. Marryat, moreover, never made me
wish to run away to sea, whilst certainly Pater did make me wish for
more 'colour' in the curriculum, for a renaissance of the Farrar
period, when there was always 'a sullen spirit of revolt against the
authorities'; when lockers were always being broken into and marks
falsified, and small boys prevented from saying their prayers, insomuch
that they vowed they would no longer buy brandy for their seniors. In
some schools, I am told, the pretty old custom of roasting a fourth-form
boy, whole, upon Founder's Day still survives. But in my school there
was less sentiment. I ended by acquiescing in the slow revolution of its
wheel of work and play. I felt that at Oxford, when I should be of age
to matriculate, a 'variegated dramatic life was waiting for me. I was
not a little too sanguine, alas!

How sad was my coming to the university! Where were those sweet
conditions I had pictured in my boyhood? Those antique contrasts? Did
I ride, one sunset, through fens on a palfrey, watching the gold
reflections on Magdalen Tower? Did I ride over Magdalen Bridge and hear
the consonance of evening-bells and cries from the river below? Did I
rein in to wonder at the raised gates of Queen's, the twisted pillars of
St. Mary's, the little shops, lighted with tapers? Did bull-pups snarl
at me, or dons, with bent backs, acknowledge my salute? Any one who
knows the place as it is, must see that such questions are purely
rhetorical. To him I need not explain the disappointment that beset me
when, after being whirled in a cab from the station to a big hotel, I
wandered out into the streets. On aurait dit a bit of Manchester through
which Apollo had once passed; for here, among the hideous trains and the
brand-new bricks--here, glared at by the electric-lights that hung from
poles, screamed at by boys with the Echo and the Star--here, in a riot
of vulgarity, were remnants of beauty, as I discerned. There were only
remnants.

Soon also I found that the life of the place, like the place, had
lost its charm and its tradition. Gone were the contrasts that made it
wonderful. That feud between undergraduates and dons--latent, in the
old days, only at times when it behoved the two academic grades to unite
against the townspeople--was one of the absurdities of the past. The
townspeople now looked just like undergraduates and the dons just like
townspeople. So splendid was the train-service between Oxford and London