“My Lord,” replied the sage, “nothing is more easy than to say Luther is mistaken: nothing more difficult than to prove him so.”
VIR EGREGIE DOCTUS,
Was the soubriquet conferred upon the celebrated Etonian, Cantab, Reformer, Provost of King’s College, and Bishop of Hereford, Dr. Edward Fox, by the learned Bishop Godwin. Another Etonian and Cantab, Dr. Aldrich, Bishop of Carlisle, received from Erasmus, when young, the equally just and elegant compliment of
“BLANDÆ ELOQUENTIÆ JUVENEM.”
A POINT OF ETIQUETTE.
Many humorous stories are told of the absurd height to which the observance of etiquette has been carried at both Oxford and Cambridge. In my time, you might meet a good fellow at a wine party, crack your joke with him, hob-nob, &c., but, unless introduced, you would have been stared at with the most vacant wonderment if you attempted to recognise him next day. It is told of men of both universities, that a scholar walking on the banks of the Isis, or Cam, fell into the river, and was in the act of drowning, when another son of Alma-Mater came up, and observing his perilous situation, exclaimed, “What a pity it is I have not the honour of knowing the gentleman, that I might save him!” One version of the story runs, that the said scholars met by accident on the banks of the Nile or Ganges, I forget which, when the catastrophe took place; we may, therefore, very easily imagine the presence of either a crocodile or an alligator to complete the group.
Wood, in his Annals of Oxford, has the following anecdote of
THE VALUE OF A SYLLABLE.
“The masters of olden time at Athens, and afterwards at Oxford, were called Sophi, and the scholars Sophistæ; but the masters taking it in scorn that the scholars should have a larger name than they, called themselves Philosophi,—that is, lovers of science, and so got the advantage of the scholars by one syllable.” Every body has heard of Foote’s celebrated motto for a tailor friend of his, about to sport his coat of arms,—“List, list, O list!” But every body has not heard, probably, though it is noticed in his memoir, extant in Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes, that the learned Cambridge divine and antiquary, Dr. Cocks Macro, having applied to a Cambridge acquaintance for an appropriate motto to his coat of arms, was pithily answered with