Nuts to crack; or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge ScholarsGooch, Richard
History
Nuts to crack; or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars
Gooch, Richard
University of Cambridge -- Anecdotes; University of Oxford -- Anecdotes
over the buttery-hatch of Christ-College, Cambridge, and, as Dr.
Johnson insinuates in his Life, was the last Cambridge student so
castigated in either university. The officer who performed this
_fundamental_ operation was Dr. Thomas Bainbrigge, the master of
Christ's College. But as it was at a later date that Dr. Ralph
Bathurst carried his whip, according to our friend Tom's showing, to
_surprise_ the scholars, it is therefore going a great length to give
our "Prince of Poets" the _sole_ merit of being the last _smart_
fellow that issued from the halls of either Oxford or Cambridge,
handsome as he was.
The following celebrated
EPIGRAM ON AN EPIGRAM,
Printed, says the Oxford Sausage, "from the original MSS. preserved in
the ARCHIVES of the Jelly-bag Society," is somewhere said to have been
written by Dr. Ralph Bathurst, when an Oxford scholar:--
One day in _Christ-church_ meadows walking,
Of poetry and such things talking,
Says _Ralph_, a merry wag,
An EPIGRAM, if right and good,
In all its circumstances should
Be like a JELLY-BAG.
Your simile, I own, is new,
But how dost make it out? quoth Hugh.
Quoth RALPH, I'll tell you, friend:
Make it at top both wide and fit
To hold a budget full of wit,
And point it at the end.
* * * * *
TELL US WHAT YOU CAN'T DO?
A party of Oxford scholars were one evening carousing at the Star Inn,
when a waggish student, a stranger to them, abruptly introduced
himself, and seeing he was not "one of us," they all began to _quiz_
him. This put him upon his mettle, and besides boasting of other
accomplishments, he told them, in plain terms, that he could write
Greek or Latin Verses better, and was, in short, an over-match for
them at any thing. Upon this, one of the party exclaimed, "You have
told us a great deal of what you can do, _tell us something you can't
do_?" "Well," he retorted, "I'll tell you what I can't do--_I can't
pay my reckoning!_" This sally won him a hearty welcome.
* * * * *
THE FIRST WOMEN INTRODUCED INTO A CLOISTER.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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