Part 12

They knocked, and there was no answer. They tried the door, and found that it was locked and barred. They smashed their way through it with sledge-hammers, entered, and waited for Mrs. Fell to go. But Mrs. Fell did not budge. Mrs. Fell even said that she had no intention of budging. When the Earl of Pembroke and Montgomery argued with her, she argued back with equal vigour; and there was nothing for it but to bid the soldiers act. They strapped Mrs. Fell into a chair, and they strapped all the little Fells on to boards, and they lifted their living, screaming, and protesting loads, and carried them out, and deposited them in the middle of Tom Quad, where they remained until three of the canons came to the rescue, and conducted them to a place of refuge in a neighbouring apothecary’s house. It may be doubted whether Tom Quad has ever witnessed so strange a scene, before or since.

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Enough of the picturesque, however. We must next turn to personalities; and, as we find more famous men among Deans of Christ Church than among the Heads of any of the other Houses, we may fitly begin by saying something about some of them in the Mainly about People style. Dr. Samuel Fell’s son John has a fair title to come first. A popular rhyme preserves his memory, and the story of that rhyme must be told.

This second Dr. Fell was one of the first of the deans to take not only himself but his duties seriously. He insisted that Christ Church men should read, and also that they should wear academic dress; he raised the standard of examinations, and was strict in all matters of discipline. As he ruled in the loose days of the Restoration, he inevitably had trouble with some of the livelier spirits; and one of the liveliest of the recalcitrant was Tom Brown, an author and wit of some note in his day, though now forgotten. Tom Brown, having offended, was to be sent down; but, at the last moment, the Dean partially relented. He handed Tom Brown Martial’s epigram beginning “_Non amo te, Sabidi_,” and promised to allow him to remain in residence if he could extemporise a satisfactory English version of it. Whereupon Tom Brown improvised the familiar quatrain:

“I do not love thee, Dr. Fell, The reason why I cannot tell, But this I know, and know full well, I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.”

Hardly less famous is Aldrich—equally famous, as a logician, as a writer of catches, and as a smoker. His Logic remained the textbook in common use at Oxford for more than two centuries. Concerning his addiction to tobacco a story is told of a bet made that he would be found smoking at ten o’clock in the morning—a bet lost because, at the moment when the clock struck, he was not puffing at his pipe, but refilling it. One of his most popular catches was specially composed for the use of smokers, being so arranged as to give each singer a breathing time in which to keep his pipe alight. Moreover, much as the Dean loved his pipe, he loved his bowl no less; and he was the author of a Latin epigram, enumerating five excuses for the glass:

“Si bene quid memini, sunt causæ quinque bibendi: Hospitis adventus, præsens sitis atque futura, Aut vini bonitas, aut quælibet altera causa.”

Aldrich’s successor was Atterbury, who had been a tutor under him; and Atterbury was the most brilliant of the Oxford representatives in the famous “Battle of the Books” concerning the authenticity of the “Epistles of Phalaris.” The ultimate victory in that encounter rested, of course, with Bentley of Trinity, Cambridge, for the Oxford case had not a leg to stand upon; but the Christ Church wits were at least successful in obscuring the issue and throwing dust in the eyes of their contemporaries: a cheap success, no doubt, but better than none at all. It is a pretty story; but the reader who is curious about it must be referred to Macaulay or Jebb, for there remain three other deans with clamorous claims upon our space.

Cyril Jackson is the greatest of them. He had been the tutor of the Regent and his brothers, who had “imbibed” from him, according to his biographer, “that elevation of sentiment, that pride of soul, and that generosity of spirit which teaches them, as it were innately, to look down upon everything which bears the semblance of mean, low, or sordid feeling.” In that eulogy, no doubt, the exaggerations of the courtier are combined with those of the necrologist; but it was not Cyril Jackson’s fault if the lovers of Mrs. Fitzherbert and Mary Ann Clarke failed to imbibe all the virtues which one could wish them to have displayed. He was an excellent tutor and an admirable Dean, who raised the College to a pitch of efficiency never before attained. He joined with Parsons of Balliol and Eveleigh of Oriel in originating honours examinations, and his own men did strikingly well in them. Sir Robert Peel was one of his double-firsts. He was in correspondence with Sir Robert at the beginning of his public career, and advised him to perfect his oratorical style “by the continual reading of Homer.”

His courtly dignity may be said to have laid the foundation of the Christ Church manner—of the manner, at all events, which one associates with the Deans of Christ Church. They, more than the Heads of any other Houses, have aimed at fulfilling the ideal of the “magnificent man” of Aristotle’s “Ethics”—with what success those who have seen the towering figure of Dean Liddell, filling the aisles of the cathedral with the pageant of his presence, are aware. This personal majesty, it is understood, is rather the appanage of the office than the accidental attribute of any individual; and the serene and well-warranted self-sufficiency of Cyril Jackson, imitated, consciously or unconsciously, by his successors, is its source.

Cyril Jackson was so satisfied with his position that he refused all offers of ecclesiastical preferment. Probably he felt that no other office could be more exalted than that which he held and adorned. At all events he declined more than one bishopric, and his reply to one of the offers is historical. “_Nolo episcopari._ Try my brother Bill; he’ll take it.” But he did not, on the other hand, cling to the office from which he was unwilling to be promoted. He retired from it, at the age of sixty-three, when his reputation was at its highest, and spent his last years quietly in the country. Some Latin elegiacs in which he expressed his preference for the simple life are too delightful not to be quoted:

“Si mihi, si liceat traducere leniter ævum, Non pompam, nec opes, nec mihi regna peto Vellem ut divini pandens mysteria verbi, Vitam in secreto rure quietus agam. Curtatis decimis, modicoque beatus agello, Virtutæ et pura sim pietate sacer.”

Dean Hall, who succeeded, may be passed over. Dean Smith, who came next, was known as “Presence of mind Smith.” While an undergraduate, it was said, he had gone boating, and had returned alone. His companion, he explained, had fallen into the river, and had clung to the side of the boat. “Neither of us,” Smith said, “could swim; and if I had not, with great presence of mind, hit him on the head with the boat-hook, _both_ of us would have been drowned.” That story, however, is only repeated, as the journalists say, “with reserve.” Having repeated it, one passes on to Gaisford, whose memory has left more lasting traces.

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Gaisford was a protégé of Cyril Jackson, who is said to have said to him: “You will never be a gentleman, but you may succeed with certainty as a scholar.” That he was not, at any rate, a man of the world, may be inferred from his reply to the letter in which Lord Liverpool offered him the Regius Professorship of Greek. “My lord,” he wrote bluntly, “I have received your letter and accede to its contents. Yours, &c.” That he succeeded as a scholar is attested by the fact that when he went to Germany and called on Dindorf, the great Teuton, though he had never been introduced to him, fell on his neck, and kissed him on both cheeks.

Discipline, however, did not flourish in Gaisford’s time, or in that of his immediate predecessors, as it had flourished in the time of the great Cyril. This was the period in which an undergraduate was killed in a “rag”—his back broken across a chair by the too athletic Lord Hillsborough, he who, together with Peard of Brasenose (Garibaldi’s Englishman), cleared the streets of bargees in “town and gown rows.” This was also the period when the Marquis of Waterford and his company painted the door of the Deanery, and the doors of the canons’ residences, red, because of the objection taken to their hunting in pink. It was the period, too, when the flowers were dug up out of the Deanery garden and scattered about the quad—whence the expression “planting Peckwater” as a picturesque synonym for a Christ Church rag. It was the period, finally, when the statue of Mercury, formerly standing in the centre of the fountain in Tom Quad, was dressed in the robes of a Doctor of Divinity. The thing happened in the dead of winter, when the water in the fountain was frozen hard. After the deed had been done, the ice was broken, so that none could get to Mercury without wading through freezing water, five feet deep.

Though these things happened, however, there was a dignity about Gaisford, none the less. It came out when he received a letter beginning: “The Dean of Oriel presents his compliments to the Dean of Christ Church”; on which communication Gaisford’s classical comment was “Alexander the coppersmith sends greeting to Alexander the Great!” It came out again in the sermon in which he exhorted his congregation to the study of the Greek language on the ground that a knowledge of that tongue would enable them “not only to read the oracles of God in the original, but also to look down with contempt upon the vulgar herd.”

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Leaving the deans, and turning to the undergraduates, one hardly knows where to begin; for the great names are as thick as bilberries, and belong to every department of activity. One might begin a very miscellaneous list with the names of Hakluyt, John Locke the philosopher, and William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania—a list which does not become any the less miscellaneous by the addition of the names of John and Charles Wesley, and Canon Liddon. Or one may recall that Christ Church has educated three successive Viceroys of India in Lords Dalhousie, Canning, and Elgin, and three successive Premiers in Gladstone and Lords Salisbury and Rosebery, and various other Prime Ministers, including Lord Liverpool, and George Canning, and Sir Robert Peel.

Peel, it is to be remembered, was the first Christ Church man to take a double first; and he took it with remarkable _éclat_. The _viva voce_ part of the examination was much more important in those days than in these. Theoretically it still takes place in the presence of spectators; but the benches are usually empty. Then there often were crowded houses to listen to the entertainment; and the examining of Peel was a great occasion, like a first night at an important theatre. There was “standing room only”; and when the examinee distinguished himself there was “loud and prolonged applause,” if not actually an _encore_ and a “call.” One wonders whether there were any who divined the verbosity of the future orator when they heard him render _suave_ in _suave mari magno_, “It is a source of gratification.”

Yet Peel, prematurely solemn as he was, could sometimes unbend, and once played a practical joke. The victim of it was a timorous freshman, known to be a scholar of poor quality. The unhappy youth received a message to the effect that the Vice-Chancellor, having heard of his ignorance, and desiring to test it, proposed to examine him privately, in his rooms, in the Greek Testament. The supposed Vice-Chancellor, who duly visited him, was Peel in disguise, attended by a scout disguised as an Esquire Bedell. Peel put the freshman through his paces, denounced his blunders in a severe tone of voice, and told him that he would probably be expelled. The freshman, so the story concludes, fled from the College without waiting for the confirmation of this sentence of expulsion, and was never heard of again.

Gladstone, who was to be so ardent a disciple of Peel in many things, imitated him, in the first instance, by taking a double first—he was one of the five first-class men in both the classical and mathematical lists; but his failures are quite as interesting as his successes. He was beaten for a Divinity Prize by Martin Farquhar Tupper, the proverbial philosopher, whose acquaintance he had made as the result of their common habit of attending the Communion Service at the Cathedral. He also competed unsuccessfully for the Ireland; and he has related how one of the examiners explained his defeat to him. “He abused me,” he says, “for my essay, on which he said his own memorandum was ‘desultory beyond belief’; also for throwing dust in the examiners’ eyes, like a man who, when asked who wrote ‘God save the King?’ replied, ‘Thompson wrote “Rule, Britannia.”’”

That, it will be allowed, was characteristic; and there is something not less characteristic in the story which Lord Morley tells of his “Greats” examination:

“The excitement,” Lord Morley writes, “reached its climax when the examiner, after testing his knowledge of some point of theology, said: ‘We will now leave that part of the subject,’ and the candidate, carried away by his interest in the subject, answered: ‘No, sir; if you please, we will not leave it yet.’”

One could tell other stories, of course, if there were room for them; but Gladstone’s life at Oxford was not, except for his success in the schools, either sensational or eventful. His diary shows that he gave, or went to, a wine-party nearly every night; that he was very pleased with himself when he succeeded in making a speech of three-quarters of an hour’s duration at the Union; and that he “haunted sermons,” as the Consistory of Geneva ordered the Prisoner of Chillon to do. That is practically all that there is to be said; but one may conclude by quoting Gladstone’s mature opinion of his University. “Oxford,” he wrote, two generations later, “had rather tended to hide from me the great fact that liberty is a great and precious gift of God, and that human excellence cannot grow up in a nation without it.”

Oxford, it is not to be denied, does sometimes tend thus to confound and obscure the human spirit. That is one of the defects of the qualities of its atmosphere. It not only clings to lost causes—it gets stuck to them, as it were with glue; and it allows reactionary obscurantists like Pusey—to take the first Christ Church instance that occurs—to have too much to say. Gladstone evidently came to feel that, in later life, when he had left the “weeds,” as he called them, of ecclesiasticism behind him. But his deep love for his University was never affected by the discovery. To say of any one, he once declared, that he was “a typically Oxford man” was to pay him the highest possible compliment; and it will readily be believed that that is not a proposition which this work is written to dispute.

TRINITY COLLEGE

Founded with the spoils of monasteries—The sympathy of Queen Elizabeth—President Kettell—His objection to long hair—His trouble with the Court ladies during the Civil War—Dr. Johnson’s love of the College—The expulsion of Walter Savage Landor—Newman in his evangelical days—The Gentlemen Adventurers—Richard Burton’s revolt against discipline.

Trinity was founded with the spoils of monasteries, in 1554; and the property of the “buzzing monks” was thus put to better uses than ever before. The founder, Sir Thomas Pope, was Princess Elizabeth’s guardian at Hatfield, in Queen Mary’s reign; and he interested the Princess in his educational enterprise. It is on record that our virgin ruler interceded on behalf of two early Fellows of Trinity who had got out of the College by night by climbing over the wall—for what purpose the chronicler does not relate. They had been expelled; but—“at my Lady Elizabeth her Grace’s desire”—they were readmitted on payment of a fine.

[Illustration: TRINITY COLLEGE.

[To face p. 226.]

The College, though a small one, and not very richly endowed, has always had a claim to distinction. If one cannot say of it, as one can of some of the other colleges, that, at a given moment, it stood for Oxford, supplying the mind, or the energy, which set the mass in motion, one can, at least, say that it preserved its intellectual activity in times of sloth, and has an exceptionally long list of illustrious names on its books—largely, perhaps, because it has been less hampered than some other colleges by “close scholarships” and provisions for showing preference to “founders’ kin.” It has educated statesmen like the Earl of Chatham and Lord North; such prominent Parliament men as Ludlow and Ireton; poets of varying degrees of merit from Elkanah Settle to Walter Savage Landor; divines, of whom John Henry Newman is the most famous; a number of gentlemen adventurers, of whom more presently; a number of men of letters, among whom Mr. Quiller Couch must on no account be overlooked.

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In the case of so small a College maintaining so high a standard, one naturally looks for Presidents of commanding personality; and one finds such a President in Dr. Kettell, who flourished in the reign of Charles I., and whose memory is still preserved by Kettell Hall in the Broad. Dr. Kettell, it is recorded, “had a very venerable person and was an excellent governor”; and the chronicle of his governorship is happily full of those picturesque details which make it interesting to realise what the academic life of the past was like.

In his gown and surplice and hood, he had, says Aubrey, “a terrible, gigantic aspect with his sharp grey eyes”; but the impressiveness of his appearance must have been of a different order when he was seen on horseback, on Sundays, riding out to preach at Garsington, “with his boy Ralph before him, with a leg of mutton and some College bread.” He loved his College, and lived for it, and, where deeds of charity were concerned, let not his right hand know what his left hand did. One of the happy deeds done by his left hand was to thrust money secretly in at the windows of students whom he knew to be poor; and one of his modes of promoting sobriety was to see that the Trinity beer was the best in Oxford, so that no Trinity man should have any excuse for visiting a tavern.

One of the best known of his idiosyncrasies was his objection to long hair; for the wearing of long hair was not, as is sometimes carelessly assumed, first introduced into Oxford by the æsthetes. Whereas they wore their hair long as a mark of the sensibility of their souls, the imitators of the Cavaliers had done so, long before them, in vanity, and for the purpose of proving themselves to be men of fashion. President Kettell was “irreconcilable” to the habit. He went about with a pair of scissors for the purpose of cutting men’s hair when he found it offensively long; and when he happened not to have his scissors with him, he used a knife.

“I remember,” says Aubrey, “he cut Mr. Radford’s hair with the knife that chips the bread on the buttery hatch, and then he sang,

“‘And was not Grim the collier finely trimm’d? Tonedi, Tonedi.’”

That was at dinner in hall—a curious incident; but times have changed, and many things happened at Oxford in the reign of Charles I. which happen there no longer. Probably, too, when the Court came to Oxford at the beginning of the Civil War, the President’s hostility to long hair relaxed. His principal trouble then was with the Court ladies who attended Divine services in the Trinity chapel, “half-dressed,” to the great scandal of the undergraduates, and walked in the Trinity Grove with their gallants. Some of them, it seems, used to play the lute there—a disconcertingly unacademical proceeding, most disadvantageous to discipline; and the climax was reached when two specially audacious ladies—“my Lady Isabella Thynne and fine Mistress Fenshawe, her great and intimate friend”—carried frivolity to the point of calling on the President.

That, indeed, is a scene worth picturing: on the one hand the “Oxford character,” neither accustomed to the society of ladies nor desirous of it, a man of dignity and authority, though unpolished, very wroth at the intrusion of “minxes” in the paths of academic peace; on the other hand high-spirited and mischievous beauties, to whom great academic names were nothing and great academic potentates were only so many “musty old professors.” Their idea, apparently, was to ogle the President—to make him flirt with them—and, failing that, to overwhelm him with satirical reproaches as a cross-grained old gentleman. And, no doubt, the President was cross-grained, and entirely indisposed to flirt; but he was a match for his visitors none the less.

“Madam,” he said, addressing himself to Mistress Fenshawe, “your husband and father I bred up here, and I knew your grandfather. I know you to be a gentlewoman, and I will not say you are a baggage; but get you gone for a very woman!”

And, so speaking, he drove the giggling intruders from his presence, as summarily as Benjamin Jowett, at a later date, expelled a deputation of the Balliol washerwomen from the Master’s lodge. He makes a characteristic exit speech in that scene, and leaves us free to call up ghosts of other men.

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The ghost of Dr. Johnson would readily appear if called. He stayed at Kettell Hall while working at his Dictionary; he said that he would rather live at Trinity than anywhere else at Oxford; his young friends Bennet Langton and Topham Beauclerk were both Trinity men. Dr. Johnson, however, will be waiting for us when we come to speak of Pembroke; so we may put him on one side, and recall the memory of the greatest of the Trinity poets, Walter Savage Landor. He was one of the many Oxford poets who, like Shelley and Swinburne, have left the University without a degree; and his manner of leaving, like Shelley’s, was violent, and the result of variance with the dons.