Every one knows the various processes of slacking at the present time, so that there is no need for detail. But in essence the method is the same, and the result also. Our lunches at the Cherwell Hotel, at the riverside inns at Iffley and Abingdon; our “Grinds”; our slacking on the river in summer term--all these were done two centuries ago, and, just as some of the more energetic of us seek to immortalise these doings by contributing poems and articles to the ’varsity papers, so did the Undergraduates then send their sonnets and Latin verses to _The Student_, the _Oxford Magazine_, and Jackson’s _Oxford Journal_. In place of the musical comedy lady, whose silvery laughter floats down wind to-day, the Oxford toast flaunted it right merrily in the old days. The gownsmen’s tobacco accounts then amounted to quite as much as ours do, and they wrote home for further supplies of pocket money in almost the identical terms which we use to-day. Yesterday’s and to-day’s Oxford men are one and the same. Oxford herself and her Dons are changed, but the Undergraduate goes on doing and thinking the same things in the same way, and when he goes down now he feels very much as felt the eighteenth-century poet who, also down, sang:-- “Could Ovid, deathless bard, forbear, Confin’d by Scythia’s frozen plains, Cease to desire his native air In softest elegiac strains? Cursed with the town no more can I For Oxford’s meadow cease to sigh.... Can I, while mem’ry lasts, forget Oxford, thy silver rolling stream, Thy silent walks and cool retreat Where first I sucked the love of fame? E’en now the thought inspires my breast And lulls my troubled soul to rest.” [Illustration: VIEW OF ST. MARY’S CHURCH & RADCLIFFE LIBRARY.] CHAPTER II THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FRESHER First arrival--Footpads and “easy pads”--Farewell to parents--A forlorn animal--Terrae Filius’s advice--Much prayers--“Hell has no fury like a woman scorned”--The disadvantages of a conscience. The beginning of our university career is marked, unless we be Stoics, by mixed feelings of elation and a sinking at the pit of the stomach which we afterwards learn to recognise as “needle.” The train journey may have seemed long, but at this first breathless moment when the porter receives our goods and chattels into his arms from the top of the moribund hansom, we could almost wish that we were back in the train again. A sense of isolation, and of having to stand or fall by ourselves, sweeps over like a tidal wave, leaving us momentarily chilled and nervous.