"
Johnson was a man who could take the rough with the smooth, and, to
judge by all accounts, the Oxford of the earlier half of the
eighteenth century was excessively rough. Manners were rather
primitive: a big fire burned in the centre of Balliol Hall, and
round this fire, one night in every year, it is said that all the
world was welcome to a feast of ale and bread and cheese. Every
guest paid his shot by singing a song or telling a story; and one can
fancy Johnson sharing in this barbaric hospitality. "What learning
can they have who are destitute of all principles of civil
behaviour?" says a writer from whose journal (printed in 1746)
Southey has made some extracts. The diarist was a Puritan of the old
leaven, who visited Oxford shortly before Johnson's period, and who
speaks of "a power of gross darkness that may be felt constantly
prevailing in that place of wisdom and of subtlety, but not of God .
. . In this wicked place the scholars are the rudest, most giddy, and
unruly rabble, and most mischievous." But this strange and
unfriendly critic was a Nonconformist, in times when good Churchmen
showed their piety by wrecking chapels and "rabbling" ministers. In
our days only the Davenport Brothers and similar professors of
strange creeds suffer from the manly piety of the undergraduates.
Of all the carping, cross-grained, scandal-loving, Whiggish
assailants of Alma Mater, the author of Terrae Filius was the most
persistent.
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