An intercepted letter
Good brother Calif orniensis
Mercurius Oxoniensis
Good brother Californiensis, You reproach me for my long silence, which indeed is blameable, but I shall extenuate my fault by pleading the usuall excuses, viz: want of leisure and want of matter. For the first, I have been busied, these last months, about the re-modelling of our college wine-cellar, which (I can assure you) is now second to none in Turlstreet. For the second, I must tell you that a strange lull, not to say a delicious torpor, has fallen upon this whole university since the total collapse and ruine of the fanatiques of which I writ to you last year. Our young men now ply their studies, and their innocent pleasures, and so do we.
'Tis marvellous how fashions shift, with us as with you: for the change seems generall. All you transatlantick Mercuries sing the same tune: where once the young men were burning libraries, or college presidents, and toppling rare and costly engines down mountain ravines, now all is virtue and civility. Our present young men open doors for their betters, touch their caps, yield the wall, etc. etc. As for that vast Platonicall machine of perfect government built for them by Master Verulamius Hart (since made Principall of Brazen-nose college for his pains), it now lies, gathering rust, in Master Registrar's Lumber Room, and if we had a mountain ravine, doubtless 'twould be toppled down it; for in coll, after coll, the young men, finding that they would be taxed to maintain it, protest that they own it not, or have forgot it. Only Balliol coll, remains stuck in antique postures. 'Tis said that in that coll, the junto of fanatiques who still rule the roast have taxed their fellowschollers (whom the seniors have left at their mercy) to send moneys to the blessed martyrs of the Angry Brigade, now languishing in prison: but whether to alleviate their sufferings or to provide 'em with the sinews of a new warre against her Majesty's loyal! subjects, I know not.
Howsoever, if the young have become wiser, think not that folly is dead in Oxon, for our seniors have rush'd in to fill the void. Of whom first of all I must commemorate your old friend Dr Rowse, who has been at his trumpeting again. Indeed, the noyse still humms in our ears and the effects of his rampage still afflict our eyes, for our stately acedemick groves lie before us, all trampled and desolate. But I will set out the whole lamentable history.
The fit took him (as I am informed) in the Old-soules club, of an afternoon, when the other Fellows were taking their siesta, or snooze, which he rudely interrupted, and now no life is to be seen in that ravaged paradise. For at the first swish of his trunk (wherewith he uprooted a young tree and used it to thrash three junior Fellows, and that mercilessly), Master Warden Sparrow took flight, in his majestick Bentley, to the Beefsteak Club in London, and thence to Marocco, with my Lord Clark of Civilisation, leaving the Fellows (who had no such means of locomotion) to fend for themselves; whereupon 'twas sauve qui peat and Devil take the hindmost. The older soules, betwixt fear and shame, hid themselves in caves and holes in the earth; the nimble young whippersnappers shinned up tall trees and crumbling towers, where they still cling, quaking, till that tempest be overpast. Several persons have been trodden to death, but only one of note has perished, viz: Professor Dr Dame Helen Gardner DBE, who, having rashly taunted the monster, found herself impaled on his left tusk. The entire Board of the English Faculty has come on bended knees to the outer gate of the Old-soules club, offering complete submission and regular tribute for all time, in hope to recover the body and give it decent burial]. I will advertise you of the day of the funerall, so that you may not omit to send a wreath. Let it be of more than ordinary splendour, for the occasion will surely be of great solemnity. I hear that already there is much jostling among the litterati, who shall deliver the eulogium.
You will doubtless ask, Whence arose this tragicall wrath, the direfull spring of woes unnumber'd? It seems that the good Doctor, while rummaging among some old papers in Duke Humfrey's Library, lit happily upon a bundle of notes whieh vastly excited him, for they allowed him to fit a new name (how aptly, we know not) to an old whore who plied her trade in London in the time of her late Majesty Queen Elizabeth; which ingeniose speculation he instantly cried up as a prime discovery, worthy of Archimedes in his bath-tub or Sir Isaac Newton in his orchard, and the inauguration of a new age of the world, to be named after himself, and to last till his own apotheosis (or apocotocyntosis) at Doomsday; and so thought fit to publish it abroad in his usuall manner.
warn you of this great hullabaloo lest the ecbos of it, rolling mit, as they must, to your fog-bound ocean shore, should have disturbed your delicate seismographicall engines, and thereby spread a panique fear of earthquakes, tidal waves, etc., among your more timorous neighbours, and sent 'em fleeing for safety, in carts and covered waggons, to the desarts of Montana and Idaho and the folds and creases of the Rocky Mountains, thus depriving your dear Governour, Master Reagan, of loyal tributaries and voters. If so, let him call 'em back. Tell 'em that 'tis but the Doctor in one of his fits, which are seasonall and go by the Moone. They know him well in those parts (too well, some say, in the Athenaeum of San Marino; but this inter nos). They will understand.
Nor is it only the Old-soules club that has been thus disorder'd; for I must tell you that some other coils. too are smarting from indecent exposure in the publick prints. For this misfortune men blame, above all, our sleek and jovial! philosopher, Master Antony Quinton, the Democritus of New-coil., who thought fit, in an ill moment, some weeks past, to entertain some rattle-pated giglot from Fleet-street. This creature, flitting from coll. to coll. under protection of our frivolous brethren, and supping at our hospitable high-tables (now laid open to that sex), and scribbling down in a pocket-book what she remember'd of their idle gossip and unguarded observations (which should be free of such danger, being privileg'd), and filling it out from her imagination (which is but a poor thing, nourished on the thin juice of Sunday Supplements and Women's Pages), has now publish'd to the world her image of our society, as seen through her own exiguous ,polyhedronall goggle-eyes. Whereat, as you can well suppose, there has arisen an angry buzz from all those whom she has brush'd with her little wings, and especially from New-coil., where our philosopher (for whom great things had been forecast by our domestick astrologers) is now quite sunck and out of all hope of preferment, and 'tis feared he must now leave this place in perpetuity, together with his wife, our famous sculptrix, against whom all the ladies of Oxon have sworn revenge for her rash description of them, which was never intended for their ears, and perhaps anyway misconstrued: but nescit vox missa reverti. 'Tis thought they will be safest beyond seas, and (having changed their names) will go to live among the Hurons or the Mohawks or the Kwakiutl, in your country, he to teach 'em the new philosophy, she to sculpt their totempoles; which will be a sad loss to us, who can ill spare such learning, wit, sprightliness, etc., but just punishment of them for suffering such a gilded carrion-fly to light upon our well-spread high-tables.
You enquire after our delicate poet Master Parsnip Auden, who fled hither to escape the noyse and highway robbery of your great continent. He is now settled in his snug cottage in Christ-church, to the great advantage of that learned society, which he daily delights with his cristalline wit and spiritual! conversation. But it seems that we have won him from you by too specious pretences; for since 'his coming he has made publick complaint of the intolerable noyse of Oxon, and has charged a young man in her Majesty's courts for robbing him at night in the Old-soules club, where he first sojourned; which is a just cause of shame to all loyall Oxonians and, especially, to
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