Transcriber's Note:

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation in the original document have been preserved.

TEA ON THE LAWN AT THE OXFORD UNION (page [63])

AN AMERICAN AT
OXFORD

BY

JOHN CORBIN

AUTHOR OF "SCHOOLBOY LIFE IN ENGLAND"

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1903

COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY JOHN CORBIN
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published May, 1902

TO
A. F. C.

PREFACE

By a curious coincidence, the day on which the last proof of this book was sent to the printer saw the publication of the will of the late Cecil Rhodes, providing that each of the United States is forever to be represented at Oxford by two carefully selected undergraduate students. That the plan will result in any speedy realization of the ideals of the great exponent of English power in the new worlds is perhaps not to be expected. For the future of American education, on the other hand, few things could be more fortunate. Native and independent as our national genius has always been, and seems likely to remain, it has always been highly assimilative. In the past, we have received much needed aliment from the German universities. For the present, the elements of which we have most need may best, as I think, be assimilated from England.

Whether or not Americans at Oxford become imbued with Mr. Rhodes's conceptions as to the destiny of the English peoples, they can scarcely fail to observe that Oxford affords to its undergraduates a very sensibly ordered and invigorating life, a very sensibly ordered and invigorating education. This, as I have endeavored to point out in the following pages, our American universities do not now afford, nor are they likely to afford it until the social and the educational systems are more perfectly organized than they have ever been, or seem likely to be, under the dominance of German ideals. If, however, the new Oxford-trained Americans should ever become an important factor in our university life, the future is bright with hope. We have assimilated, or are assimilating, the best spirit of German education; and if we were to make a similar draft on the best educational spirit in England, our universities would become far superior as regards their organization and ideals, and probably also as regards what they accomplish, to any in Europe. The purpose and result of an introduction of English methods would of course not be to imitate foreign custom, but to give fuller scope to our native character, so that if the American educational ideals in the end approximate the English more closely than they do at present, such a result would be merely incidental to the fact that the two countries have at bottom much the same social character and instincts. If Mr. Rhodes's dream is to be realized, it will probably be in some such tardy and roundabout but admirably vital manner as this.

At a superficial glance the testator's intention seems to have been to send the students to Oxford directly from American schools. Such a course, it seems to me, could only work harm. Even if the educational and residential facilities afforded at Oxford were on the whole superior to those of American universities, which they are not, the difference could not compensate the student for the loss of his American university course with all it means in forming lifelong friendships among his countrymen and in assimilating the national spirit. If, however, the Oxford scholarships were awarded to recent graduates of American universities, the greatest advantage might result. The student might then modify his native training so as to complete it and make it more effective. Now the wording of the testament requires only that the American scholars shall "commence residence as undergraduates." This they will be able to do whatever their previous training, and in fact this is what Americans at Oxford have always done in the past. The most valuable A.B. leaves the field of human knowledge far from exhausted; and the methods of instruction and of examining at Oxford are so different from anything we know that it has even proved worth while for the American to repeat at Oxford the same studies he took in America. The executors of the will should be most vigorously urged to select the scholars from the graduates of American universities.

The parts of this book that treat most intimately of Oxford life were written while in residence in Balliol College some six years ago. Most of the rest was written quite recently in London. Much of the matter in the following pages has appeared in "Harper's Weekly," "The Bachelor of Arts," "The Forum," and "The Atlantic Monthly." It has all been carefully revised and rearranged, and much new matter added. Each chapter has gained, as I hope, by being brought into its natural relation with the other chapters; and the ideas that have informed the whole are for the first time adequately stated.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

AN AMERICAN AT OXFORD

The great German historian of the United States, H. E. Von Holst, declares[1] that, "in the sense attached to the word by Europeans, ... there is in the United States as yet not a single university;" institutions like Johns Hopkins and Harvard he characterizes as "hybrids of college and university." In his survey of European usage, one suspects that Professor Von Holst failed to look beyond Germany. The so-called universities of England, for example, are mere aggregations of colleges; they have not even enough of the modern scientific spirit to qualify as hybrids, having consciously and persistently refused to adopt continental standards. The higher institutions of America belong historically to the English type; they have only recently imported the scientific spirit. To the great world of graduates and undergraduates they are colleges, and should as far as possible be kept so.

Yet there is reason enough for calling them hybrids. In the teaching bodies of all of them the German, or so-called university, spirit is very strong, and is slowly possessing the more advanced of our recent graduates and undergraduates. Let us be duly grateful. The first result of this spirit is an extraordinary quickening and diffusion of the modern ideal of scholarship, a devotion to pure science amounting almost to a passion. As to the second result, we may or may not have cause to be grateful. Our most prominent educational leaders have striven consciously to make over our universities on the German plan. We are in the midst of a struggle between old and new forces, and at present the alien element has apparently the upper hand. The social ideal, which only a few years ago was virtually the same in England and America, has already been powerfully modified; and the concrete embodiment of the new scientific spirit, the so-called elective system, has transformed the peculiar educational institution of our Anglo-Saxon people.

We have gone so far forward that it is possible to gain an excellent perspective on what we are leaving behind. In the ensuing pages I propose to present as plainly as I may the English university of colleges. I shall not hesitate to give its social life all the prominence it has in fact, devoting much space even to athletic sports. The peculiarity of the English ideal of education is that it aims to develop the moral and social virtues, no less than the mental—to train up boys to be men among men. Only by understanding this is it possible to sympathize with the system of instruction, its peculiar excellences, and its almost incredible defects. In the end I hope we shall see more clearly what our colleges have inherited from the parent institutions, and shall be able to judge how far the system of collegiate education expresses the genius of English and American people.

At the present juncture of political forces in America this consideration has a special importance. The success with which we exert our influence upon distant peoples will depend upon what manner of young men we train up to carry it among them. If the graduates of German institutions are prepared to establish their civilization in the imperial colonies, the fact has not yet been shown. The colleges of England have manned the British Empire.

I

THE UNIVERSITY AND THE COLLEGE

I

THE UNIVERSITY OF COLLEGES

One of the familiar sights at Oxford is the American traveler who stops over on his way from Liverpool to London, and, wandering up among the walls of the twenty colleges from the Great Western Station, asks the first undergraduate he meets which building is the university. When an Oxford man is first asked this, he is pretty sure to answer that there isn't any university; but as the answer is taken as a rudeness, he soon finds it more agreeable to direct inquirers to one of the three or four single buildings, scattered hither and yon among the ubiquitous colleges, in which the few functions of the university are performed. A traveler from our middle West, where "universities" often consist of a single building, might easily set forth for London with the firm idea that the Ashmolean Museum or the Bodleian Library is Oxford University.

To the undergraduate the university is an abstract institution that at most examines him two or three times, "ploughs" him, or graduates him. He becomes a member of it by being admitted into one of the colleges. To be sure, he matriculates also as a student of the university; but the ceremony is important mainly as a survival from the historic past, and is memorable to him perhaps because it takes place beneath the beautiful mediæval roof of the Divinity School; perhaps because he receives from the Vice-Chancellor a copy of the university statutes, written in mediæval Latin, which it is to be his chief delight to break. Except when he is in for "schools," as the examinations are called, the university fades beyond his horizon. If he says he is "reading" at Oxford, he has the city in mind. He is more likely to describe himself as "up at" Magdalen, Balliol, or elsewhere. This English idea that a university is a mere multiplication of colleges is so firmly fixed that the very word is defined as "a collection of institutions of learning at a common centre." In the daily life of the undergraduate, in his religious observances, and in regulating his studies, the college is supreme.

To an American the English college is not at first sight a wholly pleasing object. It has walls that one would take to be insurmountable if they were not crowned with shards of bottles mortared into the coping; and it has gates that seem capable of resisting a siege until one notices that they are reinforced by a cheval-de-frise, or a row of bent spikes like those that keep the bears in their dens at the Zoo. Professor Von Holst would certainly regard it as a hybrid between a mediæval cloister and a nursery; and one easily imagines him producing no end of evidence from its history and traditions to show that it is so. Like so many English institutions, its outward and visible signs belong to the manners of forgotten ages, even while it is charged with a vigorous and very modern life. A closer view of it, I hope, will show that in spite of the barnacles of the past that cling to it—and in some measure, too, because of them—it is the expression of a very high ideal of undergraduate convenience and freedom.

II

THE OXFORD FRESHMAN

When a freshman comes up to his college, he is received at the mediæval gate by a very modern porter, who lifts boxes and bags from the hansom in a most obliging manner, and is presently shown to his cloistral chambers by a friendly and urbane butler or steward. To accommodate the newcomers in the more populous colleges, a measure is resorted to so revolutionary that it shocks all American ideas of academic propriety. Enough seniors—fourth and third year men—are turned out of college to make room for the freshmen. The assumption is that the upper classmen have had every opportunity to profit by the life of the college, and are prepared to flock by themselves in the town. Little communities of four or five fellows who have proved congenial live together in "diggings"—that is, in some townsman's house—hard by the college gate. This arrangement makes possible closer and more intimate relationship among them than would otherwise be likely; and after three years of the very free life within those sharded walls, a cloistered year outside is usually more than advisable, in view of the final examination. It cannot be said that they leave college without regret; but I never heard a word of complaint, and it is tacitly admitted that on the whole they profit by the arrangement.

The more substantial furnishings in the rooms are usually permanent, belonging to the college: each successive occupant is charged for interest on the investment and for depreciation by wear. Thus the furniture is far more comfortable than in an American college room and costs the occupant less. Bed and table linen, cutlery, and a few of the more personal furnishings the student brings himself. If one neglects to bring them, as I confess I did through ignorance, the deficiency is supplied by the scout, a dignitary in the employ of the college, who stands in somewhat more than the place of a servant and less than that of a parent to half a dozen fellows whose rooms are adjacent. The scout levies on the man above for sheets, on the man below for knives and forks, and on the man across the staircase for table linen. There is no call for shame on the one part or resentment on the other, for is not the scout the representative of the hospitality of the college? "When you have time, sir," he says kindly, "you will order your own linen and cutlery." How high a state of civilization is implied in this manner of receiving a freshman can be appreciated only by those who have arrived friendless at an American university.

The scout is in effect a porter, "goody," and eating-club waiter rolled into one. He has frequently a liberal dash of the don, which he has acquired by extended residence at the university; for among all the shifting generations of undergraduates, only he and the don are permanent. When he reaches middle age he wears a beard if he chooses, and then he is usually taken for a don by the casual visitor. There is no harm in this; the scout plays the part con amore, and his long breeding enables him to sustain it to a marvel. Yet for the most part the scout belongs with the world of undergraduates. He has his social clubs and his musical societies; he runs, plays cricket, and rows, and, finally, he meets the Cambridge scout in the inter-varsity matches. His pay the scout receives in part from the college, but mostly from the students, who give him two to four pounds a term each, according to his deserts. All broken bread, meat, and wine are his perquisites, and tradition allows him to "bag" a fair amount of tea, coffee, and sugar. Out of all this he makes a sumptuous living. I knew only one exception, and that was when four out of six men on a certain scout's staircase happened to be vegetarians, and five teetotalers. The poor fellow was in extremities for meat and in desperation for drink. There was only one more pitiable sight in college, and that was the sole student on the staircase who ate meat and drank wine; the scout bagged food and drink from him ceaselessly. At the end of one term the student left a half dozen bottles of sherry, which he had merely tasted, in his sideboard; and when he came back it was gone. "Where's my sherry, Betts?" he asked. "Sherry, sir? you ain't got no sherry." "But I left six bottles; you had no right to more than the one that was broken." "Yes, sir; but when I had taken that, sir, the 'arf dozen was broke." According to Oxford traditions the student had no recourse; and be it set down to his praise, he never blamed the scout. He bemoaned the fate that bound them together in suffering, and vented his spleen on total abstinence and vegetarianism. It may be supposed that the scout's antiquity and importance makes him a bad servant; in the land of the free I fear that it would; but at Oxford nothing could be more unlikely. The only mark that distinguishes the scout from any other class of waiters is that his attentions to your comfort are carried off with greater ease and dignity. It may be true that he is president of the Oxford Society of College Servants—the Bones or the Hasty Pudding of the scouts; that he stroked the scouts' eight in the townie's bumping races, during the long vac, and afterward rowed against the scouts' eight from Cambridge; that he captained the scouts' cricket eleven; that in consequence he is a "double blue" and wears the Oxford 'varsity color on his hat with no less pride than any other "blue." Yet he is all the more bound, out of consideration for his own dignity, to show you every respect and attention.

After the scout, the hosts of the college are the dons. As soon as the freshman is settled in his rooms, or sometimes even before, his tutor meets him and arranges for a formal presentation to the dean and master. All three are apt to show their interest in a freshman by advising him as to trying for the athletic teams, joining the college clubs and societies, and in a word as to all the concerns of undergraduate life except his studies—these come later. If a man has any particular gift, athletic or otherwise, the tutor introduces him to the men he should know, or, when this is not feasible, gives a word to the upper classmen, who take the matter into their own hands. If a freshman has no especial gift, the tutor is quite as sure to say the proper word to the fellows who have most talent for drawing out newcomers.

In the first weeks of a freshman's residence he finds sundry pasteboards tucked beneath his door: the upper classman's call is never more than the formal dropping of a card. The freshman is expected to return these calls at once, and is debarred by a happy custom from leaving his card if he does not find his man. He goes again and again until he does find him. By direct introduction from the tutor or by this formality of calling, the freshman soon meets half a dozen upper classmen, generally second-year men, and in due time he receives little notes like this:—

Dear Smith,—Come to my rooms if you can to breakfast with Brown and me on Wednesday at 8.30.

Yours sincerely,
A. Robinson.

At table the freshman finds other freshmen whose interests are presumably similar to his own.

No one supposes for a moment that all this is done out of simple human kindness. The freshman breakfast is a conventional institution for gathering together the unlicked cubs, so that the local influences may take hold of them. The reputation of the college in general demands that it keep up a name for hospitality; and in particular the clubs and athletic teams find it of advantage to get the run of all available new material. The freshman breakfast is nothing in the world but a variation of the "running" that is given newcomers in those American colleges where fraternity life is strong, and might even be regarded as a more civilized form of the rushes and cane sprees and even hazings that used to serve with us to introduce newcomers to their seniors. Many second-year breakfasts are perfunctory enough; the host has a truly British air of saying that since for better or for worse he is destined to look upon your face and abide by your deeds, he is willing to make the best of it. If you prove a "bounder," you are soon enough dropped. "I shall soon be a second-year man," I once heard a freshman remark, "and then I can ask freshmen to breakfast, too, and cut them afterward." The point is that every fellow is thrown in the way of meeting the men of his year. If one is neglected in the end, he has no reason to feel that it is the fault of the college. As a result of this machinery for initiating newcomers, a man usually ceases to be a freshman after a single term (two months) of residence; and it is always assumed that he does.

III

A DAY IN AN OXFORD COLLEGE

When a freshman is once established in college, his life falls into a pleasantly varied routine. The day is ushered in by the scout, who bustles into the bedroom, throws aside the curtain, pours out the bath, and shouts, "Half past seven, sir," in a tone that makes it impossible to forget that chapel—or if one chooses, roll-call—comes at eight. Unless one keeps his six chapels or "rollers" a week, he is promptly "hauled" before the dean, who perhaps "gates" him. To be gated is to be forbidden to pass the college gate after dark, and fined a shilling for each night of confinement. To an American all this brings recollections of the paternal roof, where tardiness at breakfast meant, perhaps, the loss of dessert, and bedtime an hour earlier. I remember once, when out of training, deliberately cutting chapel to see with what mien the good dean performed his nursery duties. His calm was unruffled, his dignity unsullied. I soon came to find that the rules about rising were bowed to and indeed respected by all concerned, even while they were broken. They are distinctly more lax than those the fellows have been accustomed to in the public schools, and they are conceded to be for the best welfare of the college.

Breakfast comes soon after chapel, or roll-call. If a man has "kept a dirty roller," that is, has reported in pyjamas, ulster, and boots, and has turned in again, the scout puts the breakfast before the fire on a trestle built of shovel, poker, and tongs, where it remains edible until noon. If a man has a breakfast party on, the scout makes sure that he is stirring in season, and, hurrying through the other rooms on the staircase, is presently on hand for as long as he may be wanted. The usual Oxford breakfast is a single course, which not infrequently consists of some one of the excellent English pork products, with an egg or kidneys. There may be two courses, in which case the first is of the no less excellent fresh fish. There are no vegetables. The breakfast is ended with toast and jam or marmalade. When one has fellows in to breakfast,—and the Oxford custom of rooming alone instead of chumming makes such hospitality frequent,—his usual meal is increased by a course, say, of chicken. In any case it leads to a morning cigarette, for tobacco aids digestion, and helps fill the hour or so after meals which an Englishman gives to relaxation.

At ten o'clock the breakfast may be interrupted for a moment by the exit of some one bent on attending a lecture, though one apologizes for such an act as if it were scarcely good form. An appointment with one's tutor is a more legitimate excuse for leaving; but even this is always an occasion for an apology, in behalf of the tutor of course, for one is certainly not himself responsible. If a quorum is left, they manage to sit comfortably by the fire, smoking and chatting in spite of lectures and tutors, until by mutual consent they scatter to glance at the "Times" and the "Sportsman" in the common-room, or even to get in a bit of reading.

Luncheon often consists of bread and cheese and jam from the buttery, with perhaps a half pint of bitter beer; but it may, like the breakfast, come from the college kitchen. In any case it is very light, for almost immediately after it everybody scatters to field and track and river for the exercise that the English climate makes necessary and the sport that the English temperament demands.

By four o'clock every one is back in college tubbed and dressed for tea, which a man serves himself in his rooms to as many fellows as he has been able to gather in on field or river. If he is eager to hear of the games he has not been able to witness, he goes to the junior common-room or to his club, where he is sure to find a dozen or so of kindred spirits representing every sport of importance. In this way he hears the minutest details of the games of the day from the players themselves; and before nightfall—such is the influence of tea—those bits of gossip which in America are known chiefly among members of a team have ramified the college. Thus the function of the "bleachers" on an American field is performed with a vengeance by the easy-chairs before a common-room fire; and a man had better be kicked off the team by an American captain than have his shortcomings served up with common-room tea.

The two hours between tea and dinner may be, and usually are, spent in reading.

IV

DINNER IN HALL

At seven o'clock the college bell rings, and in two minutes the fellows have thrown on their gowns and are seated at table, where the scouts are in readiness to serve them. As a rule a man may sit wherever he chooses; this is one of the admirable arrangements for breaking up such cliques as inevitably form in a college. But in point of fact a man usually ends by sitting in some certain quarter of the hall, where from day to day he finds much the same set of fellows. Thus all the advantages of friendly intercourse are attained without any real exclusiveness. This may seem a small point; but an hour a day becomes an item in four years, especially if it is the hour when men are most disposed to be companionable.

The English College hall is a miniature of Memorial Hall at Harvard, of which it is the prototype. It has the same sombrely beautiful roof, the same richness of stained glass. It has also the same memorable and impressive canvases, though the worthies they portray are likely to be the princes and prelates of Holbein instead of the soldiers, merchants, and divines of Copley and Gilbert Stuart. The tables are of antique oak, with the shadow of centuries in its grain, and the college plate bears the names and date of the Restoration. To an American the mugs he drinks his beer from seem old enough, but the Englishman finds them aggressively new. They are not, however, without endearing associations, for the mugs that preceded them were last used to drink a health to King Charles, and were then stamped into coin to buy food and drink for his soldiers. The one or two colleges that, for Puritan principles or thrift, or both, refused to give up their old plate, are not overproud of showing it.

Across the end of the hall is a platform for high table, at which the dons assemble as soon as the undergraduates are well seated. On Sunday night they come out in full force, and from the time the first one enters until the last is seated, the undergraduates rattle and bang the tables, until it seems as if the glass must splinter. When, as often happens, a distinguished graduate comes up,—the Speaker of the Commons to Balliol, or the Prime Minister to Christ Church,—the enthusiasm has usually to be stopped by a gesture from the master or the dean.

THE HALL STAIRCASE, CHRIST CHURCH

The dons at high table, like the British peers, mingle judicial with legislative functions. All disputes about sconces are referred to them, and their decrees are absolute. A sconce is a penalty for a breach of good manners at table, and is an institution that can be traced far back into the Middle Ages. The offenses that are sconcible may be summarized as punning, swearing, talking shop, and coming to hall after high table is in session. Take, for instance, the case of a certain oarsman who found the dinner forms rather too rigid after his first day on sliding seats. By way of comforting himself, he remarked that the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Who is to decide whether he is guilty of profanity? The master, of course, and his assembled court of dons. The remark and the attendant circumstances are written on the back of an order-slip by the senior scholar present, and a scout is dispatched with it. Imagine, then, the master presenting this question to the dons: Is it profanity to refer by means of a quotation from Scripture to the cuticle one loses in a college boat? Suppose the dons decree that it is. The culprit has the alternative of paying a shilling to the college library, or ordering a tun of bitter beer. If he decides for beer, a second alternative confronts him: he may drink it down in one uninterrupted draft, or he may kiss the cup and send it circling the table. If he tries to floor the sconce and fails, he has to order more beer for the table; but if he succeeds, the man who sconced him has to pay the shot and order a second tun for the table. I never knew but one man to down a sconce. He did it between soup and fish, and for the rest of the evening was as drunk as ever was the Restoration lord who presented the silver tankard to the college.

After hall the dons go to the senior common-room for the sweet and port. At Trinity they have one room for the sweet and another for port. The students, meanwhile, in certain of the colleges, may go for dessert to the college store; that is to say, to a room beneath the hall, where the fancy groceries of the college stock are displayed for sale. There are oranges from Florida and Tangiers, dainty maiden blush apples from New England, figs and dates from the Levant, prunes and prunelles from Italy, candied apricots from France, and the superb English hothouse grapes, more luscious than Silenus ever crushed against his palate. There are sweets, cigarettes, and cigars. All are spread upon the tables like a Venetian painting of abundance; but at either end of the room stand two Oxford scouts, with account-books in their hands. A fellow takes a Tangerine and, with a tap-room gesture, tilts to the scout as if to say, "Here's looking toward you, landlord;" or, "I drink to your bonny blue eyes." But he is not confronted by a publican or barmaid; only a grave underling of the college bursar, who silently records "Brown, orange, 2d.," and looks up to catch the next item. Two other fellows are flipping for cigars, and the second scout is gravely watching their faces to see which way the coin has fallen, recording the outcome without a sign. Some one asks, "How much are chocolate creams, Higgins?" "Three ha'pence for four, sir," is the answer, and the student urges three neighbors to share his penny'orth. The scout records, "Jones, c. c. 1½d."

The minuteness of this bookkeeping is characteristic. The weekly battels (bills) always bear a charge of twopence for "salt, etc.;" and once, when I had not ordered anything during an entire day, there was an unspecified charge of a penny in the breakfast column. I asked the butler what it meant. He looked at me horrified. "Why, sir, that is to keep your name on the books." No penny, I suppose, ever filled an office of greater responsibility, and I still can shudder at so narrow an escape. I asked if such elaborate bookkeeping was not very expensive. In America, I said, we should lump the charges and devote the saving to hiring a better chef. He explained that it had always been so managed; that the chef was thought very good, sir; and that by itemizing charges the young gentlemen who wished were enabled to live more cheaply. Obviously, when it costs a penny merely to keep your name on the books, there is need to economize.

After a quarter of an hour in the store the fellows drop off by twos and threes to read, or to take coffee in some one's room. With the coffee a glass of port is usually taken. Almost all the fellows have spirits and wines, which are sold by the college as freely as any other commodity. If a man wishes a cup served in his room, he has only to say so to his scout. If one waits long enough in the store, he is almost certain to be asked to coffee and wine. The would-be host circulates the room tapping the elect on the shoulder and speaking a quiet word, as they select Bones men at Yale. If half a dozen men are left in the store uninvited, one of them is apt to rise to the occasion and invite the lot. It scarcely matters how unpopular a fellow may be. The willingness to loaf is the touch of nature that makes all men kin.

After coffee more men fall off to their books; but the faithful are likely to spend the evening talking or playing cards—bridge, loo, napp, and whist, with the German importation of skat and the American importation of poker. In one college I knew, there was a nomadic roulette wheel that wandered from room to room pursued by the shadow of the dean, but seldom failed of an evening to gather its flock about it.

V

EVENING

In the evening, when the season permits, the fellows sit out of doors after dinner, smoking and playing bowls. There is no place in which the spring comes more sweetly than in an Oxford garden. The high walls are at once a trap for the first warm rays of the sun and a barrier against the winds of March. The daffodils and crocuses spring up with joy as the gardener bids; and the apple and cherry trees coddle against the warm north walls, spreading out their early buds gratefully to the mild English sun. For long, quiet hours after dinner they flaunt their beauty to the fellows smoking, and breathe their sweetness to the fellows playing bowls. "No man," exclaims the American visitor, "could live four years in these gardens of delight and not be made gentler and nobler!" Perhaps! though not altogether in the way the visitor imagines. When the flush of summer is on, the loiterers loll on the lawn full length; and as they watch the insects crawl among the grass they make bets on them, just as the gravest and most reverend seniors have been known to do in America.

In the windows overlooking the quadrangle are boxes of brilliant flowers, above which the smoke of a pipe comes curling out. At Harvard some fellows have geraniums in their windows, but only the very rich; and when they began the custom an ancient graduate wrote one of those communications to the "Crimson," saying that if men put unmanly boxes of flowers in the window, how can they expect to beat Yale? Flower boxes, no sand. At Oxford they manage things so that anybody may have flower boxes; and their associations are by no means unmanly. This is the way they do it. In the early summer a gardener's wagon from the country draws up by the college gate, and the driver cries, "Flowers! Flowers for a pair of old bags, sir." Bags is of course the fitting term for English trousers—which don't fit; and I should like to inform that ancient graduate that the window boxes of Oxford suggest the very badge of manhood.

As long as the English twilight lingers, the men will sit and talk and sing to the mandolin; and I have heard of fellows sitting and talking all night, not turning in until the porter appeared to take their names at roll-call. On the eve of May day it is quite the custom to sit out, for at dawn one may go to see the pretty ceremony of heralding the May on Magdalen Tower. The Magdalen choir boys—the sweetest songsters in all Oxford—mount to the top of that most beautiful of Gothic towers, and, standing among the pinnacles,—pinnacles afire with the spirituality of the Middle Ages, that warms all the senses with purity and beauty,—those boys, I say, on that tower and among those pinnacles, open their mouths and sing a Latin song to greet the May. Meantime, the fellows who have come out to listen in the street below make catcalls and blow fish horns. The song above is the survival of a Romish, perhaps a Druidical, custom; the racket below is the survival of a Puritan protest. That is Oxford in symbol! Its dignity and mellowness are not so much a matter of flowering gardens and crumbling walls as of the traditions of the centuries in which the whole life of the place has deep sources; and the noblest of its institutions are fringed with survivals that run riot in the grotesque.

MAGDALEN TOWER FROM THE BRIDGE

If a man intends to spend the evening out of college, he has to make a dash before nine o'clock; for love or for money the porter may not let an inmate out after nine. One man I knew was able to escape by guile. He had a brother in Trinity whom he very much resembled, and whenever he wanted to go out, he would tilt his mortarboard forward, wrap his gown high about his neck, as it is usually worn of an evening, and bidding the porter a polite good-night, say, "Charge me to my brother, Hancock, if you please." The charge is the inconsiderable sum of one penny, and is the penalty of having a late guest. Having profited by my experience with the similar charge for keeping my name on the college books, I never asked its why and wherefore. Both are no doubt survivals of some mediæval custom, the authority of which no college employee—or don, for the matter of that—would question. Such matters interest the Oxford man quite as little as the question how he comes by a tonsil or a vermiform appendix. They are there, and he makes the best of them.

If a fellow leaves college for an evening, it is for a foregathering at some other college, or to go to the theatre. As a rule he wears a cloth cap. A "billycock" or "bowler," as the pot hat is called, is as thoroughly frowned on now in English colleges as it was with us a dozen years ago. As for the mortarboard and gown, undergraduate opinion rather requires that they be left behind. This is largely, no doubt, because they are required by law to be worn. So far as the undergraduates are concerned, every operative statute of the university, with the exception of those relating to matriculation and graduation, refers to conduct in the streets after nightfall, and almost without exception they are honored in the breach. This is out of disregard for the Vice-Chancellor of the university, who is familiarly called the Vice, because he serves as a warning to others for the practice of virtue. The Vice makes his power felt in characteristically dark and tortuous ways. His factors are two proctors, college dons in daytime, but skulkers after nightfall, each of whom has his bulldogs, that is, scouts employed literally to spy upon the students. If these catch you without cap or gown, they cause you to be proctorized or "progged," as it is called, which involves a matter of five shillings or so. As a rule there is little danger of progging, but my first term fell in evil days. For some reason or other the chest of the university showed a deficit of sundry pounds, shillings, and pence; and as it had long ceased to need or receive regular bequests,—the finance of the institution being in the hands of the colleges,—a crisis was at hand. A more serious problem had doubtless never arisen since the great question was solved of keeping undergraduates' names on the books. The expedient of the Vice-Chancellor was to summon the proctors, and bid them charge their bulldogs to prog all freshmen caught at night without cap and gown. The deficit in the university chest was made up at five shillings a head.

One of the Vice-Chancellor's rules is that no undergraduate shall enter an Oxford "pub." Now the only restaurant in town, Queen's, is run in conjunction with a pub, and was once the favorite resort of all who were bent on breaking the monotony of an English Sunday. The Vice-Chancellor resolved to destroy this den of Sabbath-breaking, and the undergraduates resolved no less firmly to defend their stronghold. The result was a hand-to-hand fight with the bulldogs, which ended so triumphantly for the undergraduates that a dozen or more of them were sent down. In the articles of the peace that followed, it was stipulated, I was told, that so long as the restaurant was closed Sunday afternoons and nights, it should never suffer from the visit of proctor or bulldog. As a result, Queen's is a great scene of undergraduate foregatherings. The dinners are good enough and reasonably cheap; and as most excellent champagne is to be had at twelve shillings the bottle, the diners are not unlikely to get back to college a trifle buffy, in the Oxford phrase.

By an interesting survival of mediæval custom, the Vice-Chancellor has supreme power over the morals of the town, and any citizen who transgresses his laws is visited with summary punishment. For a tradesman or publican to assist in breaking university rules means outlawry and ruin, and for certain offenses a citizen may be punished by imprisonment. Over the Oxford theatre the Vice-Chancellor's power is absolute. In my time he was much more solicitous that the undergraduate be kept from knowledge of the omnipresent woman with a past than that dramatic art should flourish, and forbade the town to more than one excellent play of the modern school of comedy that had been seen and discussed in London by the younger sisters of the undergraduates. The woman with a present is virtually absent.

Time was when no Oxford play was quite successful unless the undergraduates assisted at its first night, though in a way very different from that which the term denotes in France. The assistance was of the kind so generously rendered in New York and Boston on the evening of an athletic contest. Even to-day, just for tradition's sake, the undergraduates sometimes make a row. A lot of B. N. C. men, as the clanny sons of Brazenose College call themselves, may insist that an opera stop while the troupe listen to one of their own excellent vocal performances; and I once saw a great sprinter, not unknown to Yale men, rise from his seat, face the audience, and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the soubrette, announce impressively, "Do you know, I rather like that girl!" The show is usually over just before eleven, and then occurs an amusing, if unseemly, scramble to get back to college before the hour strikes. A man who stays out after ten is fined threepence; after eleven the fine is sixpence. When all is said, why shouldn't one sprint for threepence?

If you stay out of college after midnight, the dean makes a star chamber offense of it, fines you a "quid" or two, and like as not sends you down. This sounds a trifle worse than it is; for if you must be away, your absence can usually be arranged for. If you find yourself in the streets after twelve, you may rap on some friend's bedroom window and tell him of your plight through the iron grating. He will then spend the first half of the night in your bed and wash his hands in your bowl. With such evidence as this to support him, the scout is not apt, if sufficiently retained, to report a suspected absence. I have even known fellows to make their arrangements in advance and spend the night in town; but the ruse has its dangers, and the penalty is to be sent down for good and all.

It is owing to such regulations as these that life in the English college has the name of being cloistral. Just how cloistral it is in spirit no one can know who has not taken part in a rag in the quad; and this is impossible to an outsider, for at midnight all visitors are required to leave, under a heavy penalty to their host.

VI

THE MIND OF THE COLLEGE

Any jubilation is a rag; but the most interesting kind, though perhaps the least frequent, takes the direction of what we call hazing. It is seldom, however, as hazing has come to be with us, a wanton outbreak. It is a deliberate expression of public opinion, and is carried on sedately by the leading men of the college. The more I saw of it, the more deeply I came to respect it as an institution.

In its simplest if rarest form it merely consists in smashing up a man's room. The only affair of this kind which I saw took place in the owner's absence; and when I animadverted on the fact, I was assured that it would have turned out much worse for the man's feelings if he had been present. He was a strapping big Rugbeian, who had come up with a "reputter," or reputation, as a football player, and had insisted on trying first off for the 'varsity fifteen. He had promptly been given the hoof for being slow and lazy, and when he condescended to try for the college fifteen, his services were speedily dispensed with for the same reason. As he still carried his head high, it was necessary to bring his shortcomings home to him in an unmistakable manner. Brutal as I thought the proceeding, and shameful to grown men, it did him good. He became a hard-working and lowly minded athlete, and prospered. I am not prepared to say that the effect in this particular instance did not justify the means.

A series of judicial raggings was much more edifying. Having pulled their culprit out of bed after midnight, the upper classmen set him upon his window-seat in pyjamas, and with great solemnity appointed a judge, a counsel for the prosecution, and a counsel for the defense. Of the charges against him only one or two struck home, and even these were so mingled with the nonsense of the proceedings that their sting was more or less blunted. The man had been given over to his books to the neglect of his personal appearance. It was charged that in pretending to know his subjunctives he was ministering to the vanity of the dean, who had written a Latin grammar, and that by displaying familiarity with Hegel he was boot-licking the master, who was a recently imported Scotch philosopher. Then the vital question was raised as to the culprit's personal habits. Heaven defend him now from his legal defender! It was urged that as he was a student of Literæ Humaniores, he might be excused from an acquaintance with the scientific commodity known as H₂O: one might ignore anything, in fact, if only one were interested in Literæ Humaniores. By such means as this the face of the college is kept bright and shining.

Here is a round robin, addressed to the best of fellows, a member of the 'varsity shooting team and golf team. He was a Scotchman by birth and by profession, and even his schoolboy days at Eton had not divested him of a Highland gait.

"Whereas, Thomas Rankeillor, Gent, of the University of Oxford, has, by means of his large feet, uncouth gait, and his unwieldy brogues, wantonly and with malice destroyed, mutilated, and otherwise injured the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, the property of the Oxford University Golf Club, whereof he is a member, and

"Whereas, 2, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by these large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, raised embankments, groins, and other bunkers, hazards, and impediments, formed unnecessary roads, farm roads, bridle paths, and other roads, on the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally, aforesaid; excavated sundry and diverse reservoirs, tanks, ponds, conduits, sewers, channels, and other runnels, needlessly irrigating the putting greens, tees, and golf course generally aforesaid, and

"Whereas, 3, The said Thomas Rankeillor, etc., has by those large feet, uncouth gait, and unwieldy brogues aforesaid, caused landslips, thus demolishing all natural hills, bunkers, and other excrescences, and all artificial hillocks, mounds, hedges, and other hazards,

"Hereby we, the circumsigned, do request, petition, and otherwise entreat the aforesaid

"Thomas Rankeillor, Gent, of the University of Oxford, to alter, transform, and otherwise modify his uncouth gait, carriage, and general mode of progression; to buy, purchase, or otherwise acquire boots, shoes, and all other understandings of reasonable size, weight, and material; and finally that he do cease from this time forward to wear, use, or in any way carry the aforesaid brogues.

"Given forth this the 17th day of March, 1896."

At times rougher means are employed. At Brazenose there happened to be two men by the same name, let us say, of Gaylor, one of whom had made himself agreeable to the college, while the other had decidedly not. One midnight a party of roisterers hauled the unpopular Gaylor out of his study, pulled off his bags, and dragged him by the heels a lap or two about the quad. This form of discipline has since been practiced in other colleges, and is called debagging. The popular Gaylor was ever afterward distinguished by the name of Asher, because, according to the Book of Judges, Asher abode in his breaches.

Not dissimilar correctives may be employed, in extreme need, against those mightiest in authority. A favorite device is to screw the oak of an objectionable don. Mr. Andrew Lang, himself formerly a don at Merton, reports a conversation—can it have been a personal experience?—between a don standing inside a newly screwed oak and his scout, who was tendering sympathy from the staircase. "What am I to do?" cried the don. "Mr. Muff, sir," suggested the scout, "when 'e's screwed up, sir, 'e sends for the blacksmith." At Christ Church, "The House," as it is familiarly called, much more direct and personal methods have been employed. Not many years ago a censor (whose office is that of the dean at other colleges) stirred up unusual ill-will among his wards. They pulled him from his bed, dragged him into Tom Quad,—Wolsey's Quad,—and threw him bodily among the venerable carp of the Mercury Pond. Then they gathered about in a circle, and, when he raised his head above the surface, thrust him under with their walking-sticks. Something like forty of them were sent down for this, and the censor went traveling for his health.

The memory of this episode was still green when the Duke of Marlborough gave a coming of age ball at Blenheim Palace, and invited over literally hundreds of his Oxford friends. In other colleges the undergraduates were permitted to leave Oxford for the night, but at the House the censor stipulated that they be within the gates, as usual, by midnight. This would have meant a break-neck drive of eight miles after about fifteen minutes at the ball, and was far more exasperating to the young Britons than a straightforward refusal. That evening the dons sported their oaks, and carefully bolted themselves within. The night passed in so deep a silence that, for all they knew, the ghost of Wolsey might have been stalking in his cherished quadrangle, the glory of building which the Eighth Henry so unfeelingly appropriated. As morning dawned, the common-room gossips will tell you, the dons crawled furtively out of bed, and shot their bolts to find whether they had need of the blacksmith. Not a screw had been driven. The morning showed why. On the stately walls of Tom Quad was painted "Damn the Dons!" and again in capital letters, "Damn the Dons!" and a third time, in larger capitals, "Damn the Dons!" There were other inscriptions, less fit to relate; and stretching along one whole side of the quad, in huge characters, the finely antithetical sentence: "God bless the Duke of Marlborough." The doors of the dean's residence were smeared with red paint; and against a marble statue of the late Dean Liddell, the Greek lexicographer, a bottle of green ink had been smashed. Two hundred workmen, summoned from a neighboring building, labored two days with rice-root brushes and fuller's earth, but with so little effect that certain of the stones had to be replaced in the walls, and endless scrubbings failed to overcome the affinity between the ink and the literary Liddell. The marble statue has been replaced by one of plaster.

Compared with the usual Oxford rag, the upsetting of Professor Silliman's statue in the Yale campus by means of a lasso dwindles into insignificance, and the painting of 'varsity stockings on John Harvard, which so scandalized the undergraduates that they repaired the damage by voluntary subscriptions, might be regarded as an act of filial piety.

The more I learned of Oxford motives, the less anxious I was to censure the system of ragging. In an article I wrote after only a few months' stay, I spoke of it as boyish and undignified; and most Americans, I feel sure, would likewise hold up the hand of public horror. Yet I cannot be wholly thankful that we are not as they. To the undergraduates, ragging is a survival of the excellently efficient system of discipline in the public schools, where the older boys have charge of the manners and morals of the younger; and historically, like public school discipline, it is an inheritance from the prehistoric past. In the Middle Ages it was apparently the custom to hold the victim's nose literally to the grindstone. In the schools, to be sure, the Sixth Form take their duties with great sobriety of conscience—which is not altogether the case in college; but the difference of spirit is perhaps justifiable. For a properly authorized committee of big schoolboys to chastise a youngster who has transgressed is not unnatural, and the system that provides for it has proved successful for five centuries; but for men to adopt the same attitude towards a fellow only a year or two their junior would be preposterous. Horseplay is a necessary part of the game. The end in both is the same: it is to bring each individual under the influence of the traditions and standards of the institution of which he has elected to be a part. Just as the system of breakfasting freshmen is by no means as altruistic as it at first appears, the practice of ragging is by no means as brutal. It is as if the college said: We have admitted you and welcomed you, opening up the way to every avenue of enjoyment and profit, and it is for our common good, sir, that you be told of your shortcomings. The most diligent and distinguished scholar is not unlikely to be most in need of a pointed lesson in personal decorum; and the man who was not Asher may be thankful all his life for the bad quarter of an hour that taught him the difference between those who do and those who do not abide in their breaches.

With regard to the dons, a similar case might be made. Any one who assumes an authority over grown men that is so nearly absolute should be held to strict honesty and justice of dealing. So far as I could learn, the Christ Church dons who were so severely dealt with were both unjust and insincere, and I came to sympathize in some measure with the undergraduates at the House, who were half humorously inclined to regard the forty outcasts as martyrs.

This is not to argue that all American hazing is justifiable. In many cases, especially of late years, it has been as silly and brutal as the most puritanical moralists have declared. To steal the Louisburg Cross from above the door of the Harvard Library was vandalism if you wish—it was certainly a very stupid proceeding; and to celebrate a really notable athletic victory by mutilating the pedestal of the statue of John Harvard was not only stupid, but unworthy of a true sportsman. How much better to make an end with painting 'varsity stockings on the dear old boy's bronze legs, and leave the goody to wash them off next day. What I wish to point out is that where there is vigorous public spirit, it may be more efficiently expressed by hazing than by a very nor'easter of Puritan morality.

A tradition of the late master of Balliol, Jowett, the great humanist, would seem to show that he held some such opinion. It was his custom in his declining years to walk after breakfast in the garden quad, and whenever there were evidences of a rag, even to the extent of broken windows, he would say cheerily to his fidus Achates, "Ah, Hardie, the mind of the college is still vigorous; it has been expressing itself." The best possible justification of the cloistral restrictions of English college life is the facility with which the mind of the college expresses itself. It is by no means fantastic to hint that the decline of well-considered hazing in American colleges has come step by step with the breaking up of the bonds of hospitality and comradeship that used to make them well-organized social communities.

I have not come to this philosophy without deep experience. On one occasion after Hall, I was flown with such insolence against college restrictions that the cheval-de-frise above the back gate seemed an affront to a freeborn American. Though the porter's gate was still open, it was imperatively necessary to scale that roller of iron spikes. I was no sooner astride of it than a mob of townspeople gathered without, and among them a palsied beggar, who bellowed out that he would hextricate me for 'arf a crown, sir. I have seldom been in a less gratifying position; and when I had clambered back into college, I ruefully recalled the explanation my tutor had given me of the iron spikes and bottle shards,—an explanation that at the time had shaken my sides with laughter at British absurdity. My tutor had said that if the fellows were allowed to rag each other in the open streets and smash the townspeople's windows, the matter would be sure to get into the papers and set the uninitiated parent against the universities. In effect, the iron spikes and the stumps of bottles are admirable, not so much because they keep the undergraduate in, as because they keep the public out; and since the public includes all people who wish to hextricate you for 'arf a crown, sir, my mind was in a way to be reduced to that British state of illogic in which I regarded only the effect.

As a last resort I carefully sounded the undergraduates as to whether they would find use for greater liberty. They were not only content with their lot, but would, I found, resent any loosening of the restrictions. To give them the liberty of London at night or even of Oxford, they argued, would tend to break up the college as a social organization and thus to weaken it athletically; for at Oxford they understand what we sometimes do not, that a successful cultivation of sports goes hand in hand with good comradeship and mutual loyalty.

The only question remaining was of the actual moral results of the semi-cloistral life. Such outbreaks of public opinion as I have described are at the worst exceptional; they are the last resort of outraged patience. The affair at Christ Church is unexampled in modern times. Many a man of the better sort goes through his four years at the university without either experiencing or witnessing undergraduate violence. As for drinking, in spite of the fact that wine and spirits are sold to undergraduates by the college at any and all times and in any and all quantities, there seemed to be less excessive indulgence than, for instance, at Harvard or at Yale. And the fact that what there was took place for the most part within the college walls was in many respects most fortunate. When fellows are turned loose for their jubilations amid the vices of a city, as is usually the case with us, the consequences to their general morality are sometimes the most hideous. In an English college the men to whom immorality seems inevitable—and such are to be found in all communities—have recourse to London. But as their expeditions take place in daylight and cold blood, and are, except at great risk, cut short when the last evening train leaves Paddington shortly after dinner, it is not possible to carry them off with that dazzling air of the man of the world that in America lures so many silly freshmen into dissipations for which they have no natural inclination. This little liberty is apparently of great value. The cloistral vice, which seems inevitable in the English public schools, is robbed of any shadow of palliation. A fellow who continues it is thought puerile, if nothing worse. When it exists, it is more likely to be the result of the intimate study of the ancient classics, and is then even more looked down upon by the robust Briton as effeminate or decadent. The subject, usually difficult or impossible to investigate, happened to be on the surface at the time of my residence because of the sensational trial of an Oxford graduate in London. I was satisfied that the general body of undergraduates was quite free of contamination. On the whole, I should say that the restrictions of college life in England are far less dangerous than the absolute freedom of life in an American college. Under our system a few men profit greatly; they leave college experienced in the ways of the world and at the same time thoroughly masters of themselves. But it is a strong man—perhaps a blasphemous one—that would ask to be led into temptation. The best system of college residence, I take it, is that which develops thoroughly and spontaneously the normal social instincts, and at the same time leaves men free moral agents. In a rightly constituted fellow, in fact, the normal social life constitutes the only real freedom. Those frowning college walls, which we are disposed to regard as instruments of pedagogical tyranny, are the means of nourishing the normal social life, and are thus in effect the bulwarks of a freer system than is known to American universities.

VII

CLUB LIFE IN THE COLLEGE

As a place for the general purposes of residence—eating and sleeping, work and play—the English college is clearly quite as well organized and equipped as any of the societies, clubs, or fraternities of an American university. And whereas these are in their very nature small and exclusive, the college is ample in size and is consciously and effectively inclusive; the very fact of living in it insures a well-ordered life and abundant opportunity for making friends. Yet within this democratic college one finds all sorts of clubs and societies, except those whose main purpose is residential, and these are obviously not necessary.

By far the larger proportion of the clubs are formed to promote the recognized undergraduate activities. No college is without athletic and debating clubs, and there are musical and literary clubs almost everywhere. Membership in all of them is little more than a formal expression of the fact that a man desires to row, play cricket or football, to debate, read Shakespeare, or play the fiddle. Yet they are all conducted with a degree of social amenity that to an American is as surprising as it is delightful.

The only distinctively social feature of the athletic clubs is the wine, which is given to celebrate the close of a successful season. A boating wine I remember was held in a severe and sombre old hall, built before Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It was presided over by a knot of the dons, ancient oarsmen, whose hearts were still in the sport. They sat on the dais, like the family of a baron of the Middle Ages, while the undergraduates sat about the tables like faithful retainers. All the sportsmen of the college were invited, and everybody made as much noise as he could, especially one of the boating men, who went to the piano and banged out a song of triumph he had written, while we all tumbled into the chorus. One of the fellows—I have always taken it as a compliment to my presence—improvised a cheer after the manner not unknown in America, which was given with much friendly laughter. "Quite jolly, isn't it!" he remarked, with the pride of authorship, "and almost as striking as your cry of 'Quack, quack, quack!'" He had heard the Yale men give their adaptation of the frog chorus at the athletic games between Oxford and Yale. About midnight the college butler passed a loving cup of mulled wine of a spicy smoothness to fill your veins with liquid joy. The recipe, I was told, had been handed down by the butlers of the college since the fourteenth century, being older than the hall in which we were drinking. I have no doubt it was the cordial Chaucer calls Ypocras, which seems to have brought joy to his warm old heart. After the loving cup had gone about, the fellows cleared away the tables and danced a stag. At this stage of the game the dons discreetly faded away, and the wine resolved itself into a good-natured rag in the quad that was ended only by daylight and the dean. I have seen many feasts to celebrate athletic victory and the breaking of training, but none as homelike and pleasant all through as the wine of an Oxford college.

The debating clubs have of necessity a distinct social element, for where there is much talk, food and drink will always be found; and with the social element there is apt to be some little exclusiveness. In Balliol there are three debating clubs, and they are of course in some sense rivals. Like the fraternities in an American college, they look over the freshmen each year pretty closely; and the freshmen in turn weigh the clubs. One freshman gave his verdict as follows: "The fellows in A are dull, and bathe; the fellows in B are clever, and sometimes bathe; the fellows in C are supposed to be clever." The saying is not altogether a pleasant one, but will serve to indicate the range of selection of members. In spite of social distinctions, few fellows need be excluded who care to debate or are clubable in spirit. As a system, the clubs are inclusive rather than exclusive.

Each club convenes at regular intervals, usually in the rooms of such members as volunteer to be hosts. The hour of meeting is directly after dinner, and while the men gather and settle down to the business of the evening, coffee, port, and tobacco are provided out of the club treasury. The debates are supposed to be carried on according to the strictest parliamentary law, and the man who transgresses is subject to a sharp rebuff. On one occasion, when the question of paying members of Parliament was up, one speaker gravely argued that the United States Senate was filled with politicians who were attracted by the salary. Though I had already spoken, I got up to protest. The chairman sat me down with the greatest severity—amid a broad and general smile. I had neglected, I suppose, the parliamentary remark that I arose to a point of fact. A member's redress in such instances is to rag the president at the time when, according to custom, interpellations are in order; and as a rule he avails himself of this opportunity without mercy. On one occasion, a fellow got up in the strictest parliamentary manner and asked the president—a famous shot on the moors—whether it was true, as reported, that on the occasion when he lately fell over a fence three wrens and a chipping sparrow fell out of his game-bag. Such ragging as the chair administers and receives may not aid greatly in rational debate, but it certainly has its value as a preparation for the shifts and formalities of parliamentary life. It is the first duty of a chairman, even the president of the Oxford Union, to meet his ragging with cheerfulness and a ready reply, and the first duty of all debaters is to be interesting as well as convincing. In American college debating there is little of such humor and none of such levity. The speakers are drafted to sustain or to oppose a position, often without much reference to their convictions, and are supposed to do so to the uttermost. The training is no doubt a good one, for life is largely partisan; but a man's success in the world depends almost as much on his tact and good sense as on his strenuosity.

The Englishman's advantage in address is sometimes offset by deficiencies of information. In a debate on Home Rule, one argument ran somewhat as follows: It is asserted that the Irish are irresponsible and lacking in the sense of administrative justice. To refute this statement, I have only to point to America, to the great metropolis of New York. There, as is well known, politics are exclusively in the hands of Irish citizens, who, denied the right of self-government—as the American colonies were denied similar freedom, I need scarcely point out with what disastrous results to the empire—the Irish immigrants in America, I say, are evincing their true genius for statesmanship in their splendid organization known as Tammany Hall.

In the better clubs, the debates are often well prepared and cogent. I remember with particular gratitude a discussion as to whether the English love of comfort was not an evidence of softening morals. The discussion was opened with a paper by a young Scotchman of family and fortune. More than any other man I met he had realized the sweetness and pleasantness of Oxford, and all the delights of the senses and of the mind that surround the fellows there; and the result of it was, as it has so often been with such men, a craving for the extreme opposite of all he had known, for moral earnestness and austerity. What right, he questioned, had one to buy a book which, with ever so little more effort, he might read in the Bodleian, while all the poor of England are uneducated? And was it manly or in any way proper to spend so much time and interest on things that are merely agreeable? The sense of the meeting seemed to be that comfort in daily life is an evil only when it becomes an end in itself, a self-indulgence; and that a certain amount of it is necessary to fortify one for the most strenuous and earnest work in the world. I think that debate made us realize, as we never could have realized without it, to what serious end England makes the ways of her young men so pleasant; yet the more deeply I lived into the life of the university, the more deeply I questioned, as the young Scotchman did, whether the line between the amenities and the austerities was not somewhat laxly drawn.

The only purely social club, and therefore the only really exclusive one, is the wine club. In Balliol there is a college rule against wine clubs, which seems to be due partly to a feeling against social exclusiveness, and partly perhaps to a distrust of purely convivial gatherings. The purpose of a wine club was served quite as well, however, by an organization that was ostensibly for debating. The notices of meetings were usually a parody of the notices of the meetings of genuine debating clubs, and the chief business of the secretary was to concoct them in pleasing variety. For instance, it would be Resolved, that this House looks with disfavor upon the gradual introduction of a continental sabbath into England; or Resolved, that this House looks with marked disfavor upon the assumption that total abstinence is a form of intemperance. On the evening when the House was defending total abstinence, our host's furniture and tea-things suffered some damage, and as I was in training, I found it advisable to leave early. As I slipped out, the president of the club, a young nobleman, who was himself at the time in training for the 'varsity trial eights, called me back and said with marked sobriety that he had just thought of something. "You are in for the mile run, aren't you? And in America you have always run the half. Well, then, if you find the distance too long for you, just don't mind at all about the first part of the race, but when you get to the last part, run as you run a half mile. Do it in two minutes, and you can't help beating 'em." He bade me good-night with a grave and authoritative shake of the hand. If he recalled his happy thought next morning, he was unable to avail himself of it, for I grieve to say that in the 'varsity trial race, which came only a few days later, he missed his blue by going badly to pieces on the finish.

The meeting at which this occurred was exceptional. For the most part the fellows were moderate enough, and at times I suspected the wine club of being dull. Certainly, we had no such fun as at the more general jubilations—a rag in the quad or a boating wine. I doubt if any one would have cared so very much to belong to the club if it had not afforded the only badge of social distinction in college, and if this had not happened to be an unusually pretty hatband. However successful a wine club may be, moreover, it is of far less consequence than similar clubs in America. In the first place, since there are one or more of them in each of the twenty colleges, the number of men who belong to them is far greater relatively, which of course means far less exclusion. In the second place, and this is more important, the fellows who do not belong are still able to enjoy the life which is common to all members of the college. In general, the social walls of Oxford are like the material ones. Far from being the means of undue exclusion and of the suppression of public feeling, they are the live tissues in which the vital functions of the place are performed.

Until well along in the nineteenth century, this life in the college was about the only life; but of late years the university has begun to feel its unity more strongly, and in social and intellectual life, as in athletics, it has become for the first time since the Middle Ages an organic whole.

VIII

SOCIAL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSITY

The first formal organization of the life of the university was, as its name records, the Oxford Union, an institution of peculiar interest to Americans because our universities, though starting from a point diametrically opposite, have arrived at a state of social disorganization no less pronounced than that which the Union was intended to remedy. Harvard, which has progressed farthest along the path of social expansion and disintegration, has already made a conscious effort to imitate the Union. The adamantine spirit of Yale is shaken by the problems of the Sophomore societies; and it will not be many decades before other universities will be in a similar predicament. It will not be amiss, therefore, to consider what the Oxford Union has been and is. If Americans have not clearly understood it even when attempting to imitate it, one should at least remember that it would not be easy for an Oxford man to explain it thoroughly.

The Union was founded in 1823, and was primarily for debating. In fact, it was the only university debating society. Its members were carefully selected for their ability in discoursing on the questions of the day. In its debates Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, the Marquis of Salisbury, and countless other English statesmen of recent times got their first parliamentary training. Its present fame in England is largely based upon this fact; but its character has been metamorphosed. Early in its history it developed social features; and though it was still exclusive in membership, little by little men of all kinds were taken in. At this stage of its development, the Union was not unlike those vast political clubs in London in which any and all principles are subordinated to the kitchen and the wine cellar. The debates, though still of first-rate quality, became more and more an incident; the club was chiefly remarkable as the epitome of all the best elements of Oxford life. The library was filled with men reading or working at special hobbies; the reading and smoking rooms were crowded; the lawn was daily thronged with undergraduates gossiping over a cup of tea; the telegram board, the shrine of embryo politicians watching for the results from a general election, was apt to be profaned by sporting men scanning it for the winners of the Derby or the Ascot. In a word, the Union held the elect of Oxford, intellectual, social, and sporting. This is the Union remembered by the older graduates, and except for a single feature, namely, that it was still exclusive, this is the Union that has inspired the projectors of the Harvard Union.

The Oxford man of the later day knows all too well that this Union is no more. Some years ago, responding to a democratic impulse that has been very strong of late at Oxford, the Union threw down all barriers; virtually any man nowadays may join it, and its members number well beyond a thousand. The result is not a social millennium. The very feature of inclusiveness that is to be most prominent in the Union at Harvard destroyed the character of the Oxford Union as a representative body. To the casual observer it still looks much as it did a dozen years ago; but its glory has departed. In any real sense of the word it is a Union no more. The men who used to give it character are to be found in smaller clubs, very much like the clubs of an American university.

The small university debating clubs are the Russell, the Palmerston, the Canning, and the Chatham, each of which stands for some special stripe of political thought, and each of which has a special color which—sure sign of the pride of exclusiveness—it wears in hatbands. The clubs meet periodically—often weekly—in the rooms of members. Sometimes a paper is read which is followed by an informal discussion; but the usual exercise is a formal debate. Time was when the best debates came off at the Union, and writers of leading articles in London papers even now look to it as a political weather-vane. The debates there are still earnest and sometimes brilliant, and to have presided over them is a distinction of value in after life; but as far as I could gather, their prestige is falling before the smaller debating clubs. The main interest at the Union appeared to centre in the interpellation of the president, which is carried on much as in the House of Commons, though with this difference, that, following the immemorial custom, it is turned into ragging. When this is over, the major part of the audience clears out to the smoking and reading rooms. In the smaller clubs the exercises are not only serious, but—in spite of the preliminary ragging, which no function at Oxford may flourish without—they are taken seriously. The clubs really include the best forensic ability of Oxford. At the end of each year they give dinners, at which new and old members gather, while some prominent politician from Westminster holds forth on the question of the hour. In a word, these clubs, collectively, are what the Union once was—the training school of British statesmen.

The university social clubs are of a newness that shocks even an American; but it would not be quite just to account for the fact by regarding them as mere offshoots, like the debating clubs, of a parent Union. Until the nineteenth century, there really was no university at Oxford, at least in modern times. The colleges were quite independent of one another socially and in athletics, and each of them provided all the necessary instruction for its members. The social clubs which now admit members from the university at large began life as wine clubs of separate colleges, and even to-day the influence of the parent college is apt to predominate. The noteworthy fact is that in proportion as the social prestige of the Union has declined, these college wine clubs, like the small debating clubs, have gained character and prestige.

The oldest of these is the Bullingdon, which is not quite as old, I gathered, as the Institute of 1770 at Harvard, and, considered as a university organization, it is of course much younger. It was originally the Christ Church wine club, and to-day it is dominated by the sporting element of Christ Church, which is the most aristocratic of Oxford colleges. In former years, it is said, the club had kennels at Bullingdon, and held periodic hunts there; and it is still largely composed of hunting men. To-day it justifies its name mainly by having an annual dinner beneath the heavy rafters of a mediæval barn at Bullingdon. On these, as on other state occasions, the members wear a distinctive costume—no doubt a tradition from the time when men generally wore colors—which consists of a blue evening coat with white facings and brass buttons, a canary waistcoat, and a blue tie. This uniform is no doubt found in more aristocratic wardrobes than any other Oxford trophy. The influence of the Bullingdon is indirectly to discourage athletics, which it regards as unaristocratic and incompatible with conviviality; so that Christ Church, though the largest of Oxford colleges and one of the wealthiest, is of secondary importance in sports. For this reason the Bullingdon has suffered a partial eclipse, for the middle-class spirit which is invading Oxford has given athletic sports the precedence over hunting, while expensive living and mere social exclusiveness are less the vogue. By a curious analogy, one of the oldest and most exclusive of the clubs at Harvard is similarly out of sympathy with the athletic spirit.

Another old and prominent college wine club that has come to elect members from without is the Phœnix of Brazenose, the uniform of which is perhaps more beautiful than the Bullingdon uniform, consisting of a peculiar dark wine-colored coat, brass buttons, and a light buff waistcoat. In general, the college wine clubs are more or less taking on a university character. The Annandale Club of Balliol, for instance, has frequent guests from outside, and often elects them to membership out of compliment. At the formal wines the members have the privilege of inviting outside guests.

The most popular and representative Oxford club is Vincent's, which owes its prominence to the fact that it expresses the enthusiasm of modern Oxford for athletics. It was founded only a third of a century ago, but it must be remembered that inter-varsity boat races did not become usual until 1839, nor a fixture until 1856; that the first inter-varsity athletic meeting came in 1864, and the first inter-varsity football game as late as 1873. Vincent's was originally composed largely of men from University College, which was at that time a leader in sports; but later it elected many men from Brazenose, then in the ascendant. When Brazenose became more prominent in athletics, it gained a controlling influence in Vincent's; and when it declined, as it lately did, the leadership passed on. The name Vincent's came from a printer's shop, above which the club had its rooms. Any second year man is eligible; in fact, until a few years ago, freshmen were often taken in. The limit of members is ninety, but as the club is always a dozen or so short of this, no good fellow is excluded for lack of a place. When a man is proposed, his name is written in a book, in which space is left for friends in the club to write their names in approval. After this, elections are in the hands of a committee. Like all Oxford clubs, Vincent's will always, I suppose, lean towards men of some special college or group of colleges; yet it is careful to elect all clubable blues, and, in point of fact, is representative of the university at large, as, for instance, the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, or the senior societies at Yale, to which, on the whole, it most nearly corresponds.

The most democratic, as well as one of the most recent of the more purely social clubs, is the Gridiron. It is a dining rather than a social club, and one may invite to his board as many guests who are not members as he chooses. Any good fellow is eligible, though here, again, a man in one of the less known colleges might fail to get in from lack of acquaintances on the election committee.

The Union has long lost prestige before this development of small exclusive clubs. Politically, socially, and even in that most essential department, the kitchen, it holds a second place. If you ask men of the kind that used to give it its character why they never go there, they will tell you, in the most considerate phrase, how the pressure of other undergraduate affairs is so great that they have not yet found time; and this is quite true. They may add that next year they intend to make the time, for they believe that one should know all kinds of men at Oxford; and they are quite sincere. But next year they are more preoccupied than ever. If Oxford is united socially, it is not because of the Oxford Union.

In addition to the clubs which are mainly social, there is the usual variety of special organizations. These, as a rule, are of recent growth. The Musical Union has frequent meetings for practice, and gives at least one concert a year. The Dramatic Society, the O.U.D.S., as it is popularly called, will be seen to be a very portentous organization. In America, college men give comic operas and burlesques, usually writing both the book and the music themselves; and when they do, there is apt to be a Donnybrook Fair for vulnerable heads in the faculty. So well is musical nonsense adapted to the calibre of the undergraduate mind that college plays sometimes find their way to the professional stage, and to no small general favor. At Oxford the Vice-Chancellor, who is a law to himself and to the university, has decreed that there shall be no fun and nonsense. If the absurdities of donnishness are all too fair a mark for the undergraduate wit, the Vice-Chancellor has found a very serviceable scapegoat. He permits the undergraduates to present the plays of Shakespeare. Surely Shakespeare can stand the racket. The aim of the O.U.D.S. seems to be to get as many blues as possible into the cast of a Shakespearean production, with the idea, perhaps, of giving Oxford its full money's worth. I remember well the sensation made by the most famous of all university athletes,—a "quadruple blue," who played on four university teams, was captain of three of them, and held one world's record. The play was "The Merchant of Venice," and the athlete in question was the swarthy Prince of Morocco. Upon opening the golden casket his powers of elocution rose to unexpected heights. Fellows went again and again to hear him cry, "O hell! what have we here?" In one way, however, the performances of the O.U.D.S. are really noteworthy. Not even the crudest acting can entirely disguise the influences of birth and environment; and few Shakespearean actors have as fine a natural carriage as those companies of trained athletes. For the first time, perhaps, on any stage, the ancient Roman honor more or less appeared in Antonio, and there were really two gentlemen in Verona. For this reason—or, what is more likely, merely because the plays are given by Oxford men—the leading dramatic critics of London run up every year for the O.U.D.S. performance, and talk learnedly about it in their dignified periodicals. Both the musical and the dramatic societies have an increasing social element, and the dramatic society has a house of its own.

Of at least one association I happened upon, I know of no American parallel. One Sunday afternoon, a lot of fellows who had been lunching each other in academic peace were routed from college by a Salvation Army gathering that was sending up the discordant notes of puritanical piety just outside the walls. In the street near by we came upon a quiet party of undergraduates in cap and gown. They were standing in a circle, at the foot of the Martyr's Memorial, and were alternately singing hymns and exhorting the townspeople who gathered about. Their faces were earnest and simple, their attitude erect. If they were conscious of doing an unusual thing, they did not show it. I don't remember that they moved any of us to repent the pleasantness of our ways, but I know that they filled the most careless of us with a very definite admiration. One of the fellows said that he thought them mighty plucky, and that they had the stuff at least out of which sportsmen are made. The phrase is peculiarly British, but in the undergraduate vernacular there is no higher epithet of praise. In America there are slumming societies and total abstinence leagues; but I never knew any body of men who had the courage to stand up in the highway and preach their gospel to passers-by.

IX

THE COLLEGE AND THE UNIVERSITY

The distinctive feature of the social organization of Oxford life is said to be the colleges. Fifty years ago the remark held good, but to-day it requires an extension. The distinctive feature is the duality of the social organization: a man who enters fully into undergraduate affairs takes part both in the life of the college and in the life of the university. The life of the college, in so far as it is wholesome, is open to all newcomers; it is so organized as to exert powerfully upon them the force of its best influences and traditions, and is thus in the highest degree inclusive. The life of the university, in so far as it is vigorous, is in the main open only to those who bring to it special gifts and abilities, and is therefore necessarily exclusive. In college, one freely enjoys all that is fundamental in the life of a young man—a pleasant place to sleep in and to dine in, pleasant fellows with whom to work and to play. In the university, one finds scope for his special capacities in conviviality or in things of the mind. More than any other institution, the English university thus mirrors the conditions of social life in the world at large, in which one is primarily a member of his family, and takes part in the life of the outside community in proportion as his abilities lead him.

The happiest thing about all this is that it affords the freest possible interplay of social forces. As soon as a newcomer gains distinction, as he does at once if he has the capacity, he is noticed by the leading men of the college, and is thus in a way to be taken into the life of the university. From the college breakfast it is only a step to the Gridiron, from the college eight to Vincent's, and from the debating society to the Chatham or the Canning. These, like all undergraduate clubs, are in yearly need of new members, and the older men in college are only too glad to urge the just claims of the younger for good-fellowship sake, and for the general credit of their institution.

Even when a fellow has received all the university has to offer, he is still amenable to the duality of Oxford life. In American institutions, in proportion as a man is happily clubbed, he is by the very nature of the social organization withdrawn from his college mates; but at Oxford he still dines in Hall, holds forth at the college debating society, plays on the college teams, and, until his final year, he lives within the college walls. First, last, and always his general life is bound up with that of the college.

The prominent men thus become a medium by which every undergraduate is brought in touch with the life of the university. The news of the athletic world is reported at Vincent's over afternoon tea; and at dinner time the men who have discussed it there relate it to their mates in the halls of a dozen colleges. A celebrated debater brings the news of the Union or of the smaller clubs; and whatever a man's affiliations in the university, he can scarcely help bringing the report of them back with him. In an incredibly short time all undergraduate news, and the judgments upon it of those best qualified to judge, ramify the college; and men who seldom stir beyond its walls are brought closely in touch with the innermost spirit of the university life. Here, again, those forbidding walls make possible a freedom of social interplay which is unknown in America. The real union of Oxford, social, athletic, and intellectual, is quite apart from the so-called Oxford Union; it results from the nice adjustment between the general residential life of the colleges and the specialized activities of the university.

The immediate effect of this union is the humble one of making the present life of the undergraduate convenient and enjoyable; but its ultimate effect is a matter of no little importance. Every undergraduate, in proportion to his susceptibilities and capacities, comes under the influence of the social and intellectual traditions of Oxford, which are the traditions of centuries of the best English life. In Canada and Australia, South Africa and India, you will find the old Oxonian wearing the hatband, perhaps faded and weather-stained, that at Oxford denoted the thing he was most proud to stand for; and wherever you find him, you will find also the manners and standards of the university, which are quite as definite a part of him, though perhaps less conspicuous. Without a large body of men animated by such traditions, it is no exaggeration to say that it would not have been possible to build up the British empire. If the people of the United States are to bear creditably the responsibilities to civilization that have lately fallen to them, or have been assumed, there is urgent need for institutions that shall similarly impose upon our young men the best traditions and influences of American life.

II

OXFORD OUT OF DOORS

I

SLACKING ON THE ISIS AND THE CHERWELL

The dual development of college and university, with all its organic coördinations, exists also in the sports of Oxford. The root and trunk of the athletic spirit lies in the colleges, though its highest development is found in university teams. To an American, this athletic life of the college will be found of especial interest, for it is the basis of the peculiar wholesomeness and moderation of Oxford sports. If the English take their pleasures sadly, as they have been charged with doing ever since Froissart hit upon the happy phrase, they are not so black a pot but that they are able to call us blacker; in the light of international contests, they have marveled at the intensity with which our sportsmen pursue the main chance. The difference here has a far deeper interest than the critic of boating or track athletics often realizes. Like the songs of a nation, its sports have a definite relation to its welfare: one is tempted to say, let me rule the games of my countrymen and who will may frame their laws. At least, I hope to be pardoned if I speak with some particularity of the out-of-door life, and neglect the lofty theme of inter-varsity contests for the humbler pursuits of the common or garden undergraduate.

The origin of the boating spirit is no doubt what the Oxonian calls slacking, for one has to learn to paddle in a boat before he can row to advantage; and in point of fact the bumping races are supposed to have originated among parties of slackers returning at evening from up the river. If I were to try to define what a slacker is, I suppose you could answer that all Oxford men are slackers; but there are depths beneath depths of far niente. The true slacker avoids the worry and excitement of breakfast parties and three-day cricket matches, and conserves his energies by floating and smoking for hours at a time in his favorite craft on the Isis and the Cherwell—or "Char," as the university insists on calling it. He is a day-dreamer of day-dreamers; and despised as he is by the more strenuous Oxford men, who yet stand in fear of the fascination of his vices, he is as restful a figure to an American as a negro basking on a cotton-wharf, and as appealing as a beggar steeped in Italian sunlight. Merely to think of his uninterrupted calm and his insatiable appetite for doing nothing is a rest to occidental nerves; and though one may never be a roustabout and loaf on a cotton-wharf, one may at any time go to Oxford and play through a summer's day at slacking.

Before you come out, you must make the acquaintance of the O.U.H.S.—that is, the University Humane Society. In the winter, when there is skating, the Humane Society man stands by the danger spot with a life-buoy and a rope; and in the summer, when the streams swarm with pleasure-craft, he wanders everywhere, pulling slackers out of the Isis and the Char. In view of the fact that, metaphorically speaking at least, you can shake hands with your neighbors across either of these streams, the Humane Society man is not without his humors.

You may get yourself a tub or a working-boat or a wherry, a rob-roy or a dinghy, for every craft that floats is known on the Thames; but the favorite craft are the Canadian canoe and the punt. The canoe you will be familiar with, but your ideas of a punt are probably derived from a farm-built craft you have poled about American duck-marshes—which bears about the same relationship to this slender, half-decked cedar beauty that a canal-boat bears to a racing-shell.

During your first perilous lessons in punting, you will probably be in apprehension of ducking your mentor, who is lounging among the cushions in the bow. But you cannot upset the punt any more than you can discompose the Englishman; the punt simply upsets you without seeming to be aware of it. And when you crawl dripping up the bank, consoled only by the fact that the Humane Society man was not at hand with his boat-hook to pull you out by the seat of the trousers, your mentor will gravely explain how you made your mistake. Instead of bracing your feet firmly on the bottom and pushing with the pole, you were leaning on the pole and pushing with your feet. When the pole stuck in the clay bottom, of course it pulled you out of the boat.

Steering is a matter of long practice. When you want to throw the bow to the left, you have only to pry the stern over to the right as you are pulling the pole out of the water. To throw the bow to the right, ground the pole a foot or so wide of the boat, and then lean over and pull the boat up to it. That is not so easy, but you will learn the wrist motion in time. When all this comes like second nature, you will feel that you have become a part of the punt, or rather that the punt has taken life and become a part of you.

A RACING PUNT AND PUNTER

A particular beauty of punting is that, more than any other sport, it brings you into personal contact, so to speak, with the landscape. In a few days you will know every inch of the bottom of the Char, some of it perhaps by more intimate experience than you desire. Over there, on the outer curve of the bend, the longest pole will not touch bottom. Fight shy of that place. Just beyond here, in the narrows, the water is so shallow that you can get the whole length of your body into every sweep. As for the shrubbery on the bank, you will soon learn these hawthorns, if only to avoid barging into them. And the Magdalen chestnut, which spreads its shade so beautifully above the water just beyond, becomes quite familiar when its low-reaching branches have once caught the top of your pole and torn it from your hands.

The slackers you see tied up to the bank on both sides of the Char are always here after luncheon. An hour later their craft will be as thick as money-bugs on the water, and the joys of the slackers will be at height. You won't, as a rule, detect happiness in their faces, but it is always obvious in the name of the craft. One man calls his canoe "Vix Satis," which is the mark the university examining board uses to signify that a man's examination paper is a failure. Another has "P.T.O." on his bows—the "Please Turn Over" which an Englishman places at the bottom of a card where we say "Over." Still another calls his canoe the "Non-conformist Conscience"—which, as you are expected to remark, is very easily upset. All this makes the slacker even happier than if he were so un-English as to smile his pleasure, for he has a joke ready-made on his bow, where there is no risk of any one's not seeing it.

These pollard willows that line the bank are not expected to delight your eye at first sight, but as you see them day after day, they grow on you like the beauty of the bull-terrier pup that looks at you over the gunwale of the boat tied beneath them. They have been topped to make their roots strike deeper and wider into the soil, so that when the freshets come in the spring the banks will stand firm. The idea came some centuries ago from Holland, but has been so thoroughly Englished that the university, and, indeed, all England, would scarcely be itself without its pollard willows. And though the trees are not in themselves graceful, they make a large part of the beauty of the river scenery. The sun is never so golden as up there among their quivering leaves, and no shadow is so deep as that in the water at their feet.

The bar of foam ahead of us is the overflow from the lasher—that is to say, from the still water above the weir. The word "lasher" is obsolete almost everywhere else in England, and even to the Oxford mind it describes the lashing overflow rather than the lache or slack water above. When we "shoot the lasher," as the phrase goes, you will get a hint as to why the obsolete term still clings to this weir. Those fellows beyond who have tied up three deep to the bank are waiting to see us get ducked; but it is just as easy to shoot the lasher as to upset in it; and with that swarm of slackers watching, it makes a difference which you do. We have only to get up a fair pace and run into it on a diagonal. The lashing torrent will catch our bows, but we shall be half over before it sweeps them quite around; and then it will catch the stern in turn, and whirl the bow back into the proper direction. A sudden lurching of the bow, the roaring of a torrent beneath, a dash of spray—and we are in still water again.

In order to reach the inn at Marston by four we must pole on. If we were true slackers, to be sure, we should have brought a spirit lamp and a basket of tea, and tied up in the first convenient nook on the bank; but these are heights of slacking to which the novice cannot aspire. Just beyond here we shall have to give the Thames Conservancy man threepence to roll the punt around a weir. If there were ladies with us, we should have to let them walk a quarter of a mile on shore, for just above is Parson's Pleasure, the university bathing-hole; and these men, who would not let the Yale and the Cornell athletes appear in sleeveless "zephyrs," plunge into a frequented waterway without any zephyrs at all.

Above Parson's Pleasure we emerge from Mesopotamia—as the pretty river bottom is called in which the Char divides into several channels—and come in sight of the 'varsity cricket-ground. There is a game on against a picked eleven from the Marylebone Club; and every few minutes, if we waited, we might see the statuesque figures in white flannel suddenly dash after a ball or trot back and forth between the wickets. Few slackers have had energy to get beyond this point; and as we pole among the meadows, the cuckoo's homely voice emphasizes the solitude, singing the same two notes it sang to Shakespeare—and to Chaucer before him, for the matter of that.

At Marston, having ordered tea of the red-cheeked housewife, it is well to ask the innkeeper for credit. He is a Parisian, whose sociological principles, it is said, were the cause of his venturing across the Channel—in Paris, a man will even go as far as that for his opinions; and while his cheery English spouse, attended by troops of his red-cheeked boys, brings out the thin buttered bread, he will revile you. What business have you to ask an honest yeoman to lend you money? If he were to go down to Oxford and ask the first gentleman he met to lend him half a crown to feed his starving family, should he get it? Should he? And what right have you to come to his house—his home!—and demand food at his board? You are a gentleman; but what is a gentleman? A gentleman is the dregs of the idleness of centuries! Then he will declaim about his plans for the renovation of the world. All this time his well-fed wife has been pouring out the tea and slicing the Genoa cake; and now, with a smile of reassurance, she takes our names and college. But the innkeeper's eloquence does not flag, and it will not until you tell him with decision that you have had enough. This you are loath to do, for he has furnished you with a new ideal of happiness. The cotton-wharf negro sometimes wants leisure, the repose of the cricketer is at times rudely broken in upon, and even the slacker is liable to his ducking; but to stand up boldly against the evils of the world and to picture the new Utopia while your wife averts all practical consequences, this is otium cum dignitate.

This journey up the Char, though all-popular with the undergraduate, is not the only one worth taking. We might have gone down the Isis to the Iffley Mill and the sleepy little Norman church near by. This would have taken us through the thick of the college crews training for the summer eights. But the rules of the river are so complicated that no man on earth who has not given them long hours of study can understand them; and if an eight ran into us, we should be fined a quid or two—one quid for a college eight, and two for the 'varsity. Below Iffley, indeed, there is as much clear punting as you could desire, and here you are in the full current of Thames pleasure-boats. The towing-path skirts the water, so that when you are tired of punting you can get out and tow your craft. The stretch of river here I hold memorable as the scene of the only bit of dalliance I ever witnessed in this most sentimental of environments. A young man and a young woman had tied the painter of their punt to the middle of a paddle, and shoulder by shoulder were loitering along the river-side. Twenty yards behind, three other men and a baffled chaperon were steering the punt clear of the bank, and boring one another.

IFFLEY LOCK AND MILL

The best trip on the Isis is into the backwaters. These are a mesh of tiny streams that break free from the main current above Oxford and lose themselves in the broad bottom-lands. The islands they form were chosen in the Dark Ages as the sites of religious houses; for not only was the land fertile, but the network of deep, if tiny, streams afforded defense from the heathen, while the main channel of the Thames afforded communication with the Christian world. The ruins of these, or of subsequent monasteries, remain to-day brooding over a few Tudor cottages and hamlets, with a mill and a bakery and an inn or two to sustain life in the occasional undergraduate who lazes by in his canoe.

The most interesting of these ruins is Wytham. The phrase is exact, for the entire hamlet was built from a venerable religious house shortly after the dissolution of the monasteries. You can imagine the size of Wytham. If you don't watch very closely as you paddle up the sedgy backwater, you will miss it entirely, and that would be a pity, for its rude masonry, thatched roofs, and rustic garden fronts seem instinct with the atmosphere of Tudor England. The very tea roses, nodding languidly over the garden wall, smell, or seem to smell, as subtly sweet as if they had been pressed for ages between the leaves of a mediæval romance.

I am not quite sure that they do, though, for these ancient hamlets have strange ways of pulling the wool—a true golden fleece, to be sure—over American eyes. Once at twilight I heard a knot of strolling country men and women crooning a tune which was so strangely familiar that I immediately set it down as a village version of one of the noble melodies of that golden age when English feeling found its natural vent in song. As it drew nearer, I suddenly recognized it. It was a far-away version of "Mammy's Little Alabama Coon."

I have still faith, though, in a certain mediæval barmaid I chanced upon in the backwaters. The circumstances of our meeting were peculiar. As I drifted along one Sunday, perched on an after-thwart of the canoe, the current swept me toward a willow that leaned over the water, and I put up my hand to fend off. I chanced to be laughing to myself at the time at the thought of a fellow who, only the day before at the lasher, had tried to do the same thing. The lasher was forcing his punt against the willow on the opposite bank, whereupon, to my heart's delight, he lazily tried to fend it off with his arms. The punt refused to be fended off, and he stooped with an amusing effect of deliberation plump into the water. He was hauled out by the O.U.H.S. man hard by.

I was interrupted in these pleasant reminiscences by the roaring of waters about my ears, mingled with a boorish guffaw from one of the fellows behind me.... But I started to tell about the mediæval barmaid. Making my way to a bakehouse up the stream, I hung my coat and trousers before the fire on a long baker's pole, and put my shoes inside the oven on a dough tray. My companion of the horse-laugh hung my shirt on a blossoming almond-tree, and then left for the lunch hamper. He had scarcely gone when I heard the rustle of skirts at the door. "What do you want?" I cried. "I want my dinner," was the friendly reply. It was the barmaid of a neighboring public house, in her Sunday frock.

When she saw me she smiled, but maintained a dignity of port that—I insist upon it—was instinct with the simple and primitive modesty of the Middle Ages. It was the modesty of the people before whom Adam in the Chester mystery play was required by the stage directions to "stand nakyd and not be ashamyd." My barmaid advised me to take off my stockings and hang them up before the fire. The advice I admit came as a shock, but on reflection I saw that it was capital. For one happy moment I lived in the broad, wholesome atmosphere of the Middle Ages. It was like a breath from Chaucer's England.

Then the baker rushed into the room, in a cutaway Sunday coat of the latest style. He had baked for an Oxford college so long that he had become infected with the squeamish leaven of the nineteenth century. He called the girl a huzzy, and, taking her by the shoulder, hustled her into the garden, and then passed her plum pudding out to her gingerly through a crack in the door. He covered me with apologies and a bath-robe; but I did not mind either, for as the barmaid ran back to the inn she was laughing what I still insist upon believing to have been the simple joyous laughter of the Middle Ages.

But we must hurry to get back to college in time for dinner. And even at that we shall have to stop here at Magdalen bridge and give a street boy sixpence to take the punt the rest of the way. We land at the foot of the tower just as the late afternoon sun is gilding its exquisite pinnacles, and the chimes in its belfry are playing the prelude to the hour of seven. It is a melody worth all the Char and the Isis, with all their weirs and their willows. Other mediæval chimes fill you with a delicious sorrow for the past; but when they cease, and the great bell tolls out the hour, you think only of the death of time. It leaves you sadly beneath the tower, in the musty cellarage. But the melody that the Magdalen chimes utter is full of the fervid faith, the aspirations, of our fathers. It lifts you among the gilded pinnacles, or perhaps ever so little above them.

II

AS SEEN FROM AN OXFORD TUB

To the true slacker, the college barges that line the Isis are an object of aversion, for into them sooner or later every fellow who loves the water finds his way, and then there is an end of slacking. Each of the barges is a grammar school of oarsmanship, where all available men are taught everything, from what thickness of leather to wear on the heels of their boating-shoes to the rhythm in rowing by which alone an eight can realize its full speed; and from the barges issues a navy of boats and boating-men more than ten times as large as that of an American university. When Mr. R. C. Lehmann arrived at Cambridge to coach the Harvard crew, he was lost in admiration of the Charles River and the Back Bay, and in amazement at the absence of boats on them. At either Yale or Harvard it would be easy to give space to both of the fleets that now swarm on the slender Isis and threadlike Cam. We have water enough—as a Congressman once remarked of our fighting navy—it is only the boats that are lacking. The lesson we have to learn of our English cousins is not so much a matter of reach and swing, outrigger and blades, as a generous and wholesome interest in boating for the sake of the boat and of the water; and it is less apparent in an Oxford 'varsity eight than in the humblest tub of the humblest college.

The first suggestion that I should go out to be tubbed came from the gray-bearded dean of the college, who happened at the time to be taking me to the master for formal presentation. I told him that I had tried for my class crew, and that three days on the water had convinced the coach that I was useless. He fell a pace behind, looked me over, and said that I might at least try. As this was his only advice, I did not forget it; and when my tutor, before advising me as to my studies, also urged me to row, I gave the matter some serious thought.

I found subsequently that every afternoon, between luncheon and tea, the college was virtually deserted for field, track, and river; and it dawned upon me that unless I joined the general exodus I should temporarily become a hermit. Still, my earlier unhappy experience in rowing was full in mind, and I set out for the barge humble in spirit, and prepared to be cursed roundly for three days, and "kicked out," or, as they say in Oxford, "given the hoof," on the fourth.

Few memories could be so unhappy, however, as to resist the beauty of the banks of the Isis. At New Haven, the first impression an oarsman gets is said to be an odor so unwelcome that it is not to be endeared even by four years of the good-fellowship and companionship of a Yale crew. At Harvard, the Charles—"Our Charles," as Longfellow spoke of it in a poem to Lowell—too often presents aspects which it would be sacrilege to dwell on. What the "royal-towered Thame" and "Camus, reverend sire," may have been in the classic days of English poetry it is perhaps safest not to inquire; suffice it that to-day they are—and especially the Thames—all that the uninitiated imagine "our Charles." Nowhere does the sun stream more cheerfully through the moist gray English clouds; nowhere is the grass more green, the ivy more luxuriant, and the pollard willows and slender elms and poplars more dense in foliage. And every building, from the thatched farm-cottage in Christ Church meadow to the Norman church at Iffley, is, as it were, more native and more a part of creation than the grass and trees. The English oarsman, it is true, cannot be as conscious of all this as an American visitor. Yet the love of outdoors, which has been at work for centuries in beautifying the English landscape, is not the least part of the British sporting instinct. Where an American might loiter in contemplation of these woods, fields, and streams, an Englishman shoots, hunts, crickets, and rows in them.

When you enter the barge on the river, you feel keenly the contrast with the bare, chill boathouses of the American universities. On the centre tables are volumes of photographs of the crews and races of former years; the latest sporting papers are scattered on chairs and seats; and in one corner is a writing-table, with note-paper stamped "Balliol Barge, Oxford." There is a shelf or two of bound "Punches," and several shelves of books—"Innocents Abroad" and "Indian Summer," beside "Three Men in a Boat" and "The Dolly Dialogues." On the walls are strange and occult charts of the bumping races from the year one—which, if I remember rightly, is 1837. At the far end of the room is a sea-coal fire, above which shines the prow of a shell in which the college twice won the Ladies' Plate at Henley.

The dressing-room of the barge is sacred to the members of the eight, who at the present season are engaged in tubbing the freshmen in the hope of finding a new oar or two. At the appointed hour they appear, in eightsman blazers if it is fair, or in sou'westers if it is not—sad to relate, it usually is not—and each chooses a couple of men and leads them out to the float. Meanwhile, with the rest of the candidates—freshmen, and others who in past years have failed of a place in the torpids—you lounge on easy-chairs and seats, reading or chatting, until your own turn comes to be tubbed. It is all quiet like a club, except that the men are in full athletic dress.

THE FULL COSTUME OF AN EIGHTSMAN

The athletic costume is elaborate, and has been worn for a generation—since top-hats and trousers were abandoned, in fact—in more or less its present form. It consists of a cotton zephyr, flannel shorts flapping about the knees, and socks, or in winter Scotch hose gartered above the calves. The sweater, which, in cold weather, is worn on the river, has a deep V neck, supplemented when the oarsman is not in action by a soft woolen scarf or cloud. Over all are worn a flannel blazer and cap embroidered with the arms of the college. This uniform, with trifling variations, is used in all sports on field and river, and it is infinitely more necessary, in undergraduate opinion, than the academic cap and gown which the rules of the university require to be worn after dark. This seemingly elaborate dress is in effect the most sensible in the world, and is the best expression I know of the cheerful and familiar way in which an Englishman goes about his sports. Reduced to its lowest terms, it is no more than is required by comfort and decency. With the addition of sweater, scarf, blazer, and cap, it is presentable in social conversation—indeed, in the streets of the city. It is in consequence of this that an afternoon in the barge is—except for the two tubbings on the river—so much like one spent in a club.

In America an oarsman wears socks and trunks which are apt to be the briefest possible. If he wears a shirt at all, it is often a mere ribbon bounding the three enormous apertures through which he thrusts his neck and shoulders. Before going on the river he is likely to shiver, in spite of the collar of his sweater; and after he comes in, his first thought is necessarily of donning street clothes. There is, in consequence, practically no sociability in rowing until the crews are selected and sent to the training-table. A disciple of Sartor Resartus would be very likely to conclude that, until American rowing adapts itself to the English costume, it must continue to be—except for the fortunate few—the bare, unkindly sport it has always been.

All this time I have had you seated in an armchair beside the sea-coal fire. Now an eightsman comes into the barge with two deep-breathing freshmen, and nods us to follow him to the boat the three have just quitted. On a chair by the door as we go out are several pads, consisting of a rubber cloth faced with wool. These are spongeo pilenes, or so I was told, which in English are known as Pontius Pilates—or Pontiuses for short. The eightsman will advise you to take a Pontius to protect your white flannel shorts from the water on the seat; for there is always a shower threatening, unless indeed it is raining. Every one knows, however, including the eightsman, that the wool is a no less important part of the Pontius than the rubber: it will save you many painful impressions of the dinner form in hall.

We are already on the river, and pair-oars, fours, and eights are swarming about us. "Come forward," cries our coach, "ready—paddle!" and we take our place in the procession of craft that move in one another's wake down the narrow river. The coach talks pleasantly to us from time to time, and in the course of an afternoon we get a pretty good idea of what the English stroke consists in.

The sun bursts through the pearl-gray clouds, and glows in golden ponds on the dense verdure of grass and trees. "Eyes in the boat," shouts the stern voice of conscience; but the coach says, "See, fellows. Here's a 'varsity trial eight. Watch them row, and you will see what the stroke looks like. Those fellows in red caps belong to the Leander."

Their backs are certainly not all flat, and to an American eye the crew presents a ragged appearance as a whole; but a second glance shows that every back swings in one piece from the hips, and that the apparent raggedness is due to the fact that the men on the bow side swing in one line, while those on the stroke side swing in another parallel line. They sway together with absolute rhythm and ease, and the boat is set on a rigidly even keel. Our coach looks them over critically, especially his three college-mates, one of whom at least he hopes will be chosen for the 'varsity eight. No doubt he aimed at a blue himself two years ago, when he came up; but blues are not for every man, even of those who row well and strongly. He watches them until they are indistinguishable amid the myriad craft in the distance. "It's jolly fine weather," he concludes pleasantly, with a familiar glance at the sky, which you are at liberty to follow. "Come forward. Ready—paddle!" We are presently in the barge again with the other fellows. A repetition of this experience after half an hour ends the day's work.

When I tried for the freshman crew in America, I was put with seven other unfortunates into a huge clinker barge, in charge of the sophomore coxswain. On the first day I was told to mind the angle on my oar. On the second day I was told to keep my eyes in the boat, damn me! On the third day, the sophomore coxswain wrought himself into a fury, and swore at me for not keeping the proper angle. When I glanced out at my blade he yelled, "Damn you, eyes in the boat!" This upset me so that I forgot thereafter to keep a flat back at the finish of the stroke. When we touched the float he jumped out, looked at my back, brought his boot against it sharply, and told me that there was no use in trying to row unless I could hold a flat back and swing my body between my knees. That night I sat on a dictionary with my feet against the footboard and tried to follow these injunctions, until my back seemed torn into fillets, but it would not come flat. I never went down to the river again, and it was two years before I summoned courage to try another sport. The bullyragging sophomore coxswain I came to know very well in later years, and found him as courteous and good-hearted as any man. To this day, if I mention our first meeting, he looks shy, and says he doesn't remember it. He says that the flat back is a discarded fetish in Harvard boating circles, that even before the advent of Mr. Lehmann cursing and kicking were largely abandoned; and moreover (fortissimo) that the freshman crew he helped to curse and kick into shape was the only one in ten years that won.

After a fortnight's tubbing in pair-oars, the better candidates are tubbed daily in fours, and the autumn races are on the horizon. At the end of another week the boats are finally made up, and the crews settle down to the task of "getting together." Each of the fours has at least one seasoned oarsman to steady it, and is coached from the coxswain's seat by a member of the college eight. Sometimes, if the November floods are not too high, the coach runs or bicycles along the towing-path, where he can see the stroke in profile. If a coach swears at his men, there is sure to have been provocation. His favorite figure of speech is sarcasm. At the end of a heart-breaking burst he will say, "Now, men, get ready to row," or, "I say, fellows, wake up; can't you make a difference?" The remark of one coach is now a tradition—"All but four of you men are rowing badly, and they're rowing damned badly!" This convention of sarcasm is by no means old. One of the notable personages in Eights' Week is a little man who is pointed out to you as the Last of the Swearing Coaches. Tempora mutantur. Perhaps my friend the ex-coxswain is in line for a similar distinction.

When the fours are once settled in their tubs, the stroke begins to go much better, and the daily paddle is extended so as to be a real test of strength and endurance for the new men, and for the man from the torpid a brisk practice spin. Even at this stage very few of the new men are "given the hoof;" the patience of the coachers is monumental.

THE COLLEGE BARGES: TUBBING IN NOVEMBER FLOODS

The tubbing season is brought to an end with a race between the fours. Where there are half a dozen fours in training, two heats of three boats each are rowed the first day, and the finals between the best two crews on the following day. The method of conducting these races is characteristic of boating on the Isis and the Cam. As the river is too narrow to row abreast, the crews start a definite distance apart, and row to three flags a mile or so up the river, which are exactly as far apart as the boats were at starting. At each of these flags an eightsman is stationed. In the races I saw they flourished huge dueling pistols, and when the appropriate crew passed the flag, the appropriate man let off his pistol. The crew that is first welcomed with a pistol-shot wins. These races are less exciting than the bumping races; yet they have a picturesque quality of their own, and they settle the question of superiority with much less rowing. The members of the winning four get each a pretty enough prize to remember the race by, and the torpidsman at stroke holds the "Junior fours cup" for the year.

The crowning event of the season of tubbing is a wine, to which are invited all boating-men in college, and the representative athletes in other sports. In Balliol it is called the "Morrison wine," as the races are called "Morrison fours," in honor of an old Balliol man, a 'varsity oar and coach, who established the fund for the prizes. The most curious thing about this affair is that it is not given, as it would be in America, at the expense of the college, or even of the men who have been tubbed, but at the expense of those who are finally chosen to row in the races.

To my untutored mind the hospitality of English boating seemed a pure generosity. It made me uncomfortable at first, with the sense that I could never repay it; but I soon got over this, and basked in it as in the sun. The eightsmen devote their afternoons to coaching you because there are seats to be filled in the torpid and in the eight; they speak decently because they find that in the long run decency is more effective; and they hold the wine because they wish to honor the sport in which they have chosen to stake their reputations as athletes. In a word, where in America we row by all that is self-sacrificing and loyal, in England the welfare of boating is made to depend upon its attractiveness as a recreation and a sport; if it were not enjoyable to the normal man, nothing could force fellows into it.

The relationship of the autumn tubbing and its incidental sociability to the welfare of the sport in the college and in the university seems remote enough to the American mind, for out of the score of fellows who are tubbed only three or four, on an average, go farther in the sport. Yet it is typical of the whole; and it will help us in following the English boating season. Throughout the year there are two converging currents of activity in boating. On the one hand, the tubs in the autumn term develop men for the torpids, which come on during the winter term; and the torpids develop men for the summer eights. On the other hand, the 'varsity trials in the autumn term develop men for the 'varsity eight, which trains and races in the winter term; and the 'varsity oarsmen, like the men who have prospered in tubs and torpids, end the season in the eights of their respective colleges. The goal of both the novice and the veteran is thus the college eight.

The torpid is, so to speak, the understudy to the college eight. In order to give full swing to the new men, no member of the eight of the year before is allowed to row in it; and the leading colleges man two torpids—sometimes even three. The training here is much more serious than in the tubs; wine, spirits, and tobacco are out of order. The races, which are conducted like the celebrated May Eights, are rowed in midwinter—in the second of the three Oxford terms—under leaden skies, and sometimes with snow piled up along the towing-path. On the barges, instead of the crowds of ladies, gayly dressed and bent on a week of social enjoyment, one finds knots of loyal partisans who are keen on the afternoon's sport. The towing-path, too, is not so crowded as in May Week; but nothing could surpass the din of pistols and rattles and shouting that accompanies the races. If the men in the torpid do not learn how to row the stroke to the finish under the excitement of a race, it is not for the lack of coaching and experience. When the torpids break training, there are many ceremonies to signalize the return to the flesh-pots: one hardly realizes that the weeks of sport and comradeship have all gone to the filling of a place or two in the college eight.

All this time, while the tubs and torpids have been training up new men, the 'Varsity Boat Club, whose home is on the shore of the Isis opposite the row of college barges, has also, so to speak, been doing its tubbing. The new men for the 'varsity are chiefly those who have come to the front in the May Eights of the previous year—oars of two or three seasons' standing; though occasionally men are taken directly from the Eton eight, which enters yearly for the Ladies' Plate at Henley. The new men will number ten or a dozen; and early in the autumn they are taken out in tubs. They are soon joined by as many of last year's blues as are left in Oxford. The lot is divided into two eights, as evenly matched as possible, which are coached separately. These are called the Trial Eights, or 'Varsity Trials. To "get one's trials" is no mean honor. It is the sine qua non of membership to the Leander—admittedly the foremost boating club of the world. Toward the end of the first term there is a race of two and a half miles between the two trial eights at Moulsford, where the Thames is wide enough to permit the two boats to race abreast. Of the men who row in the trials the best ten or a dozen are selected to train for the 'varsity during the winter term.

Of the training of the 'varsity eight it is not necessary to speak here at length. The signal fact is that the men are so well schooled in the stroke, and so accustomed to racing, that a season of eight weeks at Oxford and at Putney is enough to fit them to go over the four miles and a quarter between Putney and Mortlake with the best possible results. The race takes place in March, just after the close of the winter term.

The series of races I have mentioned gives some idea of the scheme and scope of English boating, but it is by no means exhaustive. The strength of the boating spirit gives rise to no end of casual and incidental races. Chief among these are the coxswainless fours, which take place about the middle of the autumn term, while the trials are on the river. The crews are from the four or five chief boating colleges, and are made up largely from the men in the 'varsity trials. The races have no relation that I could discover to the 'varsity race; the only point is to find which college has the best four, and it is characteristic that merely for the sport of it the training of the 'varsity trials is interrupted.

After the 'varsity race the members of the crew rest during what remains of the Easter vacation, and then take their places in the boats of their respective colleges. Here they are joined by the other trials men, the remaining members of last year's college eight, and the two or three men who have come up from the torpids. Now begins the liveliest season in boating. Every afternoon the river is clogged with eights rowing to Iffley or to Sandford, and the towing-path swarms with enthusiasts. The course in the May bumping races is a mile and a quarter long—the same as the course of the torpids—and the crews race over it every day for a week, with the exception of an intervening Sunday, each going up a place or down a place in the procession daily according as it bumps or is bumped. These races, from the point of view of the expert oarsman, are far less important than the 'varsity race; yet socially they are far more prominent, and the enthusiasm they arouse among the undergraduates is incomparable. The vitality of Oxford is in the colleges: the university organizations are the flowers of a very sturdy root and branch.

THE LAST DAY OF THE BUMPING RACES OF THE SUMMER EIGHTS (1895)

The difference between American and English boating is that we lack the root and branches of the college system. In a university of from three to four thousand men there are, in addition to the 'varsity crew, four class crews and perhaps a few scratch crews. In England, each of the score of colleges, numbering on an average something like one hundred and fifty men apiece, mans innumerable fours, one or more eight-oared torpids, and the college eight. A simple calculation will show that with us one man in fifty to seventy goes in for the sport, while in England the proportion is one man in five to seven.

The difference in spirit is as great as the difference in numbers. In America, the sole idea in athletics, as is proclaimed again and again, is to beat the rival team. No concession is made to the comfort or wholesomeness of the sport; men are induced to train by the excellent if somewhat grandiose sentiment that they owe it to the university to make every possible sacrifice of personal pleasure. Our class crews, which have long ceased to represent any real class rivalry, are maintained mainly in the hope of producing 'varsity material. The result of these two systems is curiously at variance with the intention. At Oxford, where rowing is very pleasant indeed, and where for the greater part of the year the main interest centres in college crews, the 'varsity reaches a high degree of perfection, and the oarsmen, without quite being aware of the fact, represent their university very creditably; while at Yale, and until recently at Harvard, the subsidiary crews have been comparative failures in producing material, and the 'varsity is in consequence somewhat in the position of an exotic, being kept alive merely by the stimulus of inter-varsity rivalry.

The recent improvement at Harvard is due to Mr. Rudolph C. Lehmann, the celebrated Cambridge and Leander oar who coached the Harvard crews of 1897 and 1898, in the sportsmanlike endeavor to stimulate a broader and more expert interest in boating. His failure to bring either of the crews to victory, which to so many of us signified the utter failure of his mission, has had more than a sufficient compensation in the fact that he established at Harvard something like the English boating system. Anything strictly similar to the torpids and eights is of course out of the question, because we have no social basis such as the colleges afford for rivalry in boating; but the lack of colleges has in a measure been remedied by creating a factitious rivalry between improvised boating clubs, and the system of torpids and eights has been crudely imitated in the so-called graded crews. A season of preliminary racing has thus been established, on the basis of which the candidates for the 'varsity crew are now selected, so that instead of the nine months of slogging in the tank and on the river, in which the more nervous and highly organized candidates were likely to succumb and the stolid men to find a place in the boat, the eight is made up as at Oxford of those who have shown to best advantage in a series of spirited races. Crude as the new Harvard system is as compared with the English system, it has already created a true boating spirit, and has trained a large body of men in the established stroke, placing the sport at Harvard on a sounder basis than at any other American university. It has thus been of infinitely more advantage, by the potentiality of an example, than any number of victories at New London. To realize the full benefit of the system of graded crews and preliminary races, it is only necessary to supersede the arbitrary and meaningless division into clubs by organizations after the manner of English colleges which shall represent something definite in the general life of the university.

III

A LITTLE SCRIMMAGE WITH ENGLISH RUGBY

The relationship between the colleges and the university exists in a greater or less degree in all sports. There is a series of matches among the leading colleges in cricket, and a "cup tie" in Association football. These sports are almost as popular as rowing, and have many excellences which it would be pleasant to point out and profitable perhaps to emulate; but it seems best to concentrate attention on the sports which are best understood in America, such as Rugby football and athletics. The workings of the college system may be most clearly seen in them, and the spirit of English sportsmanship most sympathetically appreciated.

The rivalry between the Association and the Rugby games has made English football players quite unexpectedly sensitive to comparisons. I had scarcely set foot upon a Rugby field when I was confronted with the inevitable question as to English Rugby and American. I replied that from a hasty judgment the English game seemed haphazard and inconsequent. "We don't kill one another, if that's what you mean by 'inconsequent,'" my companion replied; and I soon found that a report that two players had been killed in the Thanksgiving Day match of the year before had never been contradicted in England. "That is the sport," my friend continued, "which Caspar Whitney says, in his 'Sporting Pilgrimage,' has improved English Rugby off the face of the earth!"

The many striking differences between English and American Rugby arise out of the features of our game known as "possession of the ball" and "interference." In the early days of the American game, many of the most sacred English traditions were unknown, and the wording of the English rules proved in practice so far from explicit that it was not possible to discover what it meant, much less to enforce the rules.

One of the traditions favored a certain comparative mildness of demeanor. The American players, on the contrary, favored a campaign of personal assault for which the general rules of the English scrummage lent marked facilities. It soon became necessary in America to line the men up in loose order facing each other, and to forbid violent personal contact until the actual running with the ball should begin. This clearly made it necessary that the sides should in turn put the ball in play, and consequently should alternately have possession of it. Under this arrangement, each side is in turn organized on the offensive and the defensive.

The upshot of this was that the forwards, who in the parent English game have only an incidental connection with the running of the backs, become a part of each successive play, opening up the way for the progress of the ball. According to the English code, this made our forwards off-side, so that the rule had to be changed to fit the new practice. It then appeared that if the forwards could play ahead of the ball, the backs could do so too; and here you have the second great American feature. The result of "possession" of the ball and "interference" is an elaborate and almost military code of tactics unknown in the English game.

In the course of time I had unusual facilities for observing English Rugby. During the Morrison wine which ended the season of tubbing on the river, the captain of the Balliol fifteen threw his arms about me, and besought me to play on the team. He had not a single three-quarters, he said, who could get out of his own way running. I pleaded an attack of rheumatism and ignorance of the game. He said it did not matter. "And I'm half blind," I added. "So am I," he interrupted, "but we'll both be all right in the morning." I said I referred to the fact that I was very near-sighted; but he took all excuses as a sign of resentment because he had failed to invite me to breakfast in my freshman term; he appeared to think it his duty to breakfast all possible candidates. Such are the courtesies of an English captain, and such are the informalities of English training.

The next morning the captain wrote me that there was a match on against Merton, and asked me to come out a quarter of an hour before the rest for a little coaching. A quarter of an hour to learn to play football! In spite of the captain's predictions of the night before, I was not so sure that he was yet "all right;" so I went out to the porter's lodge and scanned the bulletin board. My name stared me in the face. I had scarcely time to take luncheon and don a pair of football shorts.

The practice my coach gave me consisted in running the length of the field three or four times, passing the ball back and forth as we went. His instructions with regard to the game were equally simple. To keep in proper position I had only to watch my Merton vis-à-vis and take a place symmetrical with his. When the enemy heeled the ball out of the "scrummage" to their quarter-back, putting us for the moment on the defensive, I was to watch my man, and, if the ball was passed to him, to tackle him. If he passed it before I could tackle him I was still to follow him, leaving the man who took the ball to be watched by my neighbor, in order that I might be on hand if my man received it again. An American back, when his side is on the defensive, is expected to keep his eye on his vis-à-vis while the ball is being snapped back; but his main duty is to follow the ball. An English back under similar circumstances is expected only to follow his man. If our side happened to heel out the ball from the scrum and one of our three-quarters began to run with it, we were on the offensive, and the other three-quarters and I were to follow at his heels, so that when he was about to be tackled—"collared," the English say—he could pass it on to us. There is, as I have said, no such thing as combined "interference" among the backs. A player who gets between the man with the ball and the enemy's goal is rankly off-side. It is not to be understood that the captain coached all this information into me. I had to buttonhole him and pump it out word by word. Coaching of any sort is all but unknown on English football fields. What there is of the game is learned at school—or in the nursery!

AN ENGLISH RUGBY LINE-UP
To the left of the scrum, two half backs and six three-quarter backs face each other in pairs

When the opposing teams scattered over the field for the kick-off, I noticed with satisfaction that there was not a spectator on the grounds to embarrass me. It is so in almost all English college games—the fellows are more than likely to have sports of their own on, and anyway, what is the use in hanging round the fields where other fellows are having all the fun?

On the kick-off, luckily, the ball did not come to my corner of the field, for I could scarcely have seen it, much less caught it. Our side returned the kick and the "scrum" formed. The nine forwards gathered compactly in a semi-ellipse, bent their bodies together in a horizontal plane, with their heads carefully tucked beneath the mass, and leaned against the opposing mass of forwards, who were similarly placed. When the two scrums were thoroughly compacted, the umpire tossed the ball on the ground beneath the opposing sets of legs, whereupon both sides began to struggle. The scrum in action looks like a huge tortoise with a score of legs at each end, which by some unaccountable freak of nature are struggling to walk in opposite directions. The sight is certainly awe-inspiring, and it was several days before I realized that it masked no abstrusely working tactics; there is little, if anything, in it beyond the obvious grunting and shoving.

The backs faced each other in pairs ranged out on the side of the scrum that afforded the broader field for running. The legs in the Balliol scrum pushed harder and the bodies squirmed to more advantage, for our men had presently got the ball among their feet. They failed to hold it there, however, and it popped out into a half-back's hands. He passed it quickly to one of my companions at three-quarters, who dodged his man and ran toward the corner of the field. I followed, and just as the full-back collared him he passed the ball to me. Before I had taken three rheumatic strides I had two men hanging at my back; but when they brought me down, the ball was just beyond the line. The audience arose as one man—to wit, the referee, who had been squatting on the side lines—and shouted, "Played. Well played!" I had achieved universal fame. During the rest of the game the Balliol scrum, which was a very respectable affair of its kind, kept the ball to itself, while we backs cooled our heels.

A few days later, in a game against Jesus, the scrums were more evenly matched, and the ball was heeled out oftener. I soon found that my eyes were not sharp enough to follow quick passing; and when, just before half-time, a punt came in my direction, I was horrified to see the ball multiply until it looked like a flock of balloons. As luck had it, I singled out the wrong balloon to catch. Jesus fell on the ball just as it bounced over the goal-line. In the second half the captain put one of the forwards in my place, and put me in the scrum.

The play here was more lively, though scarcely more complex or difficult. Each forward stuck his head beneath the shoulders of the two men in front of him, grasped their waists, and then heaved, until, when the ball popped out of the scrum, the word came to dissolve. There were absolutely no regular positions; the man who was in the front centre of one scrummage might be in the outskirts of the next. On some teams, I found, by inquiry, a definite order is agreed on, but this is regarded as of doubtful advantage.

When the umpire or a half-back tosses the ball into the scrummage, there are, at an ultimate analysis, four things that can happen. First, the two sides may struggle back and forth, carrying the ball on the ground at their feet; this play is called a "pack." Second, the stronger side may cleave the weaker, and run down the field, dribbling the ball yard by yard as they go, until either side picks it up for a run, or else drops on it and cries "down." Third, one side may be able to "screw the scrum," a manœuvre which almost rises to the altitude of a "play." The captain shouts "Right!" or perhaps "Left!" and then his forwards push diagonally, instead of directly, against their opponents. The result is very like what we used to call a revolving wedge, except that, since the ball is carried on the ground, the play eventuates, when successful, in a scattering rush of forwards down the field, dribbling the ball at their feet, just as when the scrum has been cloven. The fourth possibility is that the side that gets the ball amongst its eighteen legs allows it to ooze out behind, or, if its backs are worthy of confidence, purposely heels it out. Thereupon results the play I have already described: one of the half-backs pounces upon it and passes it deftly to the three-quarters, who run with it down the field, if necessary passing it back and forth. In plays which involve passing or dribbling, English teams sometimes reach a very high degree of skill: few sights on the football field are more inspiring than to see a "combination" of players rush in open formation among their opponents, shifting the ball from one to another with such rapidity and accuracy as to elude all attempts to arrest it. As a whole, the game of the forwards is much more fun than that of the backs, though decidedly less attractive in the eyes of the spectators—a consideration of slight importance on an English field!

THROWING IN THE BALL

Just as I began to get warmed to my new work I smashed my nose against the head of a Balliol man who was dodging back into the push. The captain told me that I need not finish the game; but as it is against the English rules to substitute players and we were still far from sure of winning, I kept to my grunting and shoving. At the end of the game the captain very politely gave me the hoof. This was just what I expected and deserved; but I was surprised to find that the fellows had objected to my playing the game through with a bloody nose. They would have preferred not to be bled upon.

This regard for pleasantness and convenience, which to an American is odd enough, is characteristic even of 'varsity football. The slenderness of the preliminary training of a 'varsity fifteen is incredible to any American who has not witnessed it. To sift the candidates there is a freshman match and a senior match, with perhaps one or two "squashes"—that is to say, informal games—besides. And even these tests are largely a matter of form. Men are selected chiefly on their public school reputations or in consequence of good work on a college fifteen. The process of developing players, so familiar to us, is unknown. There is no coaching of any kind, as we understand the word. When a man has learned the game at his public school or in his college, he has learned it for all time, though he will, of course, improve by playing for the university. The need of concentrated practice is greatly lessened by the fact that the soft English winter allows as long a season of play as is desired. The team plays a game or two a week against the great club teams of England—Blackheath, Richmond, London Scottish, Cardiff, Newport, and Huddersfield—with perhaps a bit of informal kicking and punting between times. When the weather is too bad, it lays off entirely.

All this does not conduce to the strenuousness of spirit Americans throw into their sports. In an inter-varsity match I saw the Oxford team which was fifty per cent. better allow itself to be shoved all over the field: it kept the game a tie only by the rarest good fortune. It transpired later that the gayeties of Brighton, whither the team had gone to put the finishing touches on its training, had been too much for it. In an American university such laxity would be thought the lowest depth of unmanliness, but I could not see that any one at Oxford really resented it; at most it was a subject for mild sarcasm. You can't expect a team to be in the push everywhere!

This lack of thorough preparation is even more characteristic of the international teams—England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—that yearly play for the championship of Great Britain. They are chosen from the most brilliant players in the leading clubs, and local jealousy makes the task of choosing most delicate. The temptation is to take a man or two impartially from each of the great fifteens. As the international teams take little or no practice as a whole, the tendency in the great games is to neglect the finer arts of dribbling and passing in combination—the arts for which each player was severally chosen—and revert to the primitive grunting and shoving. In the great games, accordingly, the team which is man for man inferior as regards the fine points may prevail by sheer strength, so that the result is liable to be most unsatisfactory. Some years ago, owing to local jealousy, the Welsh international had to be chosen mainly from a single club—with the result that it won the championship; and in 1901 the canny Scotch team won by intentionally selecting its members, in spite of local jealousy, on the score of their familiarity with one another's play.

The very rules under which the game is played are calculated to moderate the struggle. As a result of the rule against substituting, to which I have referred, any extreme of hard play in the practice games, such as lays off dozens of good American players yearly, is not likely to be encouraged. Of course good men "crock," as they call it; but where an injury is practically certain to disqualify a man from the inter-varsity match, the football limp and the football patch can scarcely be regarded as the final grace of athletic manhood. Willful brutality is all but unknown; the seriousness of being disqualified abets the normal English inclination to play the game like a person of sense and good feeling. The physical effect of the sport is to make men erect, lithe, and sound. And the effect on the nervous system is similar. The worried, drawn features of the American player on the eve of a great contest are unknown. An Englishman could not understand how it has happened that American players have been given sulphonal during the last nights of training. English Rugby is first of all a sport, an exercise that brings manly powers into play; as Hamlet would say, the play's the thing. It is eminently an enjoyable pastime, pleasant to watch, and more pleasant to take part in.

That our American game is past hoping for on the score of playability is by no means certain. As the historical critics of literature are fond of saying, a period of rapid development is always marked by flagrant excesses, and the development of modern American football has been of astonishing rapidity. Quite often the game of one season has been radically different from the games of all preceding seasons. This cannot continue always, for the number of possible variations is obviously limited, and when the limit is reached American Rugby will be, like English Rugby, the same old game year in and year out. Everybody, from the youngest prep. to the oldest grad., will know it and love it.

The two vital points in which our game differs from the English—"possession of the ball" and "interference"—are both the occasion of vigorous handling of one's opponents. When an American player is tackled, he seldom dares to pass the ball for fear of losing possession of it, so that our rule is to tackle low and hard, in order to stop the ball sharply, and if possible to jar it out of the runner's grasp. In England, it is still fair play to grab a man by the ankle. This is partly because of the softness of the moist thick English turf; but more largely because, as passing is the rule, the tackler in nine cases out of ten aims at the ball. The result is that a man is seldom slammed to the earth as he would be in our game. It is this fact that enables the English player to go bare-kneed.

The danger from interference in the American game is also considerable. When a man is blocked off, he is liable to be thrown violently upon the far from tender bosom of our November mother-earth. Any one familiar with the practice of an American eleven will remember the constant cry of the coaches: "Knock your man on the ground! Put him out of the play!" It has been truly enough said that the American game has exaggerated the most dangerous features of the two English games—the tackling of English Rugby and the "charging" or body-checking of the Association game.

Yet this is only a partial statement of the case. These elements of possession of the ball and interference have raised our game incalculably above the English game as a martial contest. Whereas English Rugby has as yet advanced very little beyond its first principles of grunting and shoving, the American game has always been supreme as a school and a test of courage; and it has always tended, albeit with some excesses, toward an incomparably high degree of skill and strategy. Since American football is still in a state of transition, it is only fair to judge the two games by the norm to which they are severally tending. The Englishman has on the whole subordinated the elements of skill in combination to the pleasantness of the sport, while the American has somewhat sacrificed the playability of the game to his insatiate struggle for success and his inexhaustible ingenuity in achieving it. More than any other sport, Rugby football indicates the divergent lines along which the two nations are developing. By preferring either game a man expresses his preference for one side of the Atlantic over the other.

IV

TRACK AND FIELD ATHLETICS

In track and field athletics, the pleasantness and informality of English methods of training reach a climax. In America we place the welfare of our teams in the hands of a professional trainer, who, through his aide-de-camp, the undergraduate captain, is apt to make the pursuit of victory pretty much a business. Every autumn newcomers are publicly informed that it is their duty to the university to train for the freshman scratch games. At Oxford, I was surprised to find, there was not only no call for candidates, but no trainer to whom to apply for aid. The nearest approach to it was the groundsman at the Iffley Running Grounds, a retired professional who stoked the boilers for the baths, rolled the cinder-path, and occasionally acted as "starter." As his "professional" reputation as a trainer was not at stake in the fortunes of the Oxford team, his attitude was humbly advisory. The president of the Athletic Club never came near the grounds, being busy with rowing on a 'varsity trial eight, and later with playing Association football for the university. To one accustomed to train not only for the glory of his alma mater but for the reputation of his trainer, the situation was uninspiring.

As I might have expected, the impetus to train came from the college. I was rescued from a fit of depression by a college-mate, a German, who wanted some one to train with. At school he had run three miles in remarkable time; but later, when an officer in the German army, his horse had rolled over him at the finish of a steeple-chase, and the accident had knocked out his heart; so he was going to try to sprint. I advised him against all training, and the groundsman shook his head. Yet he was set upon showing the Englishmen in Balliol that a German could be a sportsman. This was no idle talk, as I found later, when he fainted in the bath after a fast hundred, and failed by no one knows how little of coming to. We were soon joined by a third Balliol man, a young Greek poet, whose name is familiar to all who are abreast of the latest literary movement at Athens. He was taking up with athletics because of his interest in the revival of the ancient glories of Greece. When I asked him what distance suited him best—whether he was a sprinter or a runner—he answered with the sweet reasonableness of the Hellenic nature that any distance would suit him that suited me. A motlier trio than we, I suppose, never scratched a cinder-path. Yet the fellows in our college seemed almost as interested as they were amused; and we soon found that even so learned a place as Balliol would have been glad to bolster its self-esteem by furnishing its quota of "running blues." What was lacking in the way of stimulus from the university was more than made up for by the spontaneous interest of the fellows in college.

The rudimentary form of athletics is in meetings held by the separate colleges. These occur throughout the athletic season, namely, the autumn term and the winter term; and as hard on to a score of colleges give them, they come off pretty often. The prizes are sums of money placed with the Oxford jeweler, to be spent in his shop as the winners see fit. In America, the four classes, which are the only sources of athletic life independent of the university, are so moribund socially that it never occurs to them to get out on the track for a day's sport. It is true that we sometimes hold inter-class games, but the management of these is in the hands of the university; they are inspired solely by a very conscious attempt to develop new men, and to furnish the old ones with practice in racing. The vitality of the athletic spirits in the English colleges is witnessed by the fact that an Oxford college frequently meets a fit rival at Cambridge in a set of dual games just for the fun of it.

The only bond between the numerous college meetings and the university sports is a single event in each, called a strangers' race, which is open to all comers. The purpose of these races is precisely that of our inter-class meetings—to give all promising athletes practice in competition. As the two prizes in each strangers' race average five pounds and thirty shillings respectively, the races are pretty efficient. Though the "blues" sometimes compete—Cross made his record of 1m. 54 ²⁄₅s. for the half mile in one of them—they generally abandon them to the new men of promise. While the president and the "blues" generally are rowing and playing football, the colleges thus automatically develop new material for the team.

The climax of the athletic meetings of the autumn term is the freshman sports, held on two days, with a day's interval. The friends of the various contestants make up a far larger audience than one finds at similar sports in America; and a brass band plays while the races are on. The whole thing is decidedly inspiring; and for the first time one is brought face to face with the fact that there are inter-varsity games in store.

When the winter term opens, bleak and rainy, the strangers' races bring out more upper classmen. By and by the "blues" themselves appear in sweater, muffler, and blazer, and "paddle" about the track to supple their muscles and regain disused racing strides. At the end of a fortnight I noticed a middle-aged gentleman with whom the prominent athletes conferred before and after each day's work. I soon found that he was Mr. C. N. Jackson, a don of Hertford College, who should always be remembered as the first hurdler to finish in even time. It is he who—save the mark—takes the place of our American trainers. At one of our large American universities about this time, as I afterwards learned, a very different scene was enacting. The trainer and the captain called a mass-meeting and collected a band of Mott Haven champions of the past to exhort the University to struggle free from athletic disgrace. Though the inter-varsity games were nearly four months in the future—instead of six or seven weeks as at Oxford—those ancient athletes aroused such enthusiasm that 268 men undertook the three months of indoor training. To one used to such exhortations, the Oxford indifference was as chilling as the weather we were all training in. Mr. Jackson seemed never to notice me; and how could I address him when he had not even asked me to save the university from disgrace? I was forced to the unheroic expedient of presenting a card of introduction. To my surprise, I found that he had been carefully watching my work from day to day, but had not felt justified in giving advice until I asked for it.

Even during the final period of training, everything happened so pleasantly and naturally that I had none of the nervous qualms common among American athletes. At first I thought I missed the early morning walks our teams take daily, the companionship and jollity of the training-table, and the sense that the team was making a common sacrifice for an important end. Yet here, too, the college made up in a large measure for what I failed to find in the university. One of our eightsmen was training with a scrub four that was to row a crew of schoolboys at Winchester; and we had a little course of training of our own. Every morning we walked out for our dip to Parson's Pleasure, and breakfasted afterward beneath an ancient ivied window in the common room. In the pleasantness and quiet of those sunlit mornings, I began to realize that our training-table mirth, which is sometimes so boisterous, is in part at least due to intense excitement and overwrought nerves. And the notion of self-sacrifice, which appeals to us so deeply, seemed absurd where we were all training for the pleasure and wholesomeness of sport, and for the sake of a ribbon of blue.

The interest the university took in our welfare became made manifest when the "first strings" were sent off to Brighton for the change in climate which all English teams require before great games. Some of the rest of us, who had nowhere else to go, went with them, but most of the men went home to train. The second string in the three miles stayed up at Oxford for commemoration, and joined us after three consecutive nights of dancing. He said that he found he needed staying up work.

Every morning at Brighton the president made the round of our quarter of the hotel shortly before eight o'clock, and spoiled our waking naps to rout us out for our morning's walk, which included a plunge into the Channel. For breakfast, as indeed for all our meals, we had ordinary English fare, with the difference only that it was more abundant.

On alternate days our training consisted in cross-country walks of ten or a dozen miles. Our favorite paths led along the chalk cliffs, and commanded a lordly view of the Channel. Sometimes, for the sake of variety, we went by train to the Devil's Dyke and tramped back over the downs, now crossing golf-links and now skirting cornfields ablaze with poppies. All this walking filled our lungs with the Brighton air, and by keeping our minds off our races, prevented worry. Sprinters and distance men walked together, though the sprinters usually turned back a mile or two before the rest. The rate prescribed was three and a half miles an hour; but our spirits rose so high that we had trouble in keeping it below five.[2]

The training dinners furnished the really memorable hours of the day. A half-pint of "Burton bitter" was a necessity, and a pint merely rations. If one preferred, he might drink Burgundy ad lib., or Scotch and soda. After trials there was champagne. When I told the fellows that in America our relaxation consists in ice-cream for Sunday dinner, they set me down as a humorist. After dinner, instead of coffee and tobacco, we used to go out to the West Pier, which was a miniature Coney Island, and amuse ourselves with the various attractions. The favorite diversion was seeing the Beautiful Living Lady Cremated. The attraction was the showman, who used to give an elaborate oration in Lancashire brogue. Every word of it was funny, but especially the closing sentence: "The Greeks 'ad a ancient custom of porun' a liebation on the cinders of the departud, which custom, gentlemen, we omits." We used to laugh so heartily at this that the showman would join in, and even the beautiful living lady would snicker companionably, as she crawled away beneath the stage. If the reader is unable to see the fun of it, there is no help for him—except, perhaps, an English training dinner.

The rest of the evenings we used to spend in strolling about among the crowd, breathing the salt air, and listening to the music. We did not lack companionship, for the Oxford and Cambridge cricket elevens were at Brighton, and the entire Cambridge athletic team. Many of the cricketers, and not a few of the Cambridge athletes—whom the Oxford men called "Cantabs," and sometimes even "Tabs"—paraded the place puffing bulldog pipes. The outward relationship between the rival teams was simply that of man to man. If one knew a Cambridge man he joined him, and introduced the fellows he happened to be walking with. One day the Cambridge president talked frankly about training, urging us to take long walks, and inviting us to go with his men. The only reason we did not go was that our day for walking happened to be different from theirs.

The days on which we did our track work we spent largely in London, at the Queen's Club grounds, in order to get a general sense of the track and of the conditions under which the sports were to take place. Sometimes, however, we ran at Preston Park, on the outskirts of Brighton.

On the day of the inter-varsity meeting, our team came together as a whole for the first time in the dressing-rooms of the Queen's Club. The fellows dropped in one by one, in frock coats, top hats, and with a general holiday air. The Oxford broad-jumper, who was the best man at the event in England, had been so busy playing cricket all season, and smoking his pipe with the other cricketers on the pier at Brighton, that he had not had time even to send to Oxford for his jumping-shoes. In borrowing a pair he explained that unless a fellow undertook the fag of thorough training, he could jump better without any practice. Our weight-thrower, a freshman, had surprised himself two days previously by making better puts than either of the Cambridge men had ever done; but as nobody had ever thought it worth while to coach him, he did not know how he had done it, and was naturally afraid he couldn't do it again. He showed that he was a freshman by appearing to care whether or not he did his best; but even his imagination failed to grasp the fact that the team which won was to have the privilege of meeting Yale in America. As it turned out, if either of these men had taken his event, Oxford, instead of Cambridge, would have met Yale.

As I went out to start in my race, the question of half-sleeves which Englishmen require in all athletic contests was settled in my mind. The numberless seasonable gowns in the stands and the innumerable top hats ranged on all sides about the course made me feel as if I were at a lawn party rather than at an athletic meeting. I suffered as a girl suffers at her first evening party, or rather as one suffers in those terrible dreams where one faces the problem of maintaining his dignity in company while clad in a smile or so. Waiving the question of half-sleeves, I should have consented to run in pyjamas.

In the race I had an experience which raised a question or two that still offer food for reflection. As my best distance—a half mile—was not included in the inter-varsity program, I ran in the mile as second string. There was a strong wind and the pace was pretty hot, even for the best of us, namely, the Cambridge first string, who had won the race the year before in 4 min. 19 ⁴⁄₅ sec.,—the fastest mile ever run in university games. As the English score in athletic games, only first places count, and on the second of the three laps I found myself debating whether it is not unnecessarily strenuous to force a desperate finish where the only question is how far a man can keep in front of the tail end. Several of the fellows had already dropped out in the quietest and most matter of fact manner; and as we were finishing the lap against the wind, I became a convert to the English code of sportsmanship.

As the bunch drew away from me and turned into the easy going of the sheltered stretch, I was filled with envy of them, and with uncontrollable disgust at myself, the like of which I had never felt when beaten, however badly, after making a fair struggle. And when I saw them finishing against the hurricane, striding as if they were running upstairs, I felt the heroism of a desperate finish as I had never done before. It did not help matters when I realized that it was the last race I was ever to run.

At the Sports' dinner that night at the Holborn Restaurant, I pocketed some of my disgust. The occasion was so happy that I remember wishing we might have something like it after our meetings at home, for good-fellowship chastens the pride of winning and gives dignity to honest defeat. There was homage for the victors and humorous sympathy for the vanquished. Light blue and dark blue applauded and poked fun at each other impartially. Sir Richard Webster, Q. C., now Lord Chief Justice, himself an old blue, presided at the dinner, and explained how it was that the performances of his day were really not to be sneezed at; and the young blues, receiving their prizes, looked happy and said nothing. After dinner, we divided into squads and went to the Empire Theatre of Varieties, Cantab locking arms with Oxonian. By supper time, at St. James', I was almost cheerful again.

Yet the disgust of having quitted that race has never left me. The spirit of English sportsmanship will always seem to me very gracious and charming. As a nation, I think we can never be too thankful for the lesson our kinspeople have to teach us in sportsmanly moderation and in chivalry toward an opponent. But every man must draw his own line between the amenities of life and the austerities; and I know one American who hopes never again to quit a contest, even a contest in sport, until he has had the humble satisfaction of doing his best.

V

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN SPORTSMANSHIP

The prevalence of out-of-door sports in England, and the amenity of the English sporting spirit, may be laid, I think, primarily, to the influence of climate. Through the long, temperate summer, all nature conspires to entice a man out of doors, while in America sunstroke is imminent. All day long the village greens in England are thronged with boys playing cricket in many-colored blazers, while every stream is dotted with boats of all sorts and descriptions; and in the evenings, long after the quick American twilight has shut down on the heated earth, the English horizon gives light for the recreations of those who have labored all day. In the winter the result is the same, though the cause is very different. Stupefying exhalations rise from the damp earth, and the livelong twilight that does for day forces a man back for good cheer upon mere animal spirits. In the English summer no normal man could resist the beckoning of the fields and the river. In the winter it is sweat, man, or die.

It is perhaps because of the incessant call to be out of doors that Englishmen care so little to have their houses properly tempered. At my first dinner with the dons of my college, the company assembled about a huge sea-coal fire. On a rough calculation the coal it consumed, if used in one of our steam-heaters, would have heated the entire college to incandescence. As it was, its only effect seemed to be to draw an icy blast across our ankles from mediæval doors and windows that swept the fire bodily up the chimney, and left us shivering. One of the dons explained that an open fire has two supreme advantages: it is the most cheerful thing in life, and it insures thorough ventilation. I agreed with him heartily, warming one ankle in my palms, but demurred that in an American winter heat was as necessary as cheerfulness and ventilation. "But if one wears thick woolens," he replied, "the cold and draught are quite endurable. When you get too cold reading, put on your great-coat." I asked him what he did when he went out of doors. "I take off my great-coat. It is much warmer there, especially if one walks briskly." Some days later, when I went to dine with my tutor, my hostess apologized for the chill of the drawing-room. "It will presently be much warmer," she added; "I have always noticed that when you have sat in a room awhile, it gets warm from the heat of your bodies." She proved to be right. But when we went into the dining-room, we found it like a barn. She smiled with repeated reassurances. Again she proved right; but we had hardly tempered the frost when we had to shift again to the drawing-room, which by this time again required, so to speak, to be acclimated. Meanwhile my tutor, who was of a jocular turn of mind, diverted our thoughts from our suffering by ragging me about American steam heat, and forced me, to his infinite delight, to admit that we aim to keep our rooms warmed to sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Needless to say, this don was an athlete. As the winter wore away, I repeatedly saw him in Balliol hockey squashes, chasing the ball about with the agility of a terrier pup. At nightfall, no doubt, he returned to his wife and family prepared to heat any room in the house to the required temperature. Heaven forbid that I should resent the opprobrium Englishmen heap upon our steam heat! I merely wish to point out that the English have failed as signally as we, though for the opposite reason, in making their houses habitable in the winter, and that an Englishman is forced into athletics to resist the deadly stupefaction of a Bœotian climate, and to keep his house warm.

In a sportsman it would be most ungracious to inveigh against English weather. The very qualities one instinctively curses make possible the full and varied development of outdoor games, which Americans admire without stint. Our football teams do day labor to get fit, and then, after a game or so, the sport is nipped in the bud. To teach our oarsmen the rudiments of the stroke we resort to months of the galley-slavery of tank-rowing. Our track athletes begin their season in the dead of winter with the dreary monotony of wooden dumb-bells and pulley-weights, while the baseball men are learning to slide for bases in the cage. In England the gymnasium is happily unknown. Winter and summer alike the sportsman lives beneath the skies, and the sports are so diverse and so widely cultivated that any man, whatever his mental or physical capacity, finds suitable exercise that is also recreation.

It is because of this universality of athletic sports that English training is briefer and less severe. The American makes, and is forced to make, a long and tedious business of getting fit, whereas an Englishman has merely to exercise and sleep a trifle more than usual, and this only for a brief period. Our oarsmen work daily from January to July, about six months, or did so before Mr. Lehmann brought English ideas among us; the English 'varsity crews row together nine or ten weeks. Our football players slog daily for six or seven weeks; English teams seldom or never "practice," and play at most two matches a week. Our track athletes are in training at frequent intervals throughout the college year, and are often at the training-table six weeks; in England six weeks is the maximum period of training, and the men as a rule are given only three days a week of exercise on the cinder-track. To an American training is an abnormal condition; to an Englishman it is the consummation of the normal.

The moderation of English training is powerfully abetted by a peculiarity of the climate. The very dullness and depression that make exercise imperative also make it impossible to sustain much of it. The clear, bright American sky—the sky that renders it difficult for us to take the same delight in Italy as an Englishman takes, and leads us to prefer Ruskin's descriptions to the reality—cheers the American athlete; and the crispness of the atmosphere and its extreme variability keeps his nerves alert. An English athlete would go hopelessly stale on work that would scarcely key an American up to his highest pitch.

The effect of these differences on the temperament of the athlete is marked. The crispness and variety of our climate foster nervous vitality at the expense of physical vitality, while the equability of the English climate has the opposite effect. In all contests that require sustained effort—distance running and cross-country running, for example—we are in general far behind; while during the comparatively few years in which we have practiced athletic sports we have shown, on the whole, vastly superior form in all contests depending upon nervous energy—sprinting, hurdling, jumping, and weight-throwing.

Because of these differences of climate and of temperament, no rigid comparisons can be made between English and American training; but it is probably true that English athletes tend to train too little. Mr. Horan, the president of the Cambridge team that ran against Yale at New Haven, said as much after a very careful study of American methods; but he was not convinced that our thoroughness is quite worth while. The law of diminishing returns, he said, applies to training as to other things, so that, after a certain point, very little is gained even for a great sacrifice of convenience and pleasantness. Our American athletes are twice as rigid in denying the spirit for an advantage, Mr. Horan admitted, of enough to win by.

The remark is worth recording: it strikes the note of difference between English and American sportsmanship. After making all allowances for the conditions here and abroad that are merely accidental, one vital difference remains. For better or for worse, a sport is a sport to an Englishman, and whatever tends to make it anything else is not encouraged; as far as possible it is made pleasant, socially and physically. Contests are arranged without what American undergraduates call diplomacy; and they come off without jockeying. It is very seldom that an Englishman forgets that he is a man first and an athlete afterwards. Yet admirable as this quality is, it has its defects, at least to the transatlantic mind. Even more, perhaps, than others, Englishmen relish the joy of eating their hearts at the end of a contest, but they have no taste for the careful preparation that alone enables a man to fight out a finish to the best advantage. It is no doubt true, as the Duke of Wellington said, that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of England; but for any inconsiderable sum I would agree to furnish a similar saying as to why the generals in South Africa ran into ambush after ambush.

In America, sportsmanship is almost a religion. Fellows mortify the flesh for months and leave no means untried that may help to bring honor to their college; or if they don't, public opinion brings swift and sure retribution. It is true that this leads to excesses. Rivalries are so strong that undergraduates have been known to be more than politic in arranging matches with each other. So the graduate steps in to moderate the ardor of emulation, and often ends by keeping alive ancient animosities long after they would have been forgotten in the vanishing generations of undergraduates. The Harvard eleven wants to play the usual football game; but it is not allowed to, because a committee of graduates sees fit to snub Yale; the athletic team wants to accept a challenge from Oxford and Cambridge, but it is not allowed to because Pennsylvania, which is not challenged, has a better team, and it is the policy of the university (which has an eye to its graduate schools) to ingratiate sister institutions. In a word, the undergraduates are left to manage their studies while the faculty manages their pastimes.

When a contest is finally on, excesses are rampant. Of occasional brutalities too much has perhaps been said; but more serious errors are unreproved. There is a tradition that it is the duty of all non-athletes to inspire the 'varsity teams by cheering the play from the side lines; and from time to time one reads leading articles in the college papers exhorting men to back the teams. The spectator is thus given an important part in every contest, and after a 'varsity match he is praised or blamed, together with the members of the team, according to his deserts. Yale may outplay Harvard, but if Harvard sufficiently out-cheers Yale she wins, and to the rooters belong the praise. In baseball games especially, a season's championship is not infrequently decided by the fact that the partisans of one side are more numerous, or for other reasons make more noise. These are serious excesses, and are worthy of the pen of the robustest reformer; but after all has been said they are incidents, and in the slow course of time are probably disappearing.

The signal fact is that our young men do what they do with the diligence of enthusiasm, and with the devotion that inspires the highest courage. It is not unknown that, in the bitterness of failure, American athletes have burst into tears. When our English cousins hear of this they are apt to smile, and doubtless the practice is not altogether to be commended; but in the length and breadth of a man's experience there are only two or three things one would wish so humbly as the devotion that makes it possible. Such earnestness is the quintessence of Americanism, and is probably to be traced to the signal fact that in the struggle of life we all start with a fighting chance of coming out on top. Whatever the game, so long as it is treated as a game, nothing could be as wholesome as the spirit that tends to make our young men play it for all it is worth, to do everything that can be done to secure victory with personal honor. In later years, when these men stand for the honor of the larger alma mater, on the field of battle or in the routine of administration, it is not likely that they will altogether forget the virtues of their youth.

The superiority of English sportsmanship arises, not from the spirit of the men, but from the breadth of the development of the sports, and this, climate aside, is the result of the division of the university into colleges. The average college of only a hundred and fifty men maintains two football teams—a Rugby fifteen and an Association eleven—an eight and two torpids, a cricket eleven, and a hockey eleven. Each college has also a set of athletic games yearly. If we add the men who play golf, lawn and court tennis, rackets and fives, who swim, box, wrestle, and who shoot on the ranges of the gun club, the total of men schooled in competition reaches eighty to one hundred. A simple calculation will show that when so many are exercising daily, few are left for spectators. Not a bench is prepared, nor even a plank laid on the spongy English turf, to stand between the hanger-on and pneumonia. A man's place is in the field of strife; to take part in athletic contests is almost as much a matter of course as to bathe. Of late years there has been a tendency in England to believe that the vigor of undergraduates—and of all Englishmen, for the matter of that—is in decadence. As regards their cultivation of sports at least, the reverse is true. Contests are more numerous now than ever, and are probably more earnestly waged. What is called English decadence is in reality the increasing superiority of England's rivals.

Quite aside from the physical and moral benefit to the men engaged, this multiplication of contests has a striking effect in lessening the importance of winning or losing any particular one of them. It is more powerful than any other factor in keeping English sports free from the excesses that have so often characterized our sports. From time to time a voice is raised in America as of a prophet of despair demanding the abolition of inter-university contests. As yet the contests have not been abolished, and do not seem likely to be. Might it not be argued without impertinence that the best means of doing away with the excesses in question is not to have fewer contests, but more of them? If our universities were divided into residential units, corresponding roughly to the English colleges, the excesses in particular contests could scarcely fail to be mitigated; and what is perhaps of still higher importance, the great body of non-athletes would be brought directly under the influence of all those strong and fine traditions of undergraduate life which centre in the spirit of sportsmanship.

Note. For a discussion of the influences of climate in international athletics, see [Appendix II].

III

THE COLLEGE AS AN EDUCATIONAL FORCE

I

THE PASSMAN

In the educational life of Oxford, as in the social and athletic life, the distinctive feature, at least to the American mind, is the duality of organization in consequence of which an undergraduate is amenable first to his college and then to the university: the college teaches and the university examines. In America, so far as the undergraduate is concerned, the college and the university are identical: the instructor in each course of lectures is also the examiner. It follows from this that whereas in America the degree is awarded on the basis of many separate examinations—one in each of the sixteen or more "courses" which are necessary for the degree—in England it is awarded on the basis of a single examination. For three or four years the college tutor labors with his pupil, and the result of his labors is gauged by an examination, set and judged by the university. This system is characteristic of both Cambridge and Oxford, and for that matter, of all English education; and the details of its organization present many striking contrasts to American educational methods.

Sir Isaac Newton's happy thought of having a big hole in his door for the cat and a little hole for the kitten must have first been held up to ridicule by an American. In England, the land of classes, it could hardly fail of full sympathy. In America there is but one hole of exit, though men differ in their proportions as they go out through it. In England there are passmen and classmen.

To say that the passman is the kitten would not be altogether precise. He is rather a distinct species of undergraduate. More than that, he is the historic species, tracing his origin quite without break to the primal undergraduate of the Middle Ages. He is a tradition from the time when the fund of liberal knowledge was so small that the university undertook to serve it all up in a pint-pot to whoever might apply. The pint-pot still exists at Oxford; and though the increasing knowledge of nine centuries long ago overflowed its brim, the passman still holds it forth trustfully to his tutor. The tutor patiently mingles in it an elixir compounded of as many educational simples as possible, and then the passman presents it to the examiners, who smile and dub him Bachelor of Arts. After three years, if he is alive and pays the sum of twelve pounds, they dub him Master.

The system for granting the pass degree is, in its broader outlines, the same as for all degrees. In the first examination—that for matriculation—it is identical for passmen and classmen. This examination is called "responsions," and is, like its name, of mediæval origin. It is the equivalent of the American entrance examination; but by one of the many paradoxes of Oxford life it was for centuries required to be taken after the pupil had been admitted into residence in one of the colleges. In the early Middle Ages the lack of preparatory schools made it necessary first to catch your undergraduate. It was not until the nineteenth century that a man could take an equivalent test before coming up, for example at a public school; but it is now fast becoming the rule to do so; and it is probable that all colleges will soon require an entrance examination. In this way two or three terms more of a student's residence are devoted to preparation for the two later and severer university tests.

The subjects required for matriculation are easy enough, according to our standards. Candidates offer: (1) The whole of arithmetic, and either (a) elementary algebra as far as simple equations involving two unknown quantities, or (b) the first two books of Euclid; (2) Greek and Latin grammar, Latin prose composition, and prepared translation from one Greek and one Latin book. The passages for prepared translation are selected from six possible Greek authors and five possible Latin authors. The influence of English colonial expansion is evident in the fact that candidates who are not "European British subjects" may by special permission offer classical Sanskrit, Arabic, or Pali as a substitute for either Greek or Latin: the dark-skinned Orientals, who are so familiar a part of Oxford life, are not denied the right to study the classics of their native tongues. Thus the election of subjects is a well-recognized part of responsions, though the scope of the election does not extend to science and the modern languages.

Once installed in the college and matriculated in the university, both passman and honor man are examined twice and twice only. The first public examination, more familiarly called "moderations," or "mods," takes place in the middle of an undergraduate's course. Here the passmen have only a single subject in common with the men seeking honors, namely, the examination in Holy Scripture, or the Rudiments of Faith and Religion, more familiarly called "Divinners," which is to say Divinities. The subject of the examination is the gospels of St. Luke and St. John in the Greek text; and either the Acts of the Apostles or the two books of Kings in the Revised Version. As in all Oxford examinations, cram-books abound containing a reprint of the questions put in recent examinations; and, as many of these questions recur from year to year, the student of Holy Scripture is advised to master them. A cram-book which came to my notice is entitled "The Undergraduate's Guide to the Rudiments of Faith and Religion," and contains, among other items of useful information: tables of the ten plagues; of the halting-places during the journey in the wilderness; of the twelve apostles; and of the seven deacons. The book recommends that the kings of Judah and Israel, the journeys of St. Paul, and the Thirty-nine Articles shall be committed to memory. The obviously pious author of this guide to the rudiments of these important accomplishments speaks thus cheerfully in his preface: "The compiler feels assured that if candidates will but follow the plan he has suggested, no candidate of even ordinary ability need have the least fear of failure." According to report, it is perhaps not so easy to acquire the rudiments of faith and religion. In a paper set some years ago, as one of the examiners informed me, a new and unexpected question was put: "Name the prophets and discriminate between the major and the minor." One astute passman wrote: "Far be it from me to make discriminations between these wise and holy men. The kings of Judah and Israel are as follows." Unless a man passes the examination, he has to take it again, and the fee to the examiner is one guinea. "This time I go through," exclaimed an often ploughed passman. "I need these guineas for cigars." Those who are not "European British subjects" may substitute certain sacred works in Sanskrit, Arabic, or Pali; and those who object for conscientious scruples to a study of the Bible may substitute the Phædo of Plato; but the sagacious undergraduate knows that if he does this he must have no conscientious scruples against harder work.

In America there is no such examination, so far as I know. At Harvard an elective course in the history and literature of the Jews is given by the Semitic department; and if this does not insure success in acquiring the rudiments of faith and religion, it was, on one occasion at least, the means of redoubling the attendance at chapel. Just before the final examination, it transpired that the professor in charge of the course was conducting morning service, and was giving five minute summaries of Jewish history. For ten days the front pews were crowded with waistcoats of unwonted brilliance; the so-called sports who had taken the course as a snap were glad to grind it up under the very best auspices.

Let me not be misunderstood. In the long run, the English undergraduates no doubt add greatly to their chances of spiritual edification. At the very least they gain a considerable knowledge of one of the great monuments of the world's literature. In America the Bible is much less read in families than in England, so that it would seem much more important to prescribe a course in Biblical history and literature. At one time Professor Child gave a course in Spenser and the English Bible, and is said to have been moved at times when reading before his classes to a truly Elizabethan access of tears. Some years before the great master died, he gave up the course in despair at the Biblical ignorance of his pupils. The usual Harvard undergraduate cannot name five of the prophets, with or without discrimination, or be certain of five of the kings of Judah. As I write this, I am painfully uncertain as to whether there were as many as five.

But to return to our muttons. The remaining subjects for pass moderations are: (1) Portions of three classic authors, two Greek and one Latin, or two Latin and one Greek. The passages of each author to be studied are prescribed, but the candidate may elect, with certain slight limitations, from eight Greek and eight Latin authors "of the best age." As in the case of responsions and Holy Scripture, Sanskrit, Arabic, or Pali may be substituted for either Greek or Latin. The examination covers not only grammar and literature, but any question arising out of the text. Besides these are required: (2) Latin prose composition; (3) sight translation of Greek and Latin; and (4) either logic or the elements of geometry and algebra.

The final pass examination allows a considerable range of election. Three general subjects must be offered. At least one of these must be chosen from the following: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Persian, German, and French. If a candidate wishes, he may choose two of his three subjects in ancient language, literature, and history, or in modern language, literature, history, and economics. The remaining one or two subjects may be chosen from a dozen courses ranging through the elements of mathematics, natural science, law, and theology. This range of choice is very different from that in America, in that a student is not permitted freely to elect subjects without reference to one another. For the pass degree, no considerable originality or grasp of the subject is necessary, any more than for an undistinguished degree in an American college; but the body of necessary facts is pretty sure to be well ordered, if not digested. The idea of grouping electives is the fundamental difference between English and American education. In the case of the honor man it will be seen to be of chief importance.

In order to take the Oxford degree, it is further necessary to be in residence three years, and a man may reside four years before going up for his final examination. The period of study—or loafing—may be broken in various ways; and it is characteristic that though a man may anticipate his time and take his last examination before the last term of his third year, he is required to reside at the university, studies or no studies, until the minimum residence is completed. Nothing could indicate more clearly the importance which is attached to the merely social side of university life.

It is, in fact, as a social being that the passman usually shines. You may know him most often from the fact that you sight him in the High by a waistcoat of many colors. At night he is apt to evade the statutes as to academicals; but if he wears his gown, he wraps it about his neck as if it were a muffler, and tilts his mortar-board at all angles. He is the genius of the fox terrier and the bulldog pipe; he rides to the hounds, and is apt in evading the vice-chancellor's regulations as to tandems and four-in-hands. Or perhaps he sits comfortably in his rooms discoursing lightly of the impious philosophies that are the studies of the classman, and writes Horatian verse for the "Isis" and the "Oxford Magazine." He does anything, in fact, that is well-bred, amusing, and not too strenuous. Curiously enough, it sometimes happens that he does sufficient reading on his own account to give him no little real culture. Of late there has been a reaction in favor of the pass school as affording a far better general education.

If the passman loiters through the three or four years, it is mainly the fault—or the virtue—of the public school he comes from. Of late the best public schools have had so strong and admirable an influence that boys have often been kept in them by their parents until they reach the age limit, generally nineteen. By this time they have anticipated most of the studies required for a pass degree in the university, and find little or nothing to do when they go up but to evade their tutors and to "reside." It is by this means, as the satirist long ago explained, that Oxford has become an institution of such great learning. Every freshman brings to it a little knowledge and no graduate takes any away.

There is reason in all this. In the first place, as I have said, the passman is the historical undergraduate, and little short of a convulsion could disestablish him—that is the best of British reasons. Moreover, to be scrupulously just, the passman knows quite as much as the American student who barely takes a degree by cramming a few hours with a venal tutor before each of his many examinations, and perhaps more than the larger proportion of German students who confine their serious interests to the duel and the Kneipe, and never graduate. And then, the Oxonian argues amiably, if it were not for the pass schools, the majority of the passmen would not come to Oxford at all, and would spend their impressionable period in some place of much less amenity. Clearly, they learn all that is necessary for a gentleman to know, and are perhaps kept from a great deal that is dangerous to young fellows with money and leisure. It means much to the aristocracy and nobility of England that, whatever their ambitions and capacities, they are encouraged by the pursuit of a not too elusive A.B. to stay four years in the university. Even the ambitious student profits by the arrangement. Wherever his future may lie, in the public service, in law, medicine, or even the church, it is of advantage to know men of birth and position—of far greater advantage, from the common sensible English point of view, than to have been educated in an atmosphere of studious enthusiasm and exact scholarship.