White, a generous man, gave the Vice-Chancellor ‘seven pounds of double-refined white sugar.’ I like to fancy my learned friend, the Proctor, going to the present Vice-Chancellor’s with a donation of white sugar! Manners have certainly changed in the direction of severity. ‘Share of the expense for Mr. Butcher’s release’ came to ten and sixpence. What had Mr. Butcher been doing? The Proctor went ‘to Blenheim with Nan,’ and it cost him fifteen and sixpence. Perhaps she was one of the ‘Oxford Toasts’ of a contemporary satire. Strawberries were fourpence a basket on the ninth of June; and on November 6, White lost one shilling ‘at cards, in common room.’ He went from Selborne to Oxford, ‘in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke’; and he gave Jenny a ‘round Chinaturene.’ Tea cost eight shillings a pound in 1752, while rum-punch was but half a crown a bowl. White’s highest terminal battels were but £12, though he was a hospitable man, and would readily treat the other Proctor to a bowl of punch. It is well to remember White and Johnson when the Gibbon of that or any other day bewails the intellectual poverty of Oxford. CHAPTER VIII POETS AT OXFORD: SHELLEY AND LANDOR AT any given time a large number of poets may be found among the undergraduates at Oxford, and the younger dons. It is not easy to say what becomes of all these pious bards, who are a marked and peculiar people while they remain in residence. The undergraduate poet is a not uninteresting study. He wears his hair long, and divides it down the middle. His eye is wild and wandering, and his manner absent, especially when he is called on to translate a piece of an ancient author in lecture. He does not ‘read’ much, in the technical sense of the term, but consumes all the novels that come in his way, and all the minor poetry. His own verses the poet may be heard declaiming aloud, at unholy midnight hours, so that his neighbours have been known to break his windows with bottles, and then to throw in all that remained of the cold meats of a supper party, without interfering with the divine _afflatus_. When the college poet has composed a sonnet, ode, or what not, he sends it to the Editor of the _Nineteenth Century_, and it returns to him after many days. At last it appears in print, in _College Rhymes_, a collection of mild verse, which is (or was) printed at regular or irregular intervals, and was never seen except in the rooms of contributors. The poet also speaks at the Union, where his sentiments are either revolutionary, or so wildly conservative that he looks on Magna Charta as the first step on the path that leads to England’s ruin. As a politician, the undergraduate poet knows no mean between Mr. Peter Taylor and King John. He has been known to found a Tory club, and shortly afterwards to swallow the formulæ of Mr. Bradlaugh.