over the buttery-hatch of Christ-College, Cambridge, and, as Dr. Johnson insinuates in his Life, was the last Cambridge student so castigated in either university. The officer who performed this fundamental operation was Dr. Thomas Bainbrigge, the master of Christ’s College. But as it was at a later date that Dr. Ralph Bathurst carried his whip, according to our friend Tom’s showing, to surprise the scholars, it is therefore going a great length to give our “Prince of Poets” the sole merit of being the last smart fellow that issued from the halls of either Oxford or Cambridge, handsome as he was.
The following celebrated
EPIGRAM ON AN EPIGRAM,
Printed, says the Oxford Sausage, “from the original MSS. preserved in the ARCHIVES of the Jelly-bag Society,” is somewhere said to have been written by Dr. Ralph Bathurst, when an Oxford scholar:—
One day in Christ-church meadows walking,
Of poetry and such things talking,
Says Ralph, a merry wag,
An EPIGRAM, if right and good,
In all its circumstances should
Be like a JELLY-BAG.
Your simile, I own, is new,
But how dost make it out? quoth Hugh.
Quoth Ralph, I’ll tell you, friend:
Make it at top both wide and fit
To hold a budget full of wit,
And point it at the end.
TELL US WHAT YOU CAN’T DO?
A party of Oxford scholars were one evening carousing at the Star Inn, when a waggish student, a stranger to them, abruptly introduced himself, and seeing he was not “one of us,” they all began to quiz him. This put him upon his mettle, and besides boasting of other accomplishments, he told them, in plain terms, that he could write Greek or Latin Verses better, and was, in short, an over-match for them at any thing. Upon this, one of the party exclaimed, “You have told us a great deal of what you can do, tell us something you can’t do?” “Well,” he retorted, “I’ll tell you what I can’t do—I can’t pay my reckoning!” This sally won him a hearty welcome.