RECOLLECTIONS OF OXFORD.* REMINISCENCES extending from the dawn of the
French Revolu- tion down to the establishment of Italian liberty, from 1789 to • Recollections of Oxford. By G. V. Cox, MA., late Esquire Bedel and Coroner in the University of Oxford. London: Macmillan.
1860, ought to present many points of interest. One would.think it impossible for a man to live in the quietest village without catching some of the notes of the time. The convulsion of one of the foremost countries in Europe, and then of Europe itself ; the rise of Napoleon to glory, to power, and thence to the overweening conceit of power ; the victories of British arms abroad and the triumph of ideas at home, Reform and Catholic emancipation, unite with countless other details to make up a stirring picture. Mr. Cox, however, has not been inspired by his subject. The general tone of his recollections is dull and trivial. He gives us few glances at the outer world which was all the time revolving round the central sun of Oxford, and was not, on the whole, very much affected by academical in- fluences. It is true that Oxford did not hold itself aloof from the great events of the age. We cannot think it always acted worthily towards them. It is painful, if not humiliating, to find that the University petitioned steadily against Reform and Catholic emancipation to the end, that the Gladstone and Hardy scandal was typified by the earlier rejection of Sir Robert Peel for Sir Robert Inglis, that attempts to forestal the work of the Com- mission of 1851 were received so coldly, aud that but for inter- ference that was thought illegal Oxford might still be sleeping the sleep of the just. Had Mr. Cox been an Oxford Conservative, there would, no doubt, have been some of the spice of rancour in his way of recounting these defeats of the party. As a steady Liberal he commands our sympathies, but he does not raise us above languid acquiescence. We note with approval that he always voted for Peel and Gladstone, but we miss all the interesting details of the contest. For a man who has lived so long in Oxford, and taken such part in local politics, Mr. Cox seems to have heard very little. While commemorating small facts in the tone of an annalist, he has not given greater ones their relative significance. He deals freely in small jokes both of his own and of other men's making, quotes foolish squibs and occasional verses of no merit, and even when he tells good stories tells them incompletely. It is evident that his book is intended for Oxford readers, and that it will only be valuable to those who can supply its missing links and appreciate the full meaning of academical allusions. Yet even such readers as these will be more inclined to cavil at Mr. Cox's omissions than to feel grateful to him for giving them an oppor- tunity of showing their more perfect knowledge. Strangers, on the other hand, will find that Mr. Cox is tantalizing as a story- teller, and too fragmentary for a guide.
Yet, as we glance over these pages, we light on many details which command more than a passing interest, and we are brought in contact with many names that have given Oxford its highest character. Mr. Cox has something te tell of the rise of the Tractarian movement, of the Hampden controversy in 1836, and of its revival twelve years later, when the former Professor of Divinity was appointed Bishop of Hereford; of the knot of Oriel men whose influence upon Oxford was so great, and who after- wards separated so widely; of the censure passed on Ward and the two years' suspension of Pusey ; of the publication of Whately's Historic Doubts relative to .Napoleon Bonaparte, and the alarm it caused to some slow, matter-of-fact people; of the refusal to Burke of a degree by diploma, and the withdrawal of Sheridan's name from the list of those on whom the honorary degree of D.C.L. was to be conferred ; of University sermons and hack preachers, of princes and potentates. If some of these incidents reflect little credit on Oxford, it must be said that Mr. Cox neither extentiates nor sets down aught in malice. He writes with a true regard for his University, but not with that abject fidelity which thinks truth of little moment compared with the lustre of an old institution. The pious maxim that no faith is to be kept with heretics seems to have been adopted in spirit by many modern casuists, who look on lies as quite allowable so long as they are merely used in controversy. On these people a word said against our sacred Universities acts as a red flag on a bull. The man who wants a reform of any kind is classed with the enemy. Mr. Cox tells a story of a tutor who was giving a lecture at the time when a gas explosion occurred in St. Mary's. He calmly turned to his class, and said, "There, gentlemen, Brodie has done it at last ! " No doubt when he learnt that the sound did not proceed from the
museum he was greatly disappointed. But his words have a mean- ing beyond that which he intended to give them. Those who fol- lowed the late controversy about lodginghouses and students unat- tached will have observed the same sort of triumphant expose facto prophecies of imaginary failure. In this case, too, the explosion has not yet come. It is while they are eagerly bending down their ears to listen for it that the Conservatives exclaim, "There, the Reformers have done it at last !" And yet one would think that a comparison of the state of Oxford at the end of the last century with its present state, as shown in 3Ir. Cox's book, must reconcile every one to the changes which have been introduced. Mr. Cox thinks that Lord Eldon's account of his examination for a degree was meant for a joke, and that competency in Hebrew and history was not actually proved by statements that Golgotha meant the place of a skull, and that King Alfred founded University College. But at least this joke was made by a Tory of the Tories, and however extravagant it may be in itself, it must have had some foundation. Dr. Pusey would hardly illustrate the failure of the present testa by saying that Socinians were allowed to put their own interpretation on the Thirty-Nine Articles.
One of the reforms to which Mr. Cox attaches much importance, and on which he seems to differ most from Dr. Pusey, is connected with the University sermons. The sketch he gives of the preachers of his youth presents a striking contrast to the existing state of things, and makes us congratulate modern Oxford on the abolition of hack sermons and the improved choice of pulpit orators. We hear of one preacher who discoursed on the character of Abraham (1) as a patriarch, (2) as the father of the faithful, and lastly, as a country gentleman. Mr. Cox tells the story of the preacher who introduced, "Paul says — and I partly agree with him," but he does not attribute it to Gaisford, as is the general custom. Dr. Tatham's sermon of two hours and a half in length, on the authenticity of the text of the Three Witnesses, is described by Mr. Cox as a strangely attractive mixture of learning and coarseness. The preacher anticipated subsequent Oxford censures against German neologians, speaking of them with a refreshing breadth of pronunciation, and expressing a wish that all the Jarman critics were at the bottom of the Jarman Ocean. But the ending of his sermon was even better. "I leave the subject to be followed up by the lamed Bench of Bishops, who have little to do, and do not always do that little." The first ser- mon that Dr. Pusey himself preached after his two years' suspen- sion reminds Mr. Cox of the Spanish theologian who, after five years' imprisonment by the Inquisition, was allowed to resume his lectures, and did so with the words, "My friends, when we last met here I remarked—." Dr. Pusey's audience apparently -expected something more personal. An attempt had just been made to bind him over, as it were, by making him sign the Thirty-Nine Articles, but the Vice-Chancellor refused to be the instrument of such dull tyranny. All Oxford men will remember the use of the same engine against Mr. Jowett, and the calm way in which he interrupted Dr. Cotton's solemn exhortation. The scene in the theatre when Mr. Ward was degraded from his fellowship, and his Ideal was condemned, is somewhat tamely described by Mr. Cox. Indeed there is always a want of life in his treatment of the great controversies which have moved the whole Academical body. Not having taken part in them, he probably views them as an outsider would, and mistakes in- difference for impartiality. But such a tendency is fatal to a true and complete picture of Oxford while those contests were being waged. In other respects, too, the want of an intimate ac- quaintance with men and things detracts from the value of Mr. Cox's recollections. When he speaks of Thackeray's lectures on "The English Humorists" being "well attended, probably better attended than Thackeray himself had expected, so little was he then (1851) known and appreciated at Oxford," we pre- sume he is thinking of the famous interview with the Vice- Chancellor when the novelist talked of himself as the author of Vanity Fair, of which the Don had never heard, and as a contri- butor to Punch, which the Don characterized as a ribald publica- tion. But if there is any truth in this story, Mr. Cox ought to have told it, instead of leaving Oxonians to catch the allusion. Again, when he mentions Copleston's pamphlet against Kett, -commonly called Horse Kett, and its motto of "Equo ne credite Teucri," he neither alludes to the tragical consequences of the joke, nor to Copleston's disclaimer of its wilful perpetration. Mr. Cox might have added that some mischievous men made Kett go to Landseer to have his portrait painted, and that when Kett was Master of the Schools the words " steriles dominantur avenae" were applied to the food which was thought best suited to his nature. Again, when we hear that Mr. Claughton, of Trinity, recited his prize poem on "Arctic Discoveries" before Sir W. Parry -and Sir John Franklin, and that they were greatly moved by it, we wonder what they thought of the line in which "the furled and idle sails" are made to flap noiselessly. Mr. Cox can hardly plead that such points as these are beneath his notice, for he goes out of his way to remark that Mr. Tupper published "A Prayer, in verse, for the Cholera," as if anything that Mr. Tupper ever did could be worth recording in a diary.
We might close our article with this passing shot at the most tempting of all targets, but that there is one fact preserved by Mr. Cox which has a singular bearing on the coming election. Till the year 1801 the Blenheim or Marlborough interest in the representation of Oxford was considered a settled and venerable institution. But in that year it was attacked by a barrister named Lockhart, formerly of University College ; and .sop's fable of the "Dog and the Wolf" furnished the Oxford citizen's with a cry which at the next election was fatal to the Duke's candidate. "From that moment," says Mr. Cox, "'only the collar' and 'collared dogs' became the popular cries in Oxford ; for the application to Oxford Freemen and the Blenheim patron- age was at once felt and acknowledged." We hope Woodstock may profit by the lesson.
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