After this, my popularity, not only in the College, but throughout the University, became so vast, that the difficulty was to get a bit of victuals in my own room. All my friends enjoyed my simplicity of mind, and Maiden Lane views of the world; which were not at all Socratic, Platonic, Stoic, nor even Academic. Moreover, they found me so glad to be taught, and so grateful, and unpretending, that they taught me every kind of light learning they knew; so that I got on wonderfully, in every study, never contemplated by Founders, and Benefactors.
Happily indeed for me, athletic contests were as yet most crude; otherwise my speed of foot before the wind would have hurried me into a world of troubles. We had a few College races, and even some rudiments of University work; but as yet nothing powerful, and glorious. How should I have felt, after being chosen to run against Cambridge, for the hundred yards, the quarter of a mile, and the hurdle race, if there had been a stiff wind blowing in my teeth, at the starting-post? All this would have probably fallen upon me, if the athletic contests had then been in vogue; and I might have won everlasting fame, or base disgrace for ever.
As it was, I believed—though the whole is now forgotten—that I had established deathless fame, by steering the Oxford boat three times to victory over Cambridge. It was natural perhaps that I should be chosen for this distinguished honour, as the coxswain of the first crew on the Isis, and nearly two stone lighter than any other coxswain on the river, while looking as big as bow almost, and with some crews bigger. Yet from my low self-estimate, I was taken by surprise, when the captain of the University Boat-club wrote to me, and even begged me, for the sake of our University (which had been beaten three years running) to accept the office. Will a duck swim, will a dog bark, will a frog hop, will a Liberal run away? Without a moment's thought, I accepted; and thus began a course of triumphs for the stronger colour, which made the very cabmen shy of mounting the light-blue rosette.
CHAPTER XXII. HEREDITARY LAWS.
What man has not described, or made believe to be describing, the race which the journals delight to call the "Inter-University Contest"? What marvel, that we have sold our birth-right to an acephalous mollusk, when the simple use of the tongue has passed into such headless mongreldom? Self-consciousness compels such creatures to befoul their origin.
I, Tommy Upmore, am not a bit better than any of my neighbours; not half so good as most of them—for I know my own faults, and I don't know theirs, or at any rate don't want to know them—but what should I be, if I hearkened to a foe, who takes out of me every gift of God, and turns me adrift, to act by nothing but the standard, apes have formed for me? "Truth is great, and shall prevail," he shouts; and to show her greatness, proves that she never did exist till now.
Happily, this stuff never troubled us, while I was at Oxford. We looked upon the chosen spirits of three thousand years, and more, as likelier to have left things worthy of our heed and sequence, than the half-taught men who spring up now, and by dint of smashing make a row. The pudor, and verecundia, of youth were still existing; and we looked up to our College Tutors, and University Lecturers,—men who had made a life-long study of the work they dealt with, who attempted not to gloze our minds with universal smattering, but forced us to learn of some few subjects what is knowledge, and what is not. And this was the distinction Mr. Cope had first tried to drive into me:
But no man, not di-cephalous—as some of our ancestors have been, according to the "Scientists"—can manage to serve two masters well; and being thus apprenticed to the river, I neglected the Aonian heights. My mother believed, and Mr. Cope assisted her in believing, that I might have done very well in the Schools; though not so grandly as Bill Chumps. But I passed all examinations fairly, with my solid grounding, and in the final one obtained what was called "an honorary fourth." This satisfied my ambition; though some cuts at me have been made about it, by people who knew no better.