Oxford [35]
bombarded with soda-water bottles full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol windows on the Martyrs' Memorial of our illustration. In this case, too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a fellow, "to go for him with a shot gun," as the repentant American said he would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly. In truth, Landor's offence has been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the common. The poet was giving "an after-dinner party" in his rooms. The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On the opposite side of the quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds, was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls "servitors and other raff of every description." The guests at the rival wine- parties began to "row" each other, Landor says, adding, "All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any conversation with them, particularly out of a window. But my gun was lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back closet some little shot. I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired." Mr. Leeds very superfluously complained to the President. Landor adopted the worst possible line of defence, and so the University and this poet parted company.
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of Shelley's expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be "the Atheist," that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities were civil, and left him alone." Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley "an Atheist." Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely guided Shelley?
Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they like--certainly much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that no OFFICIAL interference can be of real value? Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils. There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation after generation of freshmen. This is fortunate; but who can wonder that middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their own resources? One has occasionally heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to unpack. And it is true that modern education, when it meets the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of men. To put it shortly, clever
It seems to have been generally understood that Landor's affair was a boyish escapade. A copious literature is engaged with the subject of Shelley's expulsion. As the story is told by Mr. Hogg, in his delightful book, the Life of Shelley, that poet's career at Oxford was a typical one. There are in every generation youths like him, in unworldliness, wildness, and dreaminess, though unlike him, of course, in genius. The divine spark has not touched them, but they, like Shelley, are still of the band whom the world has not tamed. As Mr. Hogg's book is out of print, and rare, it would be worth while, did space permit, to reproduce some of his wonderfully life-like and truthful accounts of Oxford as she was in 1810. The University has changed in many ways, and in most ways for the better. Perhaps that old, indolent, and careless Oxford was better adapted to the life of such an almost unexampled genius as Shelley. When his Eton friends asked him whether he still meant to be "the Atheist," that is, the rebel he had been at school, he said, "No; the college authorities were civil, and left him alone." Let us remember this when the learned Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. Shairp, calls Shelley "an Atheist." Mr. Hogg sometimes complains that undergraduates were left too much alone. But who could have safely advised or securely guided Shelley?
Undergraduates are now more closely looked after, as far as reading goes, than perhaps they like--certainly much more than Shelley would have liked. But when we turn from study to the conduct of life, is it not plain that no OFFICIAL interference can be of real value? Friendship and confidence may, and often does, exist between tutors and pupils. There are tutors so happily gifted with sympathy, and with a kind of eternal youth of heart and intellect, that they become the friends of generation after generation of freshmen. This is fortunate; but who can wonder that middle-aged men, seeing the generations succeed and resemble each other, lose their powers of understanding, of directing, of aiding the young, who are thus cast at once on their own resources? One has occasionally heard clever men complain that they were neglected by their seniors, that their hearts and brains were full of perilous stuff, which no one helped them to unpack. And it is true that modern education, when it meets the impatience of youth, often produces an unhappy ferment in the minds of men. To put it shortly, clever