Dux, who had noted down the recommendation, proposed at our departure, to add: “Mem.: Never to stop again at a hotel where illuminated texts are hung in every bed-room.”
Opposite the bed allotted to me, who am obliged continually to stay my fearsome soul upon the wholesome promises of daily grace for daily need, upon exhortations to be careful for nothing, and with the day’s sufficiency of evil to cease anxious thought for morrows as rife with trouble,—opposite my bed, where my waking eyes must meet it, was a red blister-plaster:
“Boast not thyself of to-morrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”
In the adjacent closet, allotted to Prima, the only ornamental object, besides a wash-bowl so huge she had to call in her father to lift and empty it into the tiniest slop-jar ever made, was the reminder in brimstone-blues, “The wages of sin is Death!” One of our collegians was admonished that the “wrath of God abideth upon him,” and the other had a mutilated doctrinal text signifying quite another thing when read in the proper connection. Caput, in his character as Mentor and balance-wheel, checked the boys’ disposition to detect, in the lavishment of Scriptural instruction, a disposition to establish an honest equilibrium with the weighty bills. Extras in one direction, they reasoned, should be met by extras in another.
“All Scripture is profitable,” he reminded the jesters. “It is only by misuse it can be made, for a moment, to appear common, much less, absurd. Therefore,” emphatically, “I object to texts upon hotel walls!”
We were not tempted by in-door luxuries to waste in sleep or sloth the daylight hours, but gave these to very industrious sight-seeing. Yet we came away with appetites whetted, not satisfied by what we had beheld. The very air of the place is redolent of learning and honorable antiquity. Each of the twenty colleges composing the University had a valid and distinctive claim upon our notice. To name the attractions of one—say, Christ Church, or Balliol, would be to fill this chapter with a catalogue of MSS. books, pictures, dates and titles. It is a queer, fascinating, incomparable old city. Few of the streets are broad, none straight. The shops are small, usually ill-lighted and devoted to the needs and tastes of the students. The haberdashers are “gentlemen’s furnishers,” the booksellers’ windows full of text-books in all known tongues, interspersed by the far-famed Oxford Editions of Bibles and Prayer-books. Pastry-cooks are prominent and many. The colleges are imposing in dimensions, some magnificent in architecture. University, the oldest, is said to have been founded by the Great Alfred. Restored in 1229. All are so blackened and battered that the youngest looks at least a century older than the Roman Pantheon. Ancient edifices in the drier, hotter air of Southern Europe have been worn by the friction of ages. The Oxford Colleges are gnawed as by iron teeth. “Worm-eaten,” is the first epithet that comes to the tongue at sight of them. From cornice, walls and sculptures, the stone has been picked away, a grain at a time, until the surface is honeycombed, and to the inexperienced eye, disintegration of the whole seems inevitable. The lugubrious effect of age and seeming dilapidation is sensibly relieved by the reaches of turf, often bordered by gay flowers, forming the quadrangles, or court-yards, enclosed by the buildings.
The quadrangle of Christ Church College was laid out by Cardinal Wolsey, the founder and patron. It is almost square, measuring 264 feet by 261. “Great Tom,” the biggest bell in England—the custodian says, in the world,—hangs in the cupola over the gateway. It weighs 17,000 pounds, and at ten minutes past nine p.m. strikes one hundred and ten times, the number of students “on the foundation.” The pride of this college is the immense refectory, or dining-hall. The ceiling, fifty feet in height, is of solid oak elaborately carved, with graceful pendants, also elegantly wrought. Among the decorations of this roof are the armorial bearings and badges of Henry VIII. and Wolsey. Two rows, a hundred feet in length, of portraits of renowned patrons, graduates and professors of Oxford are set high upon the side-walls. At the upper end of the hall hangs Holbein’s full-length portrait of Henry VIII. The swinish eyes, pendulous cheeks, pursed-up mouth and double chin would be easily caught by any caricaturist, and are as familiar to us as the jaunty set of his flat cap upon the side of his head.
Holbein was a courtier, likewise an artist, who never stooped to caricature. This, the most celebrated likeness of his master, was said to be true to life, yet so ingeniously flattered as to find favor in the sight of the original. Holbein was a master of this species of delicate homage where the rank of the subject made the exercise of it politic. He practised the accomplishment once too often when he painted the miniature of Anne of Cleves. Keeping these things in mind, we saw a bulky trunk capped by the head I have described, one short arm akimbo, the hand resting on his sword-belt, the feet planted far apart to maintain the balance of the bloated column and display the legs he never wearied of praising and stroking. He wears a laced doublet and trunk-hose; a short cloak, lined with ermine, falls back from his shoulders. The portrait-galleries of nations may be safely challenged to furnish a parallel in bestiality and swagger with this figure. Yet the widow of a good man, herself a refined and pious gentlewoman, became without coercion, his sixth queen, and colored with pleasure when, in the view of the court, he paid her the distinguished compliment of laying his ulcerous leg across her lap! Such reminiscences are not sovereign cures for Republicanism.
On one side of Henry hangs the daughter who proved her inheritance of his coarse nature and callous sensibilities, by vaunting her relationship to him who had disgraced and murdered her mother, and declared herself, by act of Parliament, illegitimate. Much is made in Elizabeth’s portraits of her ruff and tower of red hair, of her satin robe “set all over with aglets of two sorts,” of “pearl-work and tassels of gold,” of “costly lace and knotted buttons,” and very little of the pale, high-nosed face. Her eyes are small and black; her mouth has the “purse” of her father’s, her features are expressionless. At the other hand of King Henry is the butcher’s son, created by him Lord Cardinal, cozened, in a playfully rapacious humor, out of Hampton Palace, and cast off like a vile slug from the royal hand when he had had his day and served his monarch’s ends. Wolsey’s portraits are always taken in profile, to conceal the cast in the eye, which was his thorn in the flesh. It is a triumvirate that may well chain feet, eyes, and thought for a much longer time than we could spare for the whole college.
Across this end of the room runs a platform, raised a foot or two from the hall floor. A table, surrounded by chairs, is upon it. Here dine the titled students of Christ Church College (established by the butcher’s boy!)—the élite who sport the proverbial “tufts” upon their Oxford caps. Privileged “dons” preside at their meals, and Bluff King Hal swaggers in such divinity as doth hedge in a king—and his nobles—over their heads. The gentlemen-commoners are so fortunate as to sit nearest this hallowed dais, although upon the lower level of the refectory. The commonest drink small-beer from pewter tankards in the draughts and dimness (social) of the end nearest the door.