Saint Werner’s chapel on a Sunday evening is a moving sight. Five hundred men in surplices thronging the chapel from end to end—the very flower of English youth, in manly beauty, in strength, in race, in courage, in mind—all kneeling side by side, bound together in a common bond of union by the grand historic associations of that noble place—all mingling their voices together with the trebles of the choir and the thunder-music of the organ. This is a spectacle not often equalled; and to take a share in it, as one for whose sake in part it has been established, is a privilege not to be forgotten. The music, the devotion, the spirit of the place, smoothed the swelling thoughts of Julian’s troubled heart. “Are we not all brethren? Hath not one Father begotten us?” Such began to be the burden of his thoughts, rather than the old “Scorn!—to be scorned by one that I scorn.” And when the glorious tones of the anthem ceased, and the calm steady voice of the chaplain was heard alone, uttering in the sudden hush the grand overture to the noble prayer—
“O Lord, our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth.”
Then the last demon of wrath was exorcised, and Julian thought to himself—
“No; from henceforth I scorn no one, and am indifferent alike to the proud man’s scorn and the base man’s sneer.”
The two incidents that we have narrated made Julian fear that his position as a sizar would be one of continual annoyance. He afterwards gratefully acknowledged that in such a supposition he was quite mistaken. Never again while he remained a sizar did he hear the slightest unkind allusions to the circumstance, and but for the external regulations imposed by the college, he might even have forgotten the fact. Those regulations, especially the hall arrangements, were indeed sufficiently disagreeable at times. It could not be pleasant to dine in a hall which had just been left by hundreds of men, and to make the meal amid the prospect of slovenly servants employed in the emptying of wine-glasses and the ligurrition of dishes, sometimes even in passages of coquetry or noisy civilities, on the interchange of which the presence of these undergraduates seemed to impose but little check. These things may be better now, and in spite of them Julian felt hearty reason to be grateful for the real kindness of the Saint Werner’s authorities. In other respects he found that the fact of his being a sizar made no sort of difference in his position; he found that the majority of men either knew or cared nothing about it, and sought his society on terms of the most unquestioned equality, for the sake of the pleasure which his company afforded them, and the thoughts which it enabled them to ventilate or interchange.
Chapter Eight.
Study and Idleness.
“Then what golden hours were for us,
While we sate together there!
How the white vests of the chorus
Seemed to wave up a live air.
How the cothurns trod majestic,
Down the deep iambic lines,
And the rolling anapaestic
Curled like vapour over shrines!”
E Barrett Browning.