J REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD BY THE KEY. W. TJJOKWELL, M.A. Late Fellow of New College, Author of " Tongues in Trees" '^Christian Socialism," "Winchester Fifty Years Ago,'" etc. ILLUSTRATED CASSELL AND COMPANY, Limited LONDON, PARIS, NEW YORK & MELBOURNE 1000 ALL RIGHTS KRSERVED LF sao O Thought, that wrote all that I met, And in the tresorie it set Of my braine, now shall men see If any vertue in thee bee. Now kith thy engine and thy might. Chaucer, House of Fame, ii. 18. SOME OF THESE MEMORIES, APPEAKING FROM TIME TO TIME UNDER THE SIGNATURE OF " NESTOR," IN THE COLUMNS OF " THE SPEAKER," ARE HERE REPRODUCED, BY KIND PERMISSION OF THE LATE AND PRESENT EDITORS. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PA, Oxford ix the Thirties ........ CHAPTER II. Original Characters ] CHAPTER III. Prescientific Science j CHAPTER IV. Scientific Science . ^ CHAPTER V. .SJSCULAPIUS IN THE THIRTIES f CHAPTER VI. Calliope in the Thirties 6 CHAPTER VII. Undekgraduates in the Thirties 8 CHAPTER VIII. More about Undergraduates . .10 CHAPTER IX. SuMMA Papaverum Capita. Christchurch 12j CHAPTER X. i Magdalen and New College 16 CHAPTER XI. Oriel 18 CHAPTER XII. Balliol 20: CHAPTER XIII. Pattison—Thomson—Goulburn—Sewell 211 CHAPTER XIV. Walk about Zion 241 Appendices 26' Index 28; " LIST OF ILLUSTRATION'S. \e Vice-Chancellor entering St. Mary's. The " Vice," Dr. lotton, Provost of Worcester, is followed by his Pro-Vice- chancellor Plumptre, Master of University, and " Ben ymons, Warden of Wadham. Photographed from a coloured rawing by Mrs. Freda Girdlestone . Frontispiece •' " 2. Horse Kett, from a portrait by Dighton . To face page 16 3. I '. Daubeny, from a photograph, 1860 ... „ 32 4. dt. Buckland. The Ansdell portrait. Reproduced Erom Mr. Gordon's " Life of Buckland," bj^ kind permission of the authoress and of the publisher, Mr. John Murray „ 36 5. 'Woodward, architect of the Museum. From a con- temporary photograph 48 ...... ,, 6. Huxley, from a jjhotograph taken at the Meeting of the British Association, 1860 „ .52 7. 'i'uckwell, from a water-colour drawing, 1833 . ,, 64 8. Oharles Wordsworth, from Richmond's portrait . ,, 8G 9. j^usey, from a pen-and-ink drawing of the Thirties, photographed Mrs. Girdlestone . 136 by ... ,, 10. tsir Frederick Ouseley, from a photograph about 1856 „ 152 11. Dr. Routh, from Pickersgill's portrait ... „ 164 12. J. II. Newman, from a pen-and-ink drawing 1841, photograi)hed by Mrs. Girdlestone . ,. 182 13. Mark Pattison, from a portrait in the possession of Miss Stirke ,, 216 14. Fohn (iutch, engraved from a water-colour belonging to the family „ 246 15. Mother IjOusp, from the line engraving after Loggan ,, 248 16. Mother (ioosf, from a coloured lithograph by Dightoii „ 250 — — REMINISCElSrCES OF OXFORD. CHAPTER I. OXFOED IN THE THIRTIES. " KciL fj.r)v, i)v S'lyw, w Kt'^aXe, ^a/pw ye liaXeyo^tvoQ role, crfijSpa TrpeajivTaiQ." " To tell you the truth, CephaluSj I rejoice in conversing with very old persons." — Pla'^, Republic, A. ii. The Thirties—The Approach to Oxford—Coaching Celebrities The Common Rooms—Then and Now—The Lost Art of Conversation Beaux Esprits and Belles—^^liss Horseman. THE evening of a prolonged life has its compensations and its duties. It lias its compensations : the Elder, who, reverend like Shakespeare's Nestor for his outstretched life, has attained through old experience something of prophetic strain, reaps keen enjoyment from his personal familiarity with the days of yore, known to those around him roughly from the page of history or not at all. It has its duties : to hand on and to depict with the fascinating touch of first-hand recollection the incidents and action, the characteristics and the scenery, of that vanished past, which in the retired actor's memory still survives, but must scatter like the Sibyl's leaves should 2 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD. he pass off the stage uncommunicative and unrecording. The nineteenth century, in the second intention of the term, opens with the Thirties ; its first two decades belong to and conclude an earlier epoch. The Thirties saw the birth of railroads and of the penny post ; they invented lucifer matches ; they witnessed Parliamentary and Municipal reform, the new Poor Law, the opening of London University ; they hailed the accession of Victoria ; in them Charles Dickens, Tennyson, Keble, Browning, John Henry Newman, began variously to in- fluence the world ; while with Scott, Crabbe, Coleridge, Lamb, Southey, all but a few patriarchs of the older school of literature passed away ; men now alive who were born, like myself, in the reign of George lY., recall and can describe an England as different from the England of our closing century as mon- archic France under the Ca^^ets differed from republican France to-day. Nowhere was the breach with the past more sundering than in Oxford. The University over which the Duke of Wellington was installed as Chancellor in 1834 owned undissolved continuity with the Oxford of Addison, Thomas Hearne, the Wartons, Bishop Lowth ; the seeds of the changes which awaited it—of Church move- ments, Museums and Art Galleries, Local Examinations, Science Degrees, Extension Lectures, AVomen's Colleges—germinating un- — OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES. 3 suspected while the old warrior was emitting- his genial false quantities in the Theatre, were to begin their transforming growth before the period which he adorned had found its close. The Oxford, then, of the Thirties, its scenery and habits, its humours and its characters, its gossip and its wit, shall be first amongst the dry bones in the valley of forgetfulness which I will try to clothe with flesh. It was said in those days that the approach to Oxford by the Henley road was the m.ost beautiful in the world. Soon after passing Littlemore you came in sight of, and did not lose again, the sweet city with its dreaming spires, driven along a road now crowded and obscured with dwellings, open then to corn- fields on the right, to uninclosed meadows on the left, with an unbroken view of the long line of towers, rising out of foliage less high and veiling than after sixty more years of growth to-day. At once, without suburban interval, you entered the finest quarter of the town, rolling under Magdalen Tower, and past the Magdalen elms, then in full unmutilated luxuriance, till the exquisite curves of the High Street opened on you, as you drew up at the Angel, or passed on to the Mitre and the Star. Along that road, or into Oxford by the St. Giles's entrance, lumbered at midnight Pick- ford's vast waggons with their six musically belled horses ; sped stage-coaches all day long Tantivy, Defiance, Rival, Regulator, Mazeppa, ; 4 BEMINISGENGES OF OXFORD. Dart, Magnet, Blenheim, and some thirty more ; heaped high with ponderous luggage and with cloaked passengers, thickly hung at Christmas time with turkeys, with pheasants in October ; their guards, picked buglers, sending before them as they passed Magdalen Bridge the now forgotten strains of " Brignall Banks," "The Troubadour," "I'd be a Butter- fly," "The Maid of Llangollen," or "Begone, Dull Care " ; on the box their queer old purple-faced, many-caped driyers—Cheeseman, Steeyens, Fowles, Charles Homes, Jack Adams, and Black Will. This last jehu, spending three nights of the week in Oxford, four in London, maintained in both a home, presided oyer by two seyeral wiyes, with each of whom he had gone through the marriage ceremony, and had for many years—so distant Ayas Oxford then from London—kept each partner ignorant of her sister's existence. The story came out at last but the wiyes seem not to haye objected, and it was the business of no one else ; indeed, had he been indicted for bigamy, no Oxford jury could haye been found to conyict Black Will. The coaches were horsed by Eichard Costar, as great an original as any of his men ; those wlio on his weekly yisits to the Bensington staljles sat behind Black Will and his master and overheard their talk, listened, with amuse- ment or disgust, to a rampant paraphrase of Lucretius' Fourth Book. He liyed in the picturesque house on the Cherwell, just oppo- OXFORD IN THE THIRTIES. 5 site Magdalen Turnpike, having two entrance gates, one each side of the pike, so that he could always elude payment. I remember standing within his railings to see the pro- cession of royal carriages which brought Queen Adelaide to Oxford in 1835. She drove about in semi-state, attending New College and Magdalen Chapels, lunching at Queen's, and holding a court at the Angel. Opjiosite to her in the carriage sat always the Duke of Wellington in his gold-tasselled cap, more cheered and regarded than the quiet, plain- looking, spotty-faced Queen. The Mayor of Oxford was an old Mr. Wootten, brewer, banker, and farmer, dressed always in blue brass- buttoned coat, cords, top-boots, and powdered hair. He was told that he must pay his re- spects to the Queen ; so he drove to the Angel in his wonderful one-horse-chaise, a vehicle in which Mr. and Mrs. Bubb might have made their historic jaunt to Brighton, and was intro- duced to her Majesty by the Chamberlain, Lord Howe. She held out her hand to be kissed : the Mayor shook it heartily, with the " salutation : How d'ye do, marm ; how's the king ? " I saw Queen Victoria two years afterwards proclaimed at Carfax ; and in the general election of 1837 I witnessed from the windows of Dr. Rowley, Master of University, the chairing of the successful candidates, Donald Maclean of Balliol, and William Erie of New College, afterwards Chief Justice of 6 REMINISCENCES OF OXFORD, the Queen's Bench.