CHAPTER XVII THE DON--(_continued_) Proctors--The Black Book--Personal spite and the taking of a degree--The case of Meadowcourt of Merton--Extract from Black Book--The taverner and the Proctor--Izaak Walton and the senior Proctor--Amhurst’s character sketch of a certain Proctor. The Proctor and his bull-dogs (entailing sudden scuttlings down side streets, which, if abortive, lead to the nine o’clock string outside that gentleman’s door, and the unwilling disbursement of goodly sums--the fine for being out of college at an unstatutable hour was 40s.!--because forsooth, a man had the misfortune to cross his path without being arrayed in statutable garb), loomed darkly on the eighteenth-century skyline. Wrapped in the safe embrace of trencher and gown it was possible to watch the great Proctors “... march in state With velvet sleeves and scarlet gown, Some with white wigs so hugely grown They seem to ape in some degree The dome of Radcliffe’s Library.” It was the redoubtable senior Proctor who was the guardian of the Black Book, the register of the university, in which he recorded the name of any person who affronted him or the university. The mere inscription of a name in the Proctor’s book may not seem a very fearful punishment, but it takes on a darker aspect when it is discovered that no person so recorded might proceed to his degree till he had given satisfaction to the Proctor who had put him in. Amhurst explained that the Black Book into which the Proctors put anybody “at whom, whether justly or not, they shall take offence ... was at first design’d to punish refractory persons and immoral offenders; but at present it is made use of to vent party spleen and is fill’d up with whigs, constitutioners, and bangorians. So long as the university has this rod in her hand, it is no wonder that high-church triumphs over her most powerful adversaries; nor can we be at all surpriz’d that Whiggism declines with the constitution club in Oxford, when we behold people stigmatiz’d in the Black Book, and excluded from their degrees for soberly rejoicing upon King George’s birthnight, and drinking his majesty’s health.”