Why did I sell my College Life (He cries) for Benefice and Wife? Return, ye Days! when endless Pleasure I found in Reading or in Leisure! When calm around the Common Room I puff’d my daily Pipe’s Perfume! Rode for a stomach, and inspected, At Annual Bottlings, corks selected: And din’d untax’d, untroubled, under The Portrait of our pious Founder! It was a fine thing to sit day after day, in rooms sweetened, as in Burton’s day, with juniper, or in the college library, which was as a bay or river mouth leading into the very land of silence--to sit and write, or not write, as you pleased; and, in the days when books were no longer shelved with their faces to the wall, look up at Bullarium Cherubini printed in gold upon the glowing calf, and making mystical combinations as night came on. There, and in hall, chapel, study, and garden, men doomed to very diverse fates and stations went and still go, and found it possible to live a more enchanted life than anywhere else. The refractory Headington stone crumbled, and while the classical buildings became yearly less handsome than when the masons left them, the Gothic gained by the rich inlay and delicate waste of weather and time. As if time and weather wrote the chronicles of the society, the walls came to have a singular influence upon each generation, and gave them, as it were, a common ancestry and blood--noble blood, for all. Even when they departed they had the irrefragable right of exiles to look back and salute. And yet how different the life within those walls which some now living can remember! Sixty years ago, they lament, “no man was ever seen in the streets of Oxford after lunch without being dressed as he would have been in Pall Mall.” Charles Reade at Magdalen “created a panic even among the junior members” by wearing a green coat and brass buttons, as Dean of Arts. Sixty years before that, George Colman had matriculated in a grass-green coat, “with the furiously bepowdered pate of an ultra coxcomb.” And now, says the first-quoted authority, “shooting-jackets of all patterns, in which it is not given to every man to look like a gentleman,” have taken the place of frock-coat, tall hat, and gloves, “in which every one looked well.” The change from knee-breeches to trousers early last century was made possible by the gross lenience of a proctor.