The
undergraduates have no distinguishing costume. After an hour or two
of viva voce exercises in the grammar of Priscian, preparatory
lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the "schools," a
set of low-roofed buildings between St. Mary's and Brasenose. There
he will find the Divinity "school" or lecture-room in the place of
honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the lecture-
rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and
astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and "the tongues," stretching
down School Street on either side. Here the Praelectors are holding
forth, and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their
subject regere scholas, whether they like it or not. Our friend,
Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine
of two-pence for omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his
nation (he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch, Welsh, and
Irish) in the parish Church. He stops in the Flower Market and at a
barber's shop on his way to St. Peter's, and comes forth a wonderful
pagan figure with a Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance,
with horns protruding through a wig of tow, with vine-leaves twisted
in and out of the horns, and roses stuck wherever there is room for
roses. Henricus de Bourges, and half a dozen Picardy men, with some
merry souls from the Southern side of the Thames, are jigging down
the High, playing bag-pipes and guitars.
Pages:
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47