Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/294

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
252

or politics; but nevertheless, while it did not seem to contain anything subversive of academic discipline, the Vice-Chancellor felt that he could not foresee how it might operate; and he was constrained to interdict the meetings of the Society in the manner proposed.

This was some thirty years before the foundation of the Oxford Union Society, the social, literary, and debating club so important now in Oxford University life; and it was some thirty years after the inception of "The Well Meaning" and "The Plain Dealing" Societies of the College of New Jersey; still existing, and now bearing the more familiar names of "Clio" and "Whig." In these the undergraduates of the University of rinceton still dispute upon Scientific and Literary subjects. Thus, as in some other respects, has the young Princeton been the senior of the old Oxford in the practice of Plain Doing and Well Speaking.

A contemporary of the respectable Bishop of Rochester, at Wadham, was the wicked Earl, who bore the title of Rochester. He went up in 1660, at the age of twelve; he was dubbed a Master of Arts when he was fourteen, and he eloped with a very rich wife at the age of eighteen, to die, when he was thirty-two, owing bad debts to everybody, even to posterity. He was, perhaps,