How much more lively is the Oxford couplet on the
King, who, being bored by some amateur theatricals, twice or thrice
made as if he would leave the hall, where men failed dismally to
entertain him.
"The King himself did offer,"--"What, I pray?"
"He offered twice or thrice--to go away!"
As a result of the example of the Court, the students began to wear
love-locks. In Elizabeth's time, when men wore their hair "no longer
than their ears," long locks had been a mark, says Wood, of
"swaggerers." Drinking and gambling were now very fashionable,
undergraduates were whipped for wearing boots, while "Puritans were
many and troublesome," and Laud publicly declared (1614) that
"Presbyterians were as bad as Papists." Did Laud, after all, think
Papists so very bad? In 1617 he was President of his college, St.
John's, on which he set his mark. It is to Laud and to Inigo Jones
that Oxford owes the beautiful garden-front, perhaps the most lovely
thing in Oxford. From the gardens--where for so many summers the
beauty of England has rested in the shadow of the chestnut-trees,
amid the music of the chimes, and in air heavy with the scent of the
acacia flowers--from the gardens, Laud's building looks rather like a
country-house than a college.
If St. John's men have lived in the University too much as if it were
a large country-house, if they have imitated rather the Toryism than
the learning of their great Archbishop, the blame is partly Laud's.
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