like to visit freshmen's rooms and
play practical jokes, he stirred his fire, heated his poker red hot, and
waited impatiently for callers. "The college teaching for which one was
obliged to pay," says Burton, "was of the most worthless description.
Two hours a day were regularly wasted, and those who read for honours
were obliged to choose and pay a private coach."

Another grievance was the constant bell ringing, there being so many
churches and so many services both on week days and Sundays. Later,
however, he discovered that it is possible to study, even at Oxford, if
you plug your ears with cotton-wool soaked in glycerine. He spent his
first months, not in studying, but in rowing, fencing, shooting the
college rooks, and breaking the rules generally. Many of his pranks were
at the expense of Dr. Jenkins, for whose sturdy common sense, however,
he had sincere respect; and long after, in his Vikram and the Vampire,
in which he satirises the tutors and gerund-grinders of Oxford, he paid
him a compliment. [46]

Although he could not speak highly of the dons and undergraduates, he
was forced to admit that in one respect the University out-distanced
all other seats of learning. It produced a breed of bull-terriers of
renowned pedigree which for their "beautiful build" were a joy to think
about and a delirium to contemplate; and of one of these pugnacious
brutes he soon became the proud possessor. That he got drunk himself and
made his fellow collegians drunk he mentions quite casually, just as he
mentions his other preparations for holy orders. If he walked out with
his bull-terrier, it was generally to Bagley Wood, where a pretty,
dizened gipsy girl named Selina told fortunes; and henceforward he took
a keen interest in Selina's race.

He spent most of his time, however, in the fencing saloons of an Italian
named Angelo and a Scotchman named Maclaren; and it was at Maclaren's he
first met Alfred Bates Richards, who became a life friend. Richards,
an undergraduate of Exeter, was a man of splendid physique. A giant in
height and strength, he defeated all antagonists at boxing, but Burton
mastered him with the foil and the broad-sword. Richards, who, like
Burton, became a voluminous author [47] wrote long after, "I am sure,
though Burton was brilliant, rather wild, and very popular, none of us
foresaw his future greatness."

Another Oxford friend of Burton's was Tom Hughes, author of Tom Brown's
Schooldays; the man wh