This production ‘was voted heretical,’ and burned by the hands of the small-beer drawer, while the author was expelled. In the author’s advice to freshmen, he gives a not uninteresting sketch of these rudimentary creatures. The chrysalis, as described by the preacher of a University sermon, ‘never, in his wildest moments, dreamed of being a butterfly’; but the public schoolboy of the last century sometimes came up in what he conceived to be gorgeous attire. ‘I observe, in the first place, that you no sooner shake off the authority of the birch but you affect to distinguish yourselves from your dirty school-fellows by a new drugget, a pair of prim ruffles, a new bob-wig, and a brazen-hilted sword.’ As soon as they arrived in Oxford, these youths were hospitably received ‘amongst a parcel of honest, merry fellows, who think themselves obliged, in honour and common civility, to make you _damnable drunk_, and carry you, as they call it, a CORPSE to bed.’ When this period of jollity is ended, the freshman must declare his views. He must see that he is in the fashion; ‘and let your declarations be, that you are _Churchmen_, and that you believe as the _Church_ believes. For instance, you have subscribed the Thirty-nine Articles; but never venture to explain the sense in which you subscribed them, because there are various senses; so many, indeed, that scarce two men understand them in the same, and no _true Churchman_ in that which the words bear, and in that which they were written.’ This is pretty plain speaking, and _Terræ Filius_ enforces, by an historical example, the dangers of even political freethought. In 1714 the Constitution Club kept King George’s birthday. The Constitutional Party was then the name which the Whigs took to themselves, though, thanks to the advance of civilisation, the Tories have fallen back upon the same. The Conservative undergraduates attacked the club, sallying forth from their Jacobite stronghold in Brasenose (as seen in our illustration), where the ‘silly statue,’ as Hearne calls it, was about that time erected. The Whigs took refuge in Oriel, the Tories assaulted the gates, and an Oriel man, firing out of his window, wounded a gownsman of Brasenose. The Tories, ‘under terror of this dangerous and unexpected resistance, retreated from Oriel.’ Yet such was the academic strength of the Jacobites and the Churchmen, that a Freethinker, or a ‘Constitutioner,’ could scarcely take his degree. _Terræ Filius_, who lashes the dons for covetousness, greed, dissipation, rudeness, and stupidity, often corroborates the Puritan’s report about the bad manners of the undergraduates. Yet Oxford, then as now, did not lack her exquisites, and her admirers of the fair. _Terræ Filius_ thus describes a ‘smart,’ as these dandies were called—Mr. Frippery: