Dear old Oxford![118] amid the brawl and uproar of the latter days, and with many a frailty in the curtains of the Ark which the weapons of the Philistines have found and pierced, yet _alma mater_, mother mild, like our native England, “with all thy faults I love thee still.” And when I recall my own undergraduate life of thirty years and upwards agone, I feel, notwithstanding modern vaunt, the _laudator temporis acti_ earnest within me yet and strong. Nowadays, as it seems to me, there is but little originality of character in the still famous University; a dread of eccentric reputation appears to pervade College and Hall; every “Oxford man,” to adopt the well-known name, is subdued into sameness within and without, controlled as it were into copyism and mediocrity by the smoothing-iron of the nineteenth century.[119] Whereas in my time, and before it, there were distinguished names, famous in every mouth for original achievements and “deeds of daring-do.” There were giants in those days--men of varied renown--and they arose and won for themselves, in strange fields of fame, record and place. Each became in his day a hero of the “Iliad” or “Odyssey” of Oxford life--a kind of Homeric man. Once and again in the course of every term, the whole University would ring with some fearless and practical jest, conceived and executed with a dash of original genius which betokened future victories in the war of wit and the world of men. How well do I remember a bold travesty of discipline[120] which once set the common-rooms in a roar, and even among “mine ancients,” made it “merry in hall Where beards wagged all”!