OXFORD.* Mn. ANDREW LANG is precisely the person who ought

to write a small book of this kind on Oxford. His light touch and singular facility for seizing salient points, putting them in picturesque and easy prominence, and his antiquarian pro- clivities tempered by humour, in which the Dryasdust dullness usual in antiquarians is displaced by a half-cynical playful- ness, make him an admirable compiler of a sketch of Oxford, historical and picturesque. His graceful style is well seconded by equally graceful illustrations.

The best thing in the book undoubtedly is "A Day of my Life at Oxford in the Fifteenth Century," as it might have been called, but is christened "A Media3val Undergraduate." It is an admirable summary and popularisation of the salient points to be deduced from Anstie's great work in the Rolls Series, the 3funimenta Aeademica, which reveal a life as different from Oxford life in these days as chalk from cheese. Those were the days when Colleges were few, and " nn- attached " were many; when books were few, and lectures a living force ; and when you could breakfast with a French undergraduate in the morning, thrash a Scotchman or an Irishman or a Yorkshireman in the afternoon, and join them all in a real downright gown against town riot, in which swords were drawn and blood was shed, in the evening. Those were the days when the University and the Colleges were still really what they were nominally in the Statute of Elizabeth, "charitable foundations" in the strict sense of the word ; when your "poor scholar" was passing rich on £3 a year ; when the " commons " of a loaf of bread and a hunk of butter was his real subsistence for an ordinary day ; when they were all "clerks," in the sense of "clerics ;" when the Chancellor was not a mere nominis umbra, but an actual ruler, and Oxford was a place where theology was a living force, and where the Scboolmen, the Friars, the Wycliffites, gave vital importance and force to the great movements of the day. All this was changed by the reactionary policy of the House of Lancaster, who suppressed Lollardry vi et armis, and, fol- lowed in their policy by the Tudors, reformed Oxford into the dull and stagnant order of every reactionary and obscurantist form of tenet, religious and political, which it remained till the reforms of thirty years ago. The sub- stitution of richly endowed Colleges for unattached students may have got rid of certain irregularities of life and manners, and abolished the terrible "chamber-deacons "—real or pre- tended clerks, whose "researches" were like those of Francois Villon, poet and burglar—but it turned Oxford into an aristocratic boarding-school from a democratic thinking. shop, to the great detriment of the nation. It gave up to a party what was meant for mankind, it stamped out freedom of thought in matters religious, it stereotyped education, and it robbed the poor of their great centre of culture. The vulgarity of the dissidence of Dissent, and the insane lengths to which the Protestantism of the Protestant religion was carried by ignorant Quakers and Methodists, et hoc genus tonne, may be largely imputed to the narrowing of the Universities from great popular schools of learning to an appanage of the upper classes, and the severance of the clever • Oxford: Historical and Descriptive Notes. By Andrew Lang. London : Seeley and Co. 1890.

lads of the lower classes from all opportunity of higher education.

It is the faab'on to attribute all sorts of damage at Orford and Cambridge and cathedral towns to the Puritans ; but Oliver Cromwell spared the Cambridge plate, while Charles I. left

Oxford not an ounce that he could lay his sacred hands upon. The statues above All Souls' College gate, and even Land's porch to the University Church of St. Mary's, which was one of his capital offences, were spared by the Puritans at the intercession of a Puritan grocer, Nixon, who founded a school for the poor : while the far more beautiful reredos at All Souls' had been destroyed by Royal order ; and Charles and his cavaliers would convert a College into a stable, or an ancient wall into the materials of a fortification, as soon or sooner than look at it. Needless to say that Anthony Wood furnishes copious information for the Oxford of the seven- teenth century, where the richly endowed sinecurists of the Colleges do not seem to have been, in point of manners, much above the " chamber-dekyns " of former times. He quarrelled with one Peers, who was employed to translate his History of Oxford

As Peers always cometh off with a bloody nose or a black eye, he was a long time afraid to goe anywhere where he might chance to meet his too powerful adversary, for fear of another drubbing, till he was Pro-proctor, and now Woods is as much afraid to meet him, lest he should exercise his authority upon him. And although he be a good blowzeing blood, yet it bath been observed that never since his adversary hath been in office bath he dared to be out after nine, least he should meet him and exact the rigor of the statute upon him."

Such was the odium literariwni of Restoration days. But Wood died in 1695, "forgiving every one,"—whereupon Mr. Lang pertinently observes : "He could well afford to do so. In his Athena Oxonienses he had written the lives of all his enemies." A little later, Prideaux remarks how Balliol men frequent "a dingy, horrid, scandalous ale-house, fit for none but draymen and tinkers," and there "by perpetual bubbing add art to their natural stupidity to make themselves perfect sots." Dean Aldrich, of Christ Church, whose three reasons for drinking have become classical, carps at Prideaux quite in the spirit, as Mr. Lang says, of modern Oxford : "He would do little or nothing besides heaping up notes :"— " This habit of carping, this trick of collecting notes, this inability to put a work through, this dawdling erudition, this horror of manuscripts, every Oxford man knows them, and feels those temptations which seem to be in the air. Oxford is a dis- couraging place. College drudgery absorbs the hours of students in proportion to their conscientiousness. They have only the waste odds-and-ends of time for their own labours. They live in an atmosphere of criticism. They collect notes : they wait : they dream : their youth goes by, and the night comes when no man may work."

A bit later, in 1715, the loyal Oxonians pulled down the

Presbyterian, Quakers', and Anabaptists' meeting-houses, and the Heads of Houses" represented that it was begun by the Whiggs,"—a true head-of-house way of supporting your supporters. It is refreshing to find that All Souls' was at this time Whig. It had been, therefore, described by Prideaux as "a scandalous place;" while, according to Hearne,

they were "all low churchmen, more shame to them," and on the anniversary of Charles L's execution dined off woodcocks "whose heads they cut off in contempt of the memory of the blessed martyr." In 1728, Dr. Johnson was " sconced twopence," as he informed his " sconcer," "for non-attendance on a lecture

not worth a penny." A Balliol man cut his throat with a view to suicide. The Master sent the servitor to "sconce him five shillings," and "tell him that the next time he cuts his throat I'll sconce him ten."

In these dark times, Gibbon writes :—" To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as cheer- fully renounce me for a son as I am willing to disclaim her for

a mother." Yet " Terra3 filius " could write—but his pro- duction was ordered to be burnt by the small-beer drawer, and

himself expelled,—

" Since in religion all men disagree, And some one God believe, some thirty, and some three."

Every one knows that Shelley suffered the same fate for a similar cause: and every one who wishes to know what Oxford was like at the beginning of the century, should read

Hogg's Life of Shelley.

One may hope that Oxford has improved now. We fear a good many lectures are still given "not worth a penny ;" but Oxford does not now exhibit the old horror of manuscripts, and the effect of the University Tests Act, and of unattached students, may perhaps enable it in time to shake off some of the dust of ages, and the reproach of academical uniformity and dead-aliveness.