratitude of irresponsible juniors.
It was long a common recreation, a recreation only, to go on the river in a boat, and to row or be rowed to some place of meditation or festivity, or to go with music and wine upon the Isis to Godstow Bridge or Sandford—
And there
Beckley provides accustom’d fare
Of eels, and perch, and brown beefsteak.
And the mention of Sandford carries with it many memories for modern Oxford men, even if perch is[Pg 472] not always to be had—of winter afternoons when the mulled port was as sweet as a carnation, and a voice from a slowly-gliding barge was the sole sound in all the land. One joyous company long ago went, “like country fiddlers,” to Farringdon fair, with cithern, bass viol, and violin. The city itself offered other amusements than the theatre, music hall, billiard tables, and picture shows of to-day. Freaks, monstrosities, mountebanks, jugglers, were welcome not only to undergraduates of fifteen or sixteen. There was “a brazen head that could speak and answer” at the Fleur de Lace on one day; on another, strange beasts. On May-day a maypole stood near St. Peter’s-in-the-East and opposite the “Mitre.” A bear-baiting was always a possibility. There was a fencing school at hand. One who cared for none of these has left this account of his Oxford day in the seventeenth century:—
Morn, mend hose, stu. Greek, breakfast, Austen, quoque dinner;
Afternoon, wa. me., cra. nu., take a cup, quoque supper—
i.e., interprets Wood, in the morning he mended his stockings, studied Greek, took breakfast, studied St. Augustine, and dined; and in the afternoon, walked in Christ Church meadows, cracked nuts, took a drink, and had supper.
Above all, in and after the time of Cromwell the city provided coffee-houses,—the real, steaming, smoking, witty thing. The hospitality and spirit of careless intercourse between college and college which they fostered belong to the present day. They were first opened, too, at a time when much of mediæval life was[Pg 474][Pg 473]