The choice language of Oxford
contempt was even then extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison in Daniel
Deronda, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not like as "brutes."
"Pembroke--the fittest colledge in the town for brutes." The
University did not encourage certain "players" who had paid the place
a visit, and the players, in revenge, had gone about the town at
night and broken the windows.
When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is
amusing to read of Prideaux's miserable adventures, in the diligence,
between a lady of easy manners, a "pitiful rogue," and two
undergraduates who "sordidly affected debauchery."
"This ill company made me very miserable all the way. Only once I
could not but heartily laugh to see Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by
five or six carmen with whips and prong staves for provoking them
with some of his extravagant frolics."
The "violent affection to vice" in the University, or in the country,
was, of course, the reaction against the godliness of Puritan
captains of horse. Another form of the reaction is discernible in
the revived High Church sentiments of Prideaux, Wood, and most of the
students of the time.
The manners of the undergraduates were not much better than those of
the pot-house-haunting seniors. Dr. Good, the Master of Balliol, "a
good old toast," had much trouble with his students.
"There is, over against Balliol College, a dingy, horrid, scandalous
ale-house, fit for none but draymen and tinkers, and such as, by
going there, have made themselves equally scandalous.
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