“Don't you often long to be in contact with some of the realities of life, with men and women who haven't their bread and butter already cut for them? How can a place be a university where no one can come up who hasn't two hundred a year or so to live on?”
“You ought to have been at Oxford four hundred years ago, when there were more thousands here than we have hundreds.”
“I don't see that. It must have been ten times as bad then.”
“Not at all. But it must have been a very different state of things from ours; they must have been almost all poor scholars, who worked for their living, or lived on next to nothing.”
“How do you really suppose they lived, though?”
“Oh, I don't know. But how should you like it now, if we had fifty poor scholars at St. Ambrose, besides us servitors—say ten tailors, ten shoemakers, and so on, who came up from love of learning, and attended all the lectures with us, and worked for the present undergraduates while they were hunting, and cricketing, and boating?”
“Well, I think it would be a very good thing—at any rate, we should save in tailors' bills.”
“Even if we didn't get our coats so well built,” said Hardy, laughing. “Well, Brown, you have a most catholic taste, and 'a capacity for talking in new truths', all the elements of a good Radical in you.”
“I tell you, I hate Radicals,” said Tom indignantly.
“Well, here we are in the town. I'll go round by 'The Choughs' and catch you up before you get to High Street.”