A decree had been issued by the “authorities” of a well-known College (it was in the pre-ritual days) that no undergraduate should present himself at morning chapel service with his scarlet hunting-coat underneath his surplice—a costume neither utterly secular nor completely ecclesiastical, and therefore a motley garb which it did not seem unjust or unreasonable to forbid in a sacred place. However, the order was implicitly obeyed at the ensuing matins, with solemn and suspicious exactitude. Alas! it was “the torrent’s smoothness ere it dash below;” for on the third morning, when the College servants arrived to take down the shutters and to light the fires, they discovered that “a change had come over the spirit of their dream.” Every one of the panelled doors throughout the Quadrangle of the Canons, the very seat of hoar and reverend authority, had been artistically painted during the night with the hue of Nimrod, a glowing hunter’s red! The gates were immediately closed and barred, and every member of the College convened before a grand divan of the Dons, to undergo immediate scrutiny on the origin of that which some of the undergraduates irreverently termed this ultra-observance of the rubric (their wit would be obscure to those who are unaware that rubrica, the etymon of our Church rules, signifies ruddy or red). The authors of this outrage escaped detection, although every painter in Oxford was summoned for examination, and all the dealers in colours and oils. It was subsequently whispered among the initiated that the artist, with his brushes and materials, had been brought down from London in a post-chaise-and-four, secretly introduced through an unnoted postern, and when his work was done, hospitably feasted and paid, and then sent back at full speed through the night to town.
Another “merrie jest,” but with a lowlier scene and an humbler dramatis personæ, raised the laugh of many a common-room and wine-party about the same period of my own undergraduate recollections. There was an ancient woman, blear-eyed and dim-sighted, “worn nature’s mournful monument,”[121] who had the far and wide repute of witchcraft among the College servants and the “baser sort” in the suburbs of the town; but in reality she was a mere “wreck of eld,” a harmless and helpless old creature, who stood at more than one college-gate for alms. Her well-known name was Nanny Heale. Her cottage, or rather decayed old hut, leaned against a steep mound by the castle-wall, and was so hugged in by the ground that, from a path along the ramparts a passer-by might cast a bird’s-eye look down Nanny’s chimney, and watch well her hearth and home. One winter evening certain frolicsome wights, out of College in search of a channel for the exuberant spirits of their age, were pacing, like Hardicanute, the wall east and west, when a glance down the witch’s chimney revealed a quaint and simple scene of humble life. There she crouched, close by the smoking embers, peering into the fire; and before her very nose there hung, just over the fire, a round iron vessel, called in the western counties a crock, filled to the brim with potatoes, and without a cover or lid. This utensil was suspended by its swing-handle to an iron bar, which went from side to side of the chimney-wall. To see and to assail the weak point in a field of battle is evermore the signal of a great captain. The onslaught was instantly planned. A rope, with a hook of iron at the end, was slowly and noiselessly lowered down the chimney, and, unnoted by poor Nanny’s blinking sight, the handle of the iron pot was softly grasped by the crook, and the vessel with its mealy contents began to ascend in silent majesty towards the upper air. Thoroughly roused by this unnatural and ungrateful demeanour of her lifelong companion of the hearth, old Nanny arose from her stool, peered anxiously upward to watch the ascent, and shouted at the top of her voice: “Massy ’pon my sinful soul! art gwain off—taties and all?”[122]
The vessel was quietly grasped, carried down in hot haste, and planted upright outside the cottage-door. A knock, given for the purpose, summoned the inmate, who hurried out and stumbled over, as she afterwards interpreted the event, her penitent crock.
“So then,” was her joyful greeting—“so then! theer’t come back to holt, then! Ay, ’tis a cold out o’ doors.”
Good came out of evil; for her story, which she rehearsed again and again, with all the energy and firm persuasion of truth, at last reached the ears of the parish authorities, and they, on inquiry into the evidence, forthwith decreed the addition of a shilling a-week to poor old Nanny’s allowance, on the plea that her faculties had quite failed her, and that she required greater charity because of her wandering mind. Yet the fact which she testified met the criterion of evidence demanded by Hume, for the event occurred within the experience of the witness herself.
It was by outbreaks of animal spirits such as these that the monotony of collegiate life in those days was relieved, for the University supplied but little excitement of mental kind. The battle-cries of High Church and Low Church—“that bleating of the sheep and that lowing of the oxen” which nowadays we hear—had not yet begun to rouse the Oxford mind;[123] and the only war about vestments that I recollect was our hot fierce struggle after a festive assembly to get first out into the lobby, and to grasp as a spoil the best caps and gowns one by one, until the unhappy freshman who arrived last had to put up with such ragged specimens of University costume as would hardly have satisfied the veriest Puritan for the performance of divine service.
Well, for us two—the subjects of this paper—the life of Oxford, with its freaks and its discipline, for a time was over; we had each passed the final examination so graphically named “the Great Go;” and that so as to be, what man so seldom is in this world, satisfied. In high heart, and with spirits running over, my friend and I appointed a tryst in a small watering-place on the north coast of Cornwall as a starting-point for a ride “all down the thundering shores of Bude and Boss.” In due time, and on a glorious summer day, we mounted our “Galloway nags,” and, like the knights of ancient ballad, “we laughed as we rode away.” The start was from Bude, and we made our first halt at a place twelve miles towards the south-west; a scene of general local renown, and which bears the parochial name of Warbstow Barrow. It stands upon a lofty hill that soars and swells upward into a vast circular mound, enthroned, as it were, amid a wild and boundless stretch of heathy and gorsy moorland. It was soothing to the sight to look down and around on the tapestry of purple and gold intermingled in natural woof, and flowing away in free undulation on every side. The view from this mountain-top was of wonderful extent, but wild, desolate, and bare. Beneath, on three sides, spread the moor, dotted here and there with a grey old church, that crouched toward the shadow of its low Saxon battlemented tower, as if it still sought shelter, after so many ages, from the perils of surrounding barbarism. On the fourth side swelled the sea. But the brow of this hill, like that of many others in the west, dropped into the shape of a mighty circular bowl—a kind of hollow valley turfed with grass, and surrounded by a rim; an amphitheatre, however, large enough to hold five thousand people at once.[124] On the flat level floor of this round crater, and in the exact midst, still swells up uninjured the outline of a viking’s grave, unlike other burial-mounds[125] so common in Cornwall and elsewhere,
“Where the brown barrow curves its sullen breast
Above the bones of some dead gentile’s soul,”[126]
and that on every hillside and plain. The shape of the great hillock at Warbstow is neither oval nor round, but survives the exact image of the dragon-ship of northern piracy and war.[127] Moreover, not the shape only, but the size of the ancient vessel of the dead, is perpetuated here. Measured and graduated by scale, this oblong, curved, and narrow grave would yield the dimensions of a boat of fifty tons, which would be about the weight of a Scandinavian serpent of the sea.
We saw that an effort had been made to open this barrow at one of the ends; but an old woman, whom we found at a cottage not far off, assured us “that they that tried it were soon forced to give up their digging and flee, for the thunders came for ’em, and the lightnings also.”