What a
position for a man having authority, to be in the constant habit of
sending for the blacksmith! Fellows have not very unfrequently been
fired at with Roman candles, or bombarded with soda-water bottles
full of gunpowder. One has also known sparrows shot from Balliol
windows on the Martyrs' Memorial of our illustration. In this case,
too, the sportsman was a poet. But deliberately to pot at a fellow,
"to go for him with a shot gun," as the repentant American said he
would do in future, after his derringer missed fire, is certainly a
strong measure. No college which pretended to maintain discipline
could allow even a poet to shoot thus wildly. In truth, Landor's
offence has been exaggerated by Southey. It was nothing out of the
common. The poet was giving "an after-dinner party" in his rooms.
The men were mostly from Christ Church; for Landor was intimate, he
says, with only one undergraduate of his own college, Trinity. On
the opposite side of the quadrangle a Tory and a butt, named Leeds,
was entertaining persons whom the Jacobin Landor calls "servitors and
other raff of every description." The guests at the rival wine-
parties began to "row" each other, Landor says, adding, "All the time
I was only a spectator, for I should have blushed to have had any
conversation with them, particularly out of a window. But my gun was
lying on a table in the room, and I had in a back closet some little
shot.
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