University Town on the banks of the Thames. When the counterfeit thatcher capped Latin verses with the challenging team, they fled before him, according to Wood, and hurried back to the shores of the Cam, without venturing to enter the gates of Oxford at all.
This is a very pretty and instructive tale. But, probably, it is not true.
John Kyrle, Pope's "Man of Ross," may squeeze himself into fame, perhaps, as a Literary Landmark, upon the reputation given him by the author of "The Moral Essays." He entered Balliol in 1654, but he left Oxford without a degree. Even Pope does not tell us whether or not he began to go about doing good in his college days. Nevertheless, he seems to have done a good deal of good to his fellow-men, during the rest of his long life. He planted trees; he made blades of grass to grow where none had grown before; he built, and he re-built, churches; he fed the poor; he was a general mediator in cases of domestic and local quarrels; and, as he was himself constantly involved in litigation, not being able to heal himself of quarrelling, he fed even the poor attorneys of his country-side. He was, above all, temperate in his living; he smoked but two pipes a day; and he died, a bachelor, at the age of eighty-eight.
