[Illustration: _BOWLS IN NEW COLLEGE GARDEN. Drawn by Lancelot Speed._]
There is the same kind of unalterableness about the few favoured individuals to whom the spirit of the age has allowed a secure and permanent residence in Oxford; a happy class which is now almost limited to Heads of Houses and College servants. You scarcely ever see a scout bearing the outward and visible signs of advancing years; age cannot wither them, nor (it should be added) can custom stale their infinite variety of mis-serving their masters. Perhaps it is they who are the repositories of tradition. And even Fellows contrive to retain some of the characteristics of their more permanent predecessors, whom we have now learnt to regard as abuses. Hard-worked though they are, and precarious of tenure, they are, nevertheless, in some sort imbued with that flavour of humanity and _dolce far niente_ which continues to haunt even a Common Room where Fellows drink nothing but water, and only dine together once a fortnight.
For times are sadly changed now, and a fellowship is far from being the haven of rest which it once was, and still is to a few. Look at that old Fellow pacing with slow and leisurely steps beneath Magdalen or Christchurch elms: regard him well, for he is an interesting survival, and presently he and his kind will be nothing but a memory, and probably the progressive spirit of democracy will hold him up as an awful example. He is a link with a practically extinct period. When he was first elected _verus et perpetuus socius_ of his college--without examination--the University of Oxford was in a parlous state. Reform was as yet unheard of, or only loomed dimly in the distance. Noblemen still wore tufts--think how that would scandalise us now!--and ’gentlemen commoners’ came up with the declared and recognised intention of living as gentlemen commoners should. Except for the invention of the examination system--and the demon of the schools was satisfied with only a mouthful of victims then--Oxford of the forties had not substantially changed since the last century--since the days when Mr. Gibbon was a gentleman commoner at Magdalen College, where his excuses for cutting his lectures in the morning were ’received with a smile,’ and where he found himself horribly bored by the ’private scandal’ and ’dull and deep potations’ of the seniors with whom he was invited to associate in the evening. Not much had changed since those days: lectures were still disciplinary exercises rather than vehicles of instruction, and the vespertinal port was rarely if ever interrupted in its circulation by ’the man who comes at nine.’ Many holders of fellowships scarcely came near the University; those who did reside were often not much concerned about the instruction of undergraduates, and still less with ’intercollegiate competition.’ Perhaps it was not their life’s work: a fellowship might be only a stepping-stone to a college living, when a sufficiently fat benefice should fall vacant and allow the dean or sub-warden to marry and retire into the country; and even the don who meant to be a don all his days put study or learned leisure first and instruction second, the world not yet believing in the ’spoon-feeding’ of youth. Very often, of course, they did nothing. After all, when you pay a man for exercising no particular functions, you can scarcely blame him for strictly fulfilling the conditions under which he was elected. ’But what do they do?’ inquired--quite recently--a tourist, pointing to the fellows’ buildings of a certain college. ’Do?!!’ replied the Oxford cicerone--’do? ... why them’s fellows!’ But if there was inactivity, it is only the more credit to the minority who really did interest themselves in the work of their pupils. Not that the relation of authorities to undergraduates was ever then what it has since become--whether the change be for the better or the worse. Few attempts were made to bridge the chasm which must always yawn between the life of teacher and taught. Perhaps now the attempt is a little over-emphasised; certainly things are done which would have made each particular hair to stand on end on the head of a Fellow of the old school. In his solemn and formal way he winked at rowing, considering it rather fast and on the whole an inevitable sign of declining morals. He wore his cap and gown with the anachronistic persistency of Mr. Toole in ’The Don,’ and sighed over the levity of a colleague who occasionally sported a blue coat with brass buttons.