They are either drawn
by an aspirant who is his own hero, and who idealises himself and his
friends, or they are designed by ladies who have read Verdant Green,
and who, at some period, have paid a flying visit to Cambridge. An
exhaustive knowledge of Verdant Green, and a hasty view of the
Fitzwilliam Museum and "the backs of the Colleges" (which are to
Cambridge what the Docks are to Liverpool), do not afford sufficient
materials for an accurate sketch of Oxford. The picture daubed by
the emancipated undergraduate who dabbles in fiction is as
unrecognisable. He makes himself and his friends too large, too
noisy, too bibulous, too learned, too extravagant, too pugnacious.
They seem to stride down the High, prodigious, disproportionate
figures, like the kings of Egypt on the monuments, overshadowing the
crowd of dons, tradesmen, bargees, and cricket-field or river-side
cads. Often one dimly recognises the scenes, and the acquaintances
of years ago, in University novels. The mildest of men suddenly pose
as heroes of the Guy Livingstone type, fellows who "screw up" timid
dons, box with colossal watermen, and read all night with wet towels
bound round their fevered brows. These sketches are all nonsense.
Men who do these things do not write about them; and men who write
about them never did them.
There is yet another cause which increases the difficulty of
describing undergraduate life with truth.
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