[CHAPTER IV.]
OXFORD.
As it was Long Vacation at Oxford, and I could not take rooms at once in Trinity College, where my name had been put down, it was necessary to place me somewhere out of mischief. At the intervention of friends, a certain Doctor Greenhill agreed to lodge and coach me till the opening term. The said doctor had just married a relation of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and he had taken his bride to Paris, in order to show her the world and to indulge himself in a little dissecting. Meanwhile I was placed pro tem. with another medical don, Dr. Ogle, and I enjoyed myself in that house. The father was a genial man, and he had nice sons and pretty daughters. As soon as Dr. Greenhill returned to his house in High Street, Oxford, I was taken up there by my father, and was duly consigned to the new tutor. Mr. Du Pré vanished, and was never seen again.
The first sight of Oxford struck me with a sense of appal. "O Domus antiqua et religiosa," cried Queen Elizabeth, in 1664, standing opposite Pembroke College, which the Dons desecrated in 1875. I could not imagine how such fine massive and picturesque old buildings as the colleges could be mixed up with the mean little houses that clustered around them, looking as if they were built of cardboard. In after days, I remembered the feeling, when looking at the Temple of the Sun in Palmyra, surrounded by its Arab huts, like swallows' nests planted upon a palace wall. And everything, except the colleges, looked so mean.
The good old Mitre was, if not the only, at least the chief hostelry of the place, and it had the outward and visible presence of a pot-house. The river with the classical name of Isis, was a mere moat, and its influent, the Cherwell, was a ditch. The country around, especially just after Switzerland, looked flat and monotonous in the extreme. The skies were brown-grey, and, to an Italian nose, the smell of the coal smoke was a perpetual abomination. Queer beings walked the streets, dressed in aprons that hung behind, from their shoulders, and caps consisting of a square, like that of a lancer's helmet, planted upon a semi-oval to contain the head. These queer creatures were carefully shaved, except, perhaps, a diminutive mutton-cutlet on each side of their face, and the most serious sort were invariably dressed in vestibus nigris aut sub fuscis.
Moreover, an indescribable appearance of donnishness or incipient donnishness pervaded the whole lot. The juniors looked like schoolboys who aspired to be schoolmasters, and the seniors as if their aspirations had been successful. I asked after the famous Grove of Trinity, where Charles I. used to walk when tired of Christ Church meadows, and which the wits called Daphne. It had long been felled, and the ground was covered with buildings.
At last term opened, and I transferred myself from Dr. Greenhill to Trinity College.
Then my University life began, and readers must be prepared not to be shocked at the recital of my college failures, which only proves the truth of what I said before, that if a father means his boy to succeed in an English career, he must put him to a preparatory school, Eton or Oxford, educate him for his coming profession, and not drag his family about the Continent, under governesses and tutors, to learn fencing, languages, and become wild, and to belong to nowhere in particular as to parish or county.
In the autumn term of 1840, at nineteen and a half, I began residence in Trinity College, where my quarters were a pair of dog-holes, called rooms, overlooking the garden of the Master of Balliol. My reception at College was not pleasant. I had grown a splendid moustache, which was the envy of all the boys abroad, and which all the advice of Drs. Ogle and Greenhill failed to make me remove. I declined to be shaved until formal orders were issued to the authorities of the college. For I had already formed strong ideas upon the Shaven age of England, when her history, with some brilliant exceptions, such as Marlborough, Wellington, or Nelson, was at its meanest.