at the hour when wickets were pitched on Cowley Marsh, and I never was present at his discourses, at his humorous prophecies of England’s fate, which are coming all too true.  So many weary lectures had to be attended, could not be “cut,” that we abstained from lectures of supererogation, so to speak.  For the rest there was no “literary movement” among contemporary undergraduates.  They read for the schools, and they rowed and played cricket.  We had no poets, except the stroke of the Corpus boat, Mr. Bridges, and he concealed his courtship of the Muse.  Corpus is a small college, but Mr. Bridges pulled its boat to the proud place of second on the river.  B. N. C. was the head boat, and even B. N. C. did Corpus bump.  But the triumph was brief.  B. N. C. made changes in its crew, got a new ship, drank the foaming grape, and bumped Corpus back.  I think they went head next year, but not that year.  Thus Mr. Bridges, as Kingsley advises, was doing noble deeds, not dreaming them, at that moment.

There existed a periodical entirely devoted to verse, but nobody knew anybody who wrote in it.  A comic journal was started; I remember the pride with which when a freshman, I received an invitation to join its councils as an artist.  I was to do the caricatures of all things.  Now, methought, I shall meet the Oxford wits of whom I have read.  But the wits were unutterably disappointing, and the whole thing died early and not lamented.  Only one piece of academic literature obtained and deserved success.  This was The Oxford Spectator, a most humorous little periodical, in shape and size like Addison’s famous journal.  The authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early.  There have been good periodicals since; many amusing things occur in the Echoes from the Oxford Magazine, but the Spectator was the flower of academic journals.  “When I look back to my own experience,” says the Spectator, “I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon ’the mindful tablets of my soul.’  And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell and sound, and sight and thought.  The wonderful scent of the meadow air just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of ‘ten seconds more,’ all down from the green barge to the lasher.  And yet that unrivalled moment is only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure are concentrated there.”

Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure.  Things go wrong somehow.  Life drops her happy mask.  But this has nothing to do with books.