“Most reverend Seniors,--May it please your Gravities to admit into your presence a kitten of the Muses, and a meer frog of Helicon to croak the cataracts of his plumbeous cerebrosity before your sagacious ingenuities. I am none of the University blood-hounds that seek for preferment, and whose noses are as acute as their ears, that lie perdue for places, and who, good saints! do groan till _the Visitation_ comes. These are they that esteem a tavern as bad as purgatory, and wine more superstitious than holy water; and therefore I hope this honourable convocation will not suffer one of that tribe to taste of the sack, lest they should be troubled with a vertigo and their heads turn _round_.” Except at such a special season as that, the old Oxford day bore more resemblance than our own to the life elsewhere. The fashions in cards and dress were the same as in London; the outdoor amusements were those of other town or country gentlemen. There was horse-racing at Spurton Hill and Brackley, cock-fighting at Holywell. Edgeworth’s contemporaries attended the assizes, and interfered on behalf of justice, in spite of sheriff and judge. Anthony à Wood went to fish at Wheatley Bridge, and “nutted at Shotover by the way.” And early rising was a tradition in every college until last century. The undergraduate, who to-day lives on historical principles, is often later than his sixteenth-century original was to dine, when he sits at his breakfast of steak and XX in a fine old room. Chapel at six o’clock and a lecture at seven was a common doom. Shelley and Hogg, after their days spent in shooting at a mark, and making ducks and drakes and paper boats at a Shotover pond, sat up, indeed, until two, over their conversations on literature and chemistry, but rose at seven, because it was customary. While dinner was at ten or eleven, breakfast was an informal meal. Some attempted to do without it: hence a morning preacher swooned on the altar steps. Wood speaks of the juniors “at breakfast in hall” in 1661. The majority took beer and bread from the buttery, and probably taking it in one another’s rooms, started the genial custom of breakfast parties, which was perfected early in the nineteenth century. “Let the tender swain,” says the well-spiced _Oxford Sausage_, a mid-eighteenth-century product of Oxford (and Cambridge) wits,-- Let the tender Swain Each Morn regale on nerve-relaxing Tea, Companion meet of languor-loving Nymph: Be mine each Morn with eager appetite And Hunger undissembled, to repair To friendly Buttery; there on smoaking Crust And foaming Ale to banquet unrestrained, Material Breakfast! Thus in ancient Days Our ancestors robust with liberal cups Usher’d the Morn, unlike the squeamish Sons Of modern Times: Nor ever had the Might Of Britons brave decay’d, had thus they fed, With British Ale improving British worth.