Without college or university games, the old Oxford day was very much unlike our own. Bonfires of celebration, almost alone among modern amusements, are of great antiquity, in street and quad. A hundred years ago the man who would now row or play cricket for his college, was hunting, or pole-jumping across the fields; or, if he was original, he took the long walks which were popular a few generations ago, but are now so exceptional that I know nobody who ever saw, and recognised, Matthew Arnold’s tree, though some are lazily inclined to believe that it is the one elm that dwells with the seven firs on Cumnor Hurst. One of the few college games was confined to the fives courts, which lay within the walls and have long disappeared, and are inconceivable to-day, when competition and spectators on ground remote from the colleges are characteristic of Oxford sport. Earlier still, a form of college game was the “vile and horrid sport” of forcibly shaving those who were about to become Masters of Arts, and the “tucking” (_i.e._ scratching on the chin with the thumb nail) of freshmen, which the first Earl of Shaftesbury put down at Exeter. These customs cast but a feeble shadow to-day in the occasional solemnity of trimming a contemporary’s exuberant or ill-kept hair. A more appropriate form of celebrating the taking of degrees was an elaborate supper, which is now less often possible, when a man frequently takes his degree in solitude and leaves Oxford immediately. William Paston, in the fifteenth century, writes, that he was made bachelor on a Friday and had his feast on the Monday following. He was promised a gift of venison, and though disappointed, his guests “were pleased with such meat as they had.” Even William of Wykeham, who forbade every possible game to his scholars at New, and would not allow the post-prandial leisure to be spent on ordinary days around the fire in the middle of his great hall, provided that, after supper, “on festivals and other winter nights, on which, in honour of God, his Mother, or some other saint,” there is a fire in the hall, the fellows might indulge in singing or reading “poems, chronicles of the realm, and the wonders of the world.” Some of the college halls preserved their old central fireplaces, under a louvre, until early in the last century. While the fellows dined, a servitor stood there, and read aloud from the Bible, in the first days of the college; or, as at Trinity in 1792, recited a passage from Homer or Virgil or Milton. Southey records it as a rule, that every member of the University could go by right once a year to Balliol hall, and “be treated with bread and cheese and beer, and all on condition that, when called upon, he should either sing a song or tell a story.” Those who were unqualified doubtless stayed away. Yet there is little sign that the temperate or secluded undergraduate suffered for his gifts. Whitefield himself, who