Guy Livingstone | Page 6

fiery liquors miscalled the juice of the grape,
villainous enough to make the patriarch that planted the vine stir
remorsefully in his grave under Ararat--each man all the while talking
"shop," _à l'outrance_. The skeleton of ennui sat at these dreary feasts;
and it was not even crowned with roses. I often used to wonder what
the majority of my contemporaries conversed about, when in the bosom
of their families, during the "long." They couldn't always have been
inflicting Oxford on their miserable relatives; the weakest of human
natures would have revolted against such tyranny; and yet the horizon
of their ideas seemed as utterly bounded by Bagley and Headington
Hill as if the great ocean-stream had flowed outside those limits. Some
adventurous spirits, it is true, stretched away as far as Woodstock and
Abingdon, but I doubt if they returned much improved by the grand
tour.
One of their most remarkable characteristics was the invincible terror
and repugnance that they appeared to entertain to the society of women
of their own class. When the visitation was inevitable, it is impossible

to describe the great horror that fell on these unfortunate boys. The
feeling of Zanoni's pupil, as the Watcher on the Threshold came
floating and creeping toward him, was nothing to it.
For example, at Commemoration--to which festival "lions" from all
quarters of the earth resorted in vast droves--when one of this class was
hard hit by the charms of some fair stranger, he never thought of
expressing his admiration otherwise than by piteous looks, directed at
her from an immense distance, out of shot for an opera-glass; when in
her immediate vicinity his motto was that of the Breton baron--mourir
muet. Claret-cup flowed and Champagne sparkled, powerless to raise
him to the audacity of an avowal. Under the woods of Nuneham, in the
gardens of Blenheim, amid the crowd of the Commemoration ball, the
same deep river of diffidence flowed between him and his happiness.
My own idea is that, after all was over, the silent ones, like Jacques'
stricken deer, used to "go weep" over chances lost and opportunities
neglected. With waitresses at wayside inns, et id genus omne, they were
tolerably self-possessed and reliant; though even there "a thousand
might well be stopped by three," and I would have backed an intelligent
barmaid against the field at odds; indeed, I think I have seen a security
nearly allied to contempt on the fine features of a certain "lone _star_"
as she parried--so easily!--the compliments and repartees of a dozen
assailants at once, accounted, in their own quadrangles, Millamours of
the darkest dye.
Guy accounted for this unfortunate peculiarity by saying that a cigar in
the mouth was the normal state of many of these men; so that, when
circumstances debarred them from the Havana courage, they lost all
presence of mind, and, being unable to retreat under cover of the smoke,
lapsed instantly into a sullen despair, suffering themselves to be shot
down unresistingly. Perhaps some future philosopher will favor us with
a better solution to this important problem in physics; I know of none.
After all, the reading men did best, though we did not think so then,
when we saw them creeping into morning chapel jaded and heavy-eyed,
after a debauch over Herodotus or the Stagyrite. They had a purpose in
view, at all events, and, I believe, were placidly content during the

progress of its attainment--in the seventh heaven when their hopes were
crowned by a First, or even a Second. True; the pace was too good for
some of the half-bred ones, and such as could not stand the training,
who departed, to fade away rapidly in the old house at home, or to pine,
slowly, but very surely, in remote curacies.
Some of these, I fancy, must have sympathized with Madame de Staël's
consumptive niece, who answered to the question, "Why she was
weeping all alone?" "_Je me regrette._" When, resting in their daily
walk, shortened till it became a toil to reach the shady seat under the
elms at the garden's end, they watched the stalwart plowmen and
drovers go striding by, without a trouble behind their tanned foreheads
except the thought that wages might fall a shilling a week, was there no
envy, I wonder, as they looked down on the wan hands lying so listless
across their knees? Would they not have given their First, and their
fellowship in embryo to boot, to have had the morning appetite of Tom
Chauntrell, the horse-breaker, after twelve pipes overnight, with gin
and water to match, or to have been able, like Joe Springett, the under
keeper, to breast the steepest brae in Cumberland with never a sob or a
painful breath? Did they never murmur while thinking how brightly the
blade might