And the mention of Sandford carries with it many memories for modern Oxford men, even if perch is not always to be had--of winter afternoons when the mulled port was as sweet as a carnation, and a voice from a slowly-gliding barge was the sole sound in all the land. One joyous company long ago went, “like country fiddlers,” to Farringdon fair, with cithern, bass viol, and violin. The city itself offered other amusements than the theatre, music hall, billiard tables, and picture shows of to-day. Freaks, monstrosities, mountebanks, jugglers, were welcome not only to undergraduates of fifteen or sixteen. There was “a brazen head that could speak and answer” at the Fleur de Lace on one day; on another, strange beasts. On May-day a maypole stood near St. Peter’s-in-the-East and opposite the “Mitre.” A bear-baiting was always a possibility. There was a fencing school at hand. One who cared for none of these has left this account of his Oxford day in the seventeenth century:-- _Morn, mend hose, stu. Greek, breakfast, Austen, quoque dinner;_ _Afternoon, wa. me., cra. nu., take a cup, quoque supper--_ _i.e._, interprets Wood, in the morning he mended his stockings, studied Greek, took breakfast, studied St. Augustine, and dined; and in the afternoon, walked in Christ Church meadows, cracked nuts, took a drink, and had supper. Above all, in and after the time of Cromwell the city provided coffee-houses,--the real, steaming, smoking, witty thing. The hospitality and spirit of careless intercourse between college and college which they fostered belong to the present day. They were first opened, too, at a time when much of mediæval life was [Illustration: THE HIGH STREET LOOKING EAST The Mitre Inn is on the left of the picture, and above the white building rises the tower and lantern of All Saints’ Church. A part of these buildings has been removed for the extension of Brasenose College. Farther on, the spire of the University Church appears above the porch of All Saints’, and a portion of the battlements of All Souls’ College closes the perspective.] departing, when Christmas sports were dying, and Latin conversation at dinner and supper was going out of use; and Anthony à Wood laments that scholar-like conversation (“viz. by quoting the fathers, producing an antient verse from the poets suitable to his discourse”) was accounted pedantic, and “nothing but news and the affairs of Christendom,” he says scornfully, “is discoursed of, and that generally at coffee-houses.” At some, perhaps at all of them, there was a light library, which apparently resembled the library of a modern college barge. A copy of Rabelais, with poems and plays, all chained in the old manner, embellished Short’s coffee-house. Later came the _Tatlers_ and _Spectators_ and _Connoisseurs_, for “such as have neglected or lost their Latin or Greek,” as Tom Warton said:--