After prayers he drinks tea with some celebrated toast, and then
waits upon her to Magdalen Grove or Paradise Garden, and back again.
He seldom eats any supper, and never reads anything but novels and
romances."
The dress of this hero and his friends must have made the streets
more gay than do the bright-coloured flannel coats of our boating
men.
"He is easily distinguished by a stiff silk gown, which rustles in
the wind as he struts along; a flax tie-wig, or sometimes a long
natural one, which reaches down below his [well, say below his
waist]; a broad bully-cock'd hat, or a square cap of about twice the
usual size; white stockings; thin Spanish leather shoes. His clothes
lined with tawdry silk, and his shirt ruffled down the bosom as well
as at the wrists."
These "smarts" cut no such gallant figure when they first arrived in
Oxford, with their fathers (rusty old country farmers), in linsey-
woolsey coats, greasy, sun-burnt heads of hair, clouted shoes, yarn
stockings, flapping hats, with silver hatbands, and long muslin neck-
cloths run with red at the bottom.
After this satire of the undergraduates we may look at the
contemporary account-book of a Proctor. In 1752 Gilbert White of
Selborne was Proctor, and may have fined young Gibbon of Magdalen,
who little thought that Oxford boasted an official who was to become
an English classic. White paid some attention to dress, and got a
feather-topp'd, grizzled wig from London; cost him 2 pounds, 5s.
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