MAGDALEN
Magdalen College, generally called, but nobody knows exactly why, "Maudlin," founded by William de Waynflete in 1456, was pronounced by Wood to be "the most noble and rich structure in the learned world; and its water-walks ('pleasant meanders' he called them) he looked upon as being" as delectable as the banks of Eurotas, which were shaded by bay-trees, under which Apollo himself was wont to walk, and to sing his lays."
All the students of Magdalen, in its early days, were turned out of the Hall at Curfew Time, notwithstanding the attraction the fire had for them in cold and rainy weather; except on Saints' Days, when they were permitted to remain and entertain themselves, and each other, by the singing of ballads and catches, and the reading of historical chronicles in prose and verse. The gates were closed at eight in winter, at nine in summer; and no one was excused on any consideration if not within the precincts at those hours. The Dining Halls were carpeted with rushes, into which all sorts of refuse was thrown, and they were not swept out until they became unendurable, which was about once a fortnight, and then not thoroughly. No wonder that thereby were generated "The Sweating Sickness" and other plagues of the Tudor period.
The students of Magdalen, like the students of sister colleges, were not subject to much discipline; and they resented rather roughly any discipline meted out to them, or to any one of them. One young man was caught, in 1586, killing a deer in the Forest of Shotover, and he was imprisoned. The next time the convicting judge appeared in Oxford the whole University appeared, violently, against him; and Magdalen's appearance was particularly vindictive. The students betook themselves to the top of the Tower; and waiting until Lord Norreys should pass by, they sent down a shower of stones upon him and upon his retinue, wounding some, and endangering the lives of others. It is said that "upon the foresight of this storm divers had got boards, others tables, on their heads, to keep them from it, and that if my Lord had not been in his coach he would certainly have been killed."
William Tyndale, the Translator of the Bible, was one of the first of the great sons of Magdalen. He was at Magdalen Hall as early as 1510, when, according to Wood, "he sucked in the doctrines of Luther." According to Foxe, Tyndale, while at Oxford, besides improving himself in the knowledge of tongues and other liberal arts, gave especial attention to the study of Theology; and he read privately, to certain students and Fellows of Magdalen College, some parcel of divinity; instructing them in the knowledge and truth of the Scriptures.
Tyndale's rooms were, probably, over a now stoned-up door-way, in St. Swithin's Quadrangle—always called a "Quad"—west of the ancient house of the Grammar Master. But nothing of Tyndale's home is now left.
John Foxe, the Martyrologist, was appointed a Probationary Fellow of Magdalen in 1538 and a Fellow in 1539. "For this Foundation," he wrote in later years, 'as there have been, and be yet, many students bound to yield thanks unto God, so I must needs confess to be one, except I will be unkind." Nevertheless, he was unkind enough, in 1545, to resign his Fellowship on the grounds that he could not consent to be forced to attend College-chapel regularly; to promise to take holy orders within seven years of his election as Fellow, or to take the vows of celibacy.
His wife, who was, no doubt, the cause of all this, it may be added, bore him a number of children; and she is credited by him, and by others, with having been possessed of all the womanly virtues!
Sir Thomas Bodley, the famous founder of the Bodleian Library, entered Magdalen upon the accession of Elizabeth. He received his degree of B. A. in 1563, when he went as a Fellow to Merton, with which College he is now chiefly associated.
William Camden was sent to Magdalen in 1566, but what was his condition or position there it is not easy now to determine. Anthony Wood says that he was simply a chorister, perfecting himself in grammar-learning in the Free School, hard by. He left Magdalen to go to Pembroke, and later to Christ Church.
John Lyly was at Magdalen three years after Camden. Wood says that he (Lyly) was always averse to the crabbed studies of logic and philosophy. "For so it was that his geny being naturally bent to the pleasant paths of poetry (as if Apollo had given him a wreath of his own bays, without snatching or struggling) he did, in a manner, neglect academical studies, yet not so much but that he took the degree in arts. ... At that time he was esteemed at the University as a noted wit, rare poet, comical and facetious."
Samuel Daniel, "the most noted Poet and Historian of his time," says Wood, was a Commoner at Magdalen Hall (not College), where he continued about three years. "His geny being more prone to easier and smoother studies than to pecking and hewing at logic, he exercised it much in English history and poetry, of which he gave several ingenious specimens."
Wood says that George Withers was sent to Magdalen in the year 1604, or thereabout, when, Wood adds, he made some proficiency, with much ado in academic learning. But it seems, according to the same authority, that Withers's "geny being addicted to things more trivial, he was taken home after he had spent about three years in the same house." Other, and later, authorities believe that owing to domestic and financial difficulties he was removed from college without obtaining a degree.
Wood, judging from a portrait of Withers, declares that he was of a quick and smart countenance. He seems to have gone back to Oxford for a short time in 1624, when he kept a victualling-house, and was much esteemed for his facetious company; and he is reported to have been able to make verses as fast as he could write them. The only verses by which he is remembered now, begin: "Should I, wasting in despair, die because a woman's fair?" Whether the words refer to Mrs. Withers, who, according to Aubrey, was also a great wit, and who could write verses too, is not recorded. As she was fair to Withers, it is not unlikely that he cared a good deal how fair she was.
In "Abuse Whipt and Stript" Withers wrote of his undergraduate life:
"I did as other idle freshmen do,
Long for to see the Fell of Osney, too.
But yet indeed may not I grieve to tell
I never drank of Aristotle's well.
There having seen enough, and there withal
Got some experience at the tennis-ball."
These lines might easily have been made as quickly as they could be written.
Joseph Addison, while at Queen's College, on the strength of certain clever Latin verses, obtained a "Demyship" at Magdalen in 1689, where he graduated with honors and with a reputation for eminent respectability; and where he wrote much, and began to make those rare promises of literary distinction which he was, in later life, to fulfil in so remarkable a degree.
Mr. J. Wells, in his " Oxford and Its Colleges," defines "Demies," in Waynflete's day, as "Members of the Foundation of Magdalen, who were admitted at twelve, and who received only half the allowance of a Fellow." " The Century Dictionary," in our own day, defines a "Demyship" as one of certain scholarships at Magdalen College, Oxford, namely, eight, Senior, of the annual value of one hundred pounds each, open to members of the University, who have passed all the examinations requisite for the degree of B. A. And thirty, Junior, of the annual value of fifty pounds each."
Addison's life at Magdalen lasted for some years; but concerning his habits, tastes, and friendships there, and at Queen's, from whence he migrated to Magdalen, very little is known. Magdalen gave him his Master's Degree in 1693, elected him a Probationary Fellow in 1697, and an actual Fellow in 1698. His Fellowship he retained until 1711.
His name is perpetuated in "Addison's Walk," along the banks of the Cherwell, although there is nothing to show that Addison walked it longer, or oftener, than he walked any other walk, or than did any other man! Still, it is a beautiful walk, well worth the walking for its own sake, and for the sake of Addison. Addison's rooms, with an outlook on to the Walk, and toward the Great Oak, were in a building now no longer standing, but views of which are still preserved in the College Library; some contemporary hand, on one particular old print, having designated Addison's windows. William Collins went to Queen's College in 1740; but in the next year he gained the valuable "Demyship" of Magdalen; and as long as he remained in Oxford this latter College was his home. Like certain other " Demys," we are sorry to learn that Collins was given to dissipation; that he was contemptuous of academical pedants, and of college discipline generally; that, at Magdalen, he was guilty of not a little very fair verse; and that he was not dissipated enough to forfeit his degree; although he left Oxford in debt to his tradesmen.
It is rather discouraging to think that so many of the Men of Letters who distinguished Magdalen in its history by their presence, did not, while at Magdalen, distinguish themselves. And it must be a comfort to Magdalen to have had a Tyndale and an Addison to leaven the lump of undergraduate indifference.
George Home was graduated from University College in 1749, and became a Fellow of Magdalen in 1750. He was made the President of this College in 1768. He was Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor of the University; and he became Dean of Canterbury in 1781, retaining, however, the headship of Magdalen until 1790; the double duty, as was natural, breaking down his nerves and his health. He died two years later as Bishop of Norwich. He is said to have been familiar with Oxford and Canterbury; and, by reason of his frequent journeys, equally familiar with the country lying between them; but to have known almost nothing else in a topographical way.
The work with which, to the great mass of Biblical students, his name is now associated, "The Commentary on the Psalms," was done in the room of the President of Magdalen, where John- son and Boswell visited him, in 1776, when Johnson drank innumerable cups of tea, and pronounced himself as being very much impressed by his host.
Edward Gibbon says: "I was matriculated in the University as a Gentleman Commoner [in 1752] before I had accomplished the fifteenth year of my age. ... I arrived at Oxford with a stock of erudition that might have puzzled a doctor, and a degree of ignorance of which a school-boy would have been ashamed. . . . My apartments [in Magdalen] consisted of three elegant and well furnished rooms, in the New Building, a stately pile." It is still called New Building, although it was twenty years old when Gibbon saw it first.
The connection between Gibbon and Magdalen was not long, nor was it profitable, either to college or to collegian; and no son of Oxford has ever spoken so disrespectfully, or so bitterly, of his Alma Mater. The future historian, as he has told us, was but a lad when he entered Magdalen, in 1752; and he was still a lad when its gates were shut upon him about a year later, because he had entered the Church of Rome.
How just were his complaints it is hardly necessary here to try to determine. But his complaints were many; and the Men of Magdalen, who are all its lovers, do not care much to speak of Gibbon, to this day. A delicate boy of fifteen or sixteen is hardly the best judge of what is good for himself or for other boys; and Gibbon, in the matter of Magdalen, at least, never grew into his seventeenth year. "To the University of Oxford," he wrote, when he was a good deal of a man in other respects, "To the University of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation, and she will as readily renounce me for a Son as I am willing to disclaim her for a Mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life. The reader," he continued, "will pronounce between the school and the scholar. My college forgot to instruct " [in the matter of his religious education], he said, "I forgot to return [to the Communion-table from which at his entrance he had been-forbidden on account of his youth]. And I was myself forgotten by the first magistrate of the University. Without a single lecture, either public or private, either Christian or Protestant, without any academical subscription, without any Episcopal ordination I was left, by light of my catechism, to grope my way to the Chapel and to the Communion-table, where I was admitted, without question as to how far, or by what means, I might be qualified to receive the sacrament."
The unprejudiced reader, in pronouncing between scholar and school, unless he feels that the scholar greatly exaggerates, will probably lay the onus of "The Decline and Fall" to the fault of them both!
John Wilson, better known as "Christopher North," was graduated from Magdalen in 1807. He was a Gentleman Commoner, and he made a most decided mark for himself, not only with his head but with his heels, and his arms, and with the rest of his physical anatomy. He was, even at college, what is called "a character;" but a fine, manly, breezy, intellectual, enthusiastic character, as he was throughout life. He boxed, he ran, he rode, he walked, he sculled, he dived, he swam, he skated; he tramped from Oxford to London in a night; and he jumped the Cherwell where it was twenty-three feet in width.
In 1806, while he was doing all these extraordinary physical things, he set himself down, with no whip-cord or wet towel around his head, and calmly wrote a poem on "The Study of Greek and Roman Architecture," which won the Newdigate Prize.
Charles Reade was an Oxfordshire man. He went to school at Iffley and at Staines. In 1831 he went to Magdalen as a " Demy." In 1842 he became a Fellow. In 1844, and again in 1849, he was Bursar. In 1849 he was Dean of Arts—when he attracted some small attention, in college circles, by wearing a green coat and brass buttons—and he was elected Vice-President of the College in 1851.
In 1899 the Hall-porter of Magdalen, who had been connected with the College for many years, remembered Reade, and remembered Reade's rooms. But he did not remember whether they were in " No. One New Building" or in "No. Two." He was a little uncertain he said. And it is this little uncertainty which is so trying to the Landmarker who wants to know, in Oxford and elsewhere.
Reade's biographers, fortunately, have something of certainty in their composition, and they place Reade in " a suite of five rooms at No. Two New Building, beautifully situated, and looking southward over the Cloisters and the Tower."
He retained these chambers during his later connection with the College, although very much of his time was spent in London.
John Connington went up to University College in June, 1843, but very soon after was given a "Demeship" at Magdalen, where he remained until 1846, when he returned to University to spend the rest of his university life, and to prepare his edition of "Virgil."
John Richard Green, a native of Oxford, as we have seen, went, when he was eight years of age, to Magdalen Grammar School, then held in a small room within the precincts of the College. When he was a little older he took part, from choice and with wrapt enthusiasm, in the May-morning procession of the Magdalen Choir-boys, to sing "The Hymn to the Trinity" on the College Tower; and once he received a prize at the hands of a Master of the School who was the last man in Oxford to wear the wig of other days, and who remembered and knew Dr. Johnson in life.
Green's desire was to enter Magdalen College, but it was otherwise decreed, and he went to Jesus College in 1854.
"The Oxford Directory" for 1899 says that the ceremony of chanting the Te Deum on Magdalen Towers on the First of May—in pursuance of an ancient custom—now brings together a crowd of listeners in the street below, who are willing to rise as early as five A.M.; and that at its close the bells break forth, and there is a great blowing of horns by street-boys, which last adds, naturally, but little to the solemnity of the occasion.
One familiar with the ways of college-boys in American university towns might accuse the freshmen of blowing these horns, if freshmen were ever known to get up with the sun, or before it—even for the sake of blowing horns!
Magdalen Choir and Magdalen School have been almost as important, in their day, and in their way, as Magdalen College itself; and from them many a good student has been sent into Magdalen, and into other colleges as well. When it was threatened, during the Reformation, to destroy both of these ancient institutions, the Citizens of Oxford prayed for the preservation of the School; and happily their prayer was granted. "The better part of them," they petitioned, "were able nowhere else to bring up their children in good learning; or to have them given, as well, meat, drink, clothes, and lodging, so freely and so economically; and so they attained to Logic and other faculties at the charge of the said college as before, and little or nothing at the charge of their parents."
Professor Max Muller, whose chapters of "Literary Recollections" in his "Auld Lang Syne" have been so frequently, and will be so frequently, quoted here, made his homes in Oxford (which were first in High Street, nearly opposite Magdalen, and later at No. 7 Norham Gardens, backing upon the University Park), the centre of everything that was interesting and delightful in an intellectual way. He entertained all the Lights of Literature who had been in Oxford in his time, and among others Emerson, Lowell, and Holmes were his guests in the Norham Gardens house, in which, it may be mentioned, most of these lines were written. Holmes was very happy there during more than one of the "Hundred Days" of his old age. "I had the pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford," wrote Max Miiller. "He seemed to know them all, and had something to ask and to say about every one. When we came to Magdalen College he wanted to see, and to measure, the elms. He was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms at Magdalen, and when he found that it was larger than his American giant, he stood before it, admiring it without a single word of envy or disappointment."
One who has often stood and admired those Magdalen elms, big and noble as they are, cannot help thinking that there was some little shrinkage in that string of Dr. Holmes's, during his passage over the Atlantic, or that his own giant elm had held its breath and drawn itself in at his embrace.
It is only just to Oxford and to Magdalen to say, in this connection, that G. V. Cox, in his "Recollections of Oxford," states that he recollected the collapse of the famous " Magdalen oak," which was twenty-one feet nine inches in girth, which stood at the entrance of what were then commonly called "Magdalen Water Walks," and which, in the middle of the night, accompanied by a violent rushing noise, fell down, literally of old age, in 1789. It was certainly a giant in years, and in bulk; it is believed to have antedated the College; and it is greatly to be regretted that it did not wait a century longer, that it might have given the Autocrat, the Poet, the Guardian Angel, and the Professor, a chance to have further stretched his string.
To the Max Muller house on High Street went, once for dinner, bed, and breakfast, during the Long Vacation, Mr. Tennyson. He seems to have been a little trying to his hostess, for he did not like the sauce on the salmon at dinner, and he said so frankly; while he declared, at breakfast, that "mutton chops were the staple of every bad inn in England." This was all very true, no doubt; but not altogether polite, even for a poet. He made himself agreeable in other respects, however, and, like almost all great men, he smoked a great deal!