In
Walter Savage Landor, authority recognised a noisier and rowdier
specimen of the same class. People who have to do with hundreds of
young men at a time are unavoidably compelled to generalise. No don,
that was a don, could have seen Shelley or Landor as they are
described to us without hastily classing them in the category of
poets who would come to no good and do little credit to the college.
Landor went up to Trinity College in 1793. It was the dreadful year
of the Terror, when good Englishmen hated the cruel murderers of
kings and queens. Landor was a good Englishman, of course, and he
never forgave the French the public assassination of Marie
Antoinette. But he must needs be a Jacobin, and wear his own
unpowdered hair--the Poet thus declaring himself at once in the
regular recognised fashion. "For a portion of the time he certainly
read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby,
he declined everything in the shape of competition." (Now
competition is the essence of modern University study.) "Though I
wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the
University," says Landor, "I could never be persuaded by my tutor or
friends to contend for any prize whatever." The pleasantest and most
profitable hours that Landor could remember at Oxford "were passed
with Walter Birch in the Magdalen Walk, by the half-hidden Cherwell."
Hours like these are indeed the pleasantest and most profitable that
any of us pass at Oxford.
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