Part 16

WORCESTER COLLEGE

Early history of the buildings—Gloucester College—A College for Benedictines—Its dissolution—Becomes the Bishop’s Palace—Gloucester Hall—Endowment of Worcester College—Remote situation of Worcester—Stories bearing thereupon—Notable Worcester men—Samuel Foote—Thomas de Quincey—Henry Kingsley—F. W. Newman—Dean Burgon—Burgon’s famous Newdigate.

The buildings and the site of what is now Worcester College have in their time played many parts.

First of all, in the very early days, a year after the foundation of Merton, Gloucester College was instituted there. It was a monastic establishment for the benefit of Benedictines who wanted to “live properly” at Oxford, in cells, and with facilities for praise and prayer, instead of mixing with the common herd in inns or lodgings; but abuses crept in, and the monks ceased to live as properly as founders and benefactors could have wished. We read of monks admonished for “noctivagation,” for the haunting of taverns, for theft, and for assault and battery, to say nothing of the neglect of the Lenten fast. On one occasion, it is recorded, “four turbulent Benedictines” tried to kill the Proctor; and a State Paper of 1539 exposes the fact that another Benedictine, with a bookseller to help him, got through “twenty legs of mutton, five rounds of beef, and six capons” between Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.

[Illustration: WORCESTER COLLEGE.

[To face p. 289.]

The dissolution of the monasteries implied, of course, the dissolution of Gloucester College as its corollary. It served, for a time, as a Palace for the Bishop of Oxford, but was afterwards separated from the see and turned into Gloucester Hall—a Hall in which, at first, not only students, but also miscellaneous lodgers were allowed to have rooms. Even women were permitted to reside within its walls; and it had a bad name as a place of refuge for Papists, open or concealed. It prospered under these conditions for a season, but, after the Restoration, fell upon evil days. There came a time when there were absolutely no undergraduates in residence, when the grass overgrew the paths, when the Principal, sitting alone in his glory, was distrained upon for arrears of taxes, and when burglars broke into the Hall and carried off the plate.

In William III.’s reign, however, under the principalship of Benjamin Woodroffe, the Hall pulled up again. There was an attempt to turn it into a special college for Greek students from Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem—a kind of precedent, though an imperfect one, for the endowment of the Rhodes Scholars. The experiment failed—partly for lack of funds, and partly because the Principal offended his Oriental pupils by trying to proselytise them; but Gloucester Hall was not involved in the collapse, for Woodroffe had other irons in the fire. He found a benefactor in Sir Thomas Cookes, who was proposing to bequeath £10,000 to Oxford; and this £10,000 was devoted, after long negotiations, to the transformation of Gloucester Hall into Worcester College in 1714.

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If Worcester is more famous for one thing than another, it is for its remoteness from the centres of academical activity; and there are plenty of stories bearing on this branch of the subject. Letters have been addressed to Worcester College, _near_ Oxford; the nickname of Botany Bay has been bestowed. A member of Gloucester Hall was once excused for being late at a ceremony at Saint Mary’s “because of the distance, and, the wind being against him, he could not hear the bell.” A Worcester Proctor, summoning offending undergraduates to his presence at a later period, had to find a means of coping with similar excuses. The men whom he proctorised, and bade call on him, always made a point of asking him where Worcester was; and when they kept the appointment, they generally began with: “I’m so sorry, sir. I fear I’m behind my time; but the fact is I had the greatest difficulty in finding my way. I made ever so many inquiries, but no one was able to direct me.”

And, if Worcester seems remote now that one can approach it on a tramcar by way of Beaumont Street, it must have seemed much more remote in the old days before Beaumont Street was made. A graphic picture has been preserved of Provost Landon, as Vice-Chancellor, going and coming with difficulty. Preceded, Coxe tells us, by his bedels with their gold and silver maces, he proceeded:

“through Gloucester Green, then the acknowledged site of the pig-market, and down the whole length of Friars’ Entry, at the risk of being besprinkled by trundled mops in those straits of Thermopylæ, of stumbling over buckets, knocking over children, of catching the rinsings of basins, and ducking under linen lines suspended across from the opposite houses.”

Enough, however, of that ancient gibe. We will next note that Worcester, the only Oxford college founded in the eighteenth century, is able to furnish a striking illustration of the academic manners and customs of that age.

What reading men thought of Oxford, and how they behaved themselves there, in the eighteenth century, we have already remarked in the cases of Adam Smith of Balliol, Gibbon of Magdalen, Joseph Butler of Oriel, and Jeremy Bentham of Queen’s. The attitude and deportment of men of a different type is illustrated by the career of Foote of Worcester, who was no other than Samuel Foote the comedian.

His great-grandfather having been the founder’s second cousin, Foote put in a claim to a scholarship as founder’s kin. The claim, after consideration, was allowed. He came into residence in 1737, and devoted the whole of his time to the neglect of his duties and the defiance of the dons. He acted Punch through the streets of Oxford. Finding a bell-rope hanging in a church porch which opened on a field in which cattle were turned out to graze, he tied hay round it, with the result that a hungry cow, in her attempts to eat the hay, set the bell tolling at the dead of night, and the Provost, half fearing that supernatural agencies were at work, sat up, with the sexton, into the small hours, to solve the mystery.

He solved it, and Oxford laughed at him. He sent for Foote and reprimanded him; but Foote was insolent, after an ingenious fashion of his own.

The Provost, Dr. Gower, was a pompous and pedantic person who picked his words carefully and preferred polysyllabic vocables to any others; and Foote appeared before him carrying an enormous dictionary under his arm. The reprimand began; but, as soon as a long word occurred, Foote begged the Provost to stop.

“One moment, if you please, sir. You said ‘ebullitions,’ I think? It was ‘ebullitions,’ was it not? ‘Ebullitions’ means—ah, yes, I have it. Now, if you will continue, sir, I am at your service.”

And so forth. As often as the Provost used a word of more than ordinary length, Foote, with a gravely submissive and apologetic air, arrested the harangue by pleading ignorance of its meaning, searched for it in the lexicon, read out the definition, and repeated his formula: “Ah, yes, I see. That means—— Now I am once more ready, sir, and if you will please proceed——”

So that the lecture was turned into a farce; and Foote might perfectly well have been sent down for so transmuting it, though, as a matter of fact, his disappearance was due to an offence of a different character.

He kept joyous company, and he kept it openly. In fact, he was one day discovered driving a gay and painted “actress” through the streets of Oxford, on the box seat of a coach and six—himself attired in garments so far removed from the “subfusc” that he compelled the attention of all beholders. It was useless for him, this time, to try to brazen matters out with the help of a dictionary; and the entry regarding his conduct in the College Register runs as follows:

“Whereas Samuel Foote, Scholar of Worcester College, by a long course of ill-behaviour has rendered himself obnoxious to frequent censures of the society publick and private, and having whilst he was under censure for lying out of college insolently and presumptuously withdrawn himself and refused to answer to several heinous crimes objected to him, though duly cited by the Provost by an instrument in form, in not appearing to the said citation for the above-mentioned reasons, his scholarship is declared void, and he is hereby deprived of all benefit and advantage of his said scholarship.”

So Samuel Foote departed, though he does not seem to have been actually expelled, and, in due course, became a public buffoon—which was what he was most fitted to become; and though one would not venture to say, with the example of Mr. Arthur Bourchier before one, that Oxford is no proper place for comedians, it can hardly be denied that Oxford—even eighteenth-century Oxford—was no proper place for Samuel Foote.

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Our next interesting name is that of Thomas de Quincey, essayist and opium-eater.

His mother sent him up in 1803, with fifty guineas in his pocket, and liberty to choose his own college. Professor Saintsbury, speaking from the lofty standpoint of Merton, protests that wise guardians would have counselled him to go anywhere rather than to Worcester; but one does not quite know why. He was poor, and Worcester was one of the cheaper colleges. In the matter of “caution money,” in particular, it let its members off lightly. That fact appears to have been the determining consideration; and de Quincey had too many queer experiences behind him to be likely, in any case, or at any college, to acquire the Oxford manner, and settle down into a typical Oxonian.

He had run away from school and wandered about Wales, with a duodecimo Euripides in his pocket, camping out on the hillsides in a tent, which he carried on his back during the day. He had starved in a Soho lodging and rubbed shoulders with the submerged tenth. After that, it was hardly to be expected that he would have either the notions or the behaviour of the ordinary public schoolboy who blossoms into the average University man. There were three sets for him to choose among—sets known respectively, according to the manner of their lives, as the Saints, the Sinners, and the Smilers; but though he sat with the Smilers—with the men, that is to say, who affected to be studious without being glum—in hall, his soul dwelt almost as far apart from them as from the others. “I,” he has written, “whose disease was to meditate too much and observe too little, upon my first entrance upon college life, was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings I had witnessed in London.”

It was while at Worcester, too, that de Quincey first took to opium, as a remedy against neuralgia, and continued to take it because he liked it, and came to believe that “here was the secret of happiness about which philosophers had disputed for so many ages.” And the opium habit, of course, like the more modern morphia habit, tends to make a man self-sufficing and uncompanionable, and careless of clean collars and other particularities of the toilet; and there are stories to show that that was its effect upon de Quincey.

“I neglected my dress habitually,” he says, “and wore my clothes till they were threadbare, partly under the belief that my gown would conceal defects, more from indisposition to bestow on a tailor what I had destined for a bookseller. At length, however, an official person sent me a message on the subject. This, however, was disregarded, and one day I discovered that I had no waistcoat that was not torn or otherwise dilapidated, whereupon, buttoning my coat to the throat and drawing my gown close about me, I went into hall.”

And, of course, undergraduate opinion was not going to stand that sort of thing even from a man of genius. It was an occasion for the Smilers to smile, and they smiled—and also chaffed. Evidently, they said, de Quincey had seen the Order in Council, printed in the _Gazette_, interdicting the use of waistcoats. It would be a good idea if it were followed by another Order interdicting the use of trousers. Trousers were such costly garments, and so very troublesome to put on. Et cetera, et cetera, until de Quincey learnt his lesson.

Most curious also was de Quincey’s conduct when the time came for him to try to satisfy the examiners. He handed in remarkably good papers. One of the examiners spoke of him to one of the Worcester tutors as “the cleverest man I ever met with.” But then, just as he seemed about to triumph, he “scratched” and disappeared. It has been suggested that he had some imaginary grudge against the examiners; but it seems more likely that his nerves gave way before the prospect of the _viva voce_. It was not in him to face the trial with the theatrical self-assurance of Sir Robert Peel. He feared that his hair would stand up and his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. So, without saying anything to any one, he turned and fled; and for that incident also the opium was probably responsible.

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The interest of the remarkable Worcester names which remain to be mentioned is chiefly theological.

Among novelists, indeed, the College educated Henry Kingsley; but of him little is recorded except that he was a boating man, and presented the College with a pair of silver oars, to be competed for. He was by way of being the bad boy of the Kingsley family, though most critics incline to think that he was more inspired than his famous and earnest brother Charles. Among economists, again, the College can boast of both Bonamy Price, who was Arnold’s favourite pupil at Laleham and one of his assistant masters at Rugby, and of Thorold Rogers, who quitted Holy Orders, wrote a “History of Prices,” and was distinguished for his Aristophanic humour. People are interested in them up to a point; but they are more interested in F. W. Newman and Dean Burgon.

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F. W. Newman, of course, was the famous Cardinal’s brilliant younger brother—the grave dialectician who shocked the world, at a time when it was more easily shocked than it is at present, by writing “Phases of Faith.” He fought his way through theology as grimly as men fight their way through the “Ethics,” and, starting from the Evangelical standpoint, ultimately arrived at a creed of which one need say no more than that its exceeding vagueness did not prevent him from being exceedingly earnest about it.

How, in the days of his early orthodoxy, he went out, together with a dentist and a stonemason, as a missionary to Baghdad; how he and the dentist and the stonemason sang hymns together on the ship which conveyed them to the scene of their labours; how he was chased by a mob for distributing copies of the New Testament in a Mohammedan centre; how he was impressed by the remark of an Aleppo carpenter that the English people, though skilled in the mechanical arts, were lacking in spiritual insight; how he came to the conclusion that his hymn-singing was making him ridiculous; how he found it impossible to speak the evangelical jargon of his associates; how he quarrelled with the dentist and the stonemason, and separated from them—all these matters may be studied by the curious in his biography. It is not on account of any of these exploits that Worcester is proud of him. Worcester’s pride depends upon the fact that he is, so far as is known, the only undergraduate to whom the Public Examiners ever made a present of books in order to testify to their appreciation of his exceptional attainments.

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Similarly with Burgon. Though he was a theologian, his theology has nothing to do with Worcester, and Worcester has nothing to do with his theology. His principal contribution to theological thought was his famous criticism of Darwin’s “Descent of Man.” For his own part, he said, he was quite content to look for his first parents in the Garden of Eden; but if his opponents preferred to look for theirs in the Zoological Gardens, they were perfectly welcome to do so. That is the _mot_ which people generally have in mind when they say of Burgon that buffoonery was his forte and piety his foible. Perhaps the one epigram fairly warrants the other; but the fame of both epigrams is eclipsed by the fame of Burgon’s Newdigate.

He won that prize for English verse in his last year, having been beaten in previous years by Matthew Arnold and Principal Shairp; and it is hardly too much to say that his Newdigate is the best Newdigate ever written. The one wonderful line which made it famous has already been quoted in a reference to Newdigates contained in an earlier chapter; but the present chapter may fairly end with a presentation of the jewel in its setting:

“Not virgin white—like that old Doric shrine Where once Athena held her rites divine: Not saintly grey—like many a minster fane That crowns the hill or sanctifies the plain: But rosy red—as if the blush of dawn Which first beheld them were not yet withdrawn: The hues of youth upon a brow of woe, Which men called old two thousand years ago. Match me such marvel, save in Eastern clime— _A red-rose city—half as old as time_.”

It will not be denied that Worcester has every title to be proud of Burgon for writing that.

HERTFORD COLLEGE

Hart Hall—The principalship of Dr. Richard Newton—Hart Hall becomes Hertford College—Decline, fall, and dissolution of the College—The buildings purchased for Magdalen Hall—Magdalen Hall once more transformed into Hertford College—Famous men at Hertford and Magdalen Hall—Charles James Fox—George Selwyn—Robert Stephen Hawker.

The present Hertford College is the heir and successor of an earlier Hertford College, and also of Hart Hall and Magdalen Hall; and one must begin with a word on the strange vicissitudes of these various foundations.

Hart Hall came first, dating from some time in the thirteenth century; but the founders of the halls of those days are no more to be confounded with the benefactors of learning than are the keepers of the boarding-houses in which the majority of University students reside on the Continent. They were merely landlords who desired a particular class of tenant; and the so-called Principal of the Hall was not a person set in authority over the students, but a student reputed to be solvent and elected by his fellow students, for that reason, to make himself responsible to the landlord for the rent. It was not until a later date that he was nominated from outside and charged to direct the studies and control the conduct of the inmates.

That was the first stage. The second began with the appointment to the principalship of Dr. Richard Newton. He was a man of ambition and energy; and he made it the object of his life to get Hart Hall incorporated as a College. There was considerable opposition; but, after a long fight, he got his way; and Hart Hall became Hertford College in 1737.

The College was a success as long as Newton was at the head of it. He had a reputation as a disciplinarian. Parents heard of him as a Head who could compel even rich young men to work and to behave themselves. Hence the College attracted a good many gentlemen-commoners, whose high fees kept the place going. Two of those gentlemen-commoners were George Selwyn and Charles James Fox.

By degrees, however, after Newton’s death, the fashion changed, and gentlemen-commoners went elsewhere. The endowments of the College were scanty, and it could not stand the stress of evil times. The fellowships were only worth £15 a year, and nobody wanted them. The headship itself was only worth about £60 a year, and the day came when no fit and qualified person would be satisfied with so small a stipend. So matriculations ceased, and the men who had already matriculated finished their course and left; and presently there remained nothing but an empty college building, devoid alike of Principal, tutors, and undergraduates—devoid of everything except an obstinate elderly gentleman named Hewitt, who had elected himself to the vice-principalship, and clamoured to be allowed to die in the enjoyment of that office. And then a strange thing happened.

A certain solicitor named Roberson, having no house of his own, but wanting one, boldly, without asking any man’s leave, moved, with his goods and chattels, into the late Principal’s vacant apartments. To those who questioned him as to his doings, he said that he had assumed the office of caretaker of an ancient building which seemed in danger of falling into ruins. He had, of course, no shadow of a right to be there; but he knew as a solicitor—a master of useful knowledge—that, unless and until the extinct corporation was reconstituted, no one would have the right either to turn him out or to compel him to pay rent.

His example was quickly followed by other people, who argued that a legal position which was good enough for a solicitor was good enough for them. Any man who desired to live rent-free proceeded to appoint himself caretaker of one of the vacant sets of rooms in Hertford College. Before very long, the whole college was filled with self-appointed caretakers, who took so little care that, at last, one of the buildings—a lath and plaster affair containing at least a dozen sets of rooms—collapsed “with a great crash and a dense cloud of dust.” Then, and not before it was time, the University took it upon itself to interfere.

A Commission was appointed to envisage the extraordinary situation. It reported that Hertford College, on a certain date, “became and was dissolved” and its property escheated to the Crown; and an Act of Parliament was then obtained, enabling the Crown to grant the escheated property to the University in trust for Magdalen Hall.

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The memory of Magdalen Hall is now principally kept alive by scraps of humorous rhyme. There is the rhyme which speaks of

“Whiskered Tompkins from the Hall Of seedy Magdalene.”

There is also the rhyme which celebrates

“A member of Magdalen Hall Who knew next to nothing at all; He was fifty-three When he took his degree,— Which was youngish for Magdalen Hall.”

The rhymes obviously suggest a Hall populated by the intellectual tagrag and bobtail of the University—men for whom the obtaining of a pass degree was the protracted labour of a lifetime; and that was the condition to which Magdalen Hall tended to lapse as the nineteenth century ran its course.