In the eighteenth century the same social creed was practised. For any transgression from the commonplace the chastisement of the culprit was inevitable. The freshman undoubtedly realised the truth of this, however vaguely, and conducted himself according to the rules laid down by his seniors. His excessive good manners lasted only until the moment when it was born in upon him that rudeness was the policy of his leaders. But though he might be no more than a scant fifteen years of age, as soon as he wiped away the last tear caused by the departure of his mother, the fresher became a Man, aggressively and consistently so. “No character,” wrote Colman, “is more jealous of the Dignity of Man (not excepting Colonel Bath, in Fielding’s Novel of Amelia), than a lad who has just escaped from School birch to College discipline. This early Lord of the Creation is so inflated with the importance of virility, that his pretension to it is carefully kept up in almost every sentence he utters. He never mentions any one of his associates but as a gentlemanly or a pleasant man--a studious man, a dashing man, a drinking man, etc., etc.--and the Homunculi Togati of Sixteen always talk of themselves as Christ Church men, Trinity, St John’s, Oriel, Brazen-nose men, etc.--according to their several colleges, of which old Hens, they are the Chickens--in short, there is no end to the colloquial manhood of these mannikins.” This passage might easily have been written to-day and not about the middle of the eighteenth century, for the point of view of the modern Oxford man is exactly the same as it was then. The parents of the old-time fresher looked at his going up and his immediate assumption of manhood from very opposite points of view. The mother, with regulation anxiety, conceived him to be a hardly-used, homesick, half-starved, uncomfortable, thoroughly wretched fellow, doomed to live in stone walls in a fever-stricken and miasmic locality. “Most dearly tender’d by his Mother, Who loves him better than his brother; So she at home a good while keeps him, In White-broath, and Canary steeps him; And tho’ his Noddle’s somewhat empty, His Guts are stuffed with Sweet-meats plenty.” This is how “Academia” described the mother’s far-reaching apron-string still feeling out, though some weeks cut, for her far distant son. Not so the father! When his wife sent a servant up to Oxford with a well-stuffed hamper for her boy and fond messages as to his health, he went down to the servants’ hall and, planting himself in front of the returned messenger, asked “If’s Son has got a Punck yet Whores he, and gets ye often drunk yet; Being told by’s Man, he took him quaffing, For joy he bursts his sides with laughing; and prithee John (says he) and how was’t--Ha, Drunk i’ the Cellar, as a Sow, wast?”