Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and most profitable that any of us pass at Oxford. The one duty which that University, by virtue of its very nature, has never neglected, is the assembling of young men together from all over England, and giving them three years of liberty of life, of leisure, and of discussion, in scenes which are classical and peaceful. For these hours, the most fruitful of our lives, we are grateful to Oxford, as long as friendship lives; that is, as long as life and memory remain with us. And, "if anything endure, if hope there be," our conscious existence in the after-world would ask for no better companions than those who walked with us by the Isis and the Cherwell.
Landor called himself "a Jacobin," though his own letters show that he was as far as the most insolent young "tuft" from relishing doctrines of human equality. He had the reputation, however, of being not only a Jacobin, but "a mad Jacobin"; too mad for Southey, who was then young, and a Liberal. "Landor was obliged to leave the University for shooting at one of the Fellows through a window," is the account which Southey gave of Landor's rustication. Now fellows often put up with a great deal of horse-play. There is scarcely a more touching story than that of the don who for the first time found himself "screwed up," and fastened within his own oak. "What am I to do?" the victim asked his sympathising scout, who was on the other, the free side of the oak. "Well, sir, Mr. Muff, sir, when 'e's screwed up 'e sends for the blacksmith," replied the servant. What a position for a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of sending for the blacksmith! Fellows have not very unfrequently been fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with soda-water bottles full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol windows on the Martyrs' Memorial of our illustration. In this case, too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a fellow, "to go for him with a shot gun," as the repentant American said he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly. In truth, Landor's offence has been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the common. The poet was giving "an after-dinner party" in his rooms.
The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On the opposite side of the quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls "servitors and other raff of every description." The guests at the rival wine-parties began to "row" each other, Landor says, adding, "All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out of a window. But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back closet some little shot. I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired." Mr. Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this poet parted company.
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of Shelley's expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be "the Atheist," that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities were civil, and left him alone." Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley "an Atheist." Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely guided Shelley?
Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they like--certainly much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that no OFFICIAL interference can be of real value?
