Oxford | Page 3

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This etext was prepared by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. Ltd. edition.

OXFORD
by Andrew Lang
PREFACE

These papers do not profess even to sketch the outlines of a history of
Oxford. They are merely records of the impressions made by this or
that aspect of the life of the University as it has been in different ages.
Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and white, with the pen
or the etcher's needle. On a wild winter or late autumn day (such as
Father Faber has made permanent in a beautiful poem) the sunshine
fleets along the plain, revealing towers, and floods, and trees, in a
gleam of watery light, and leaving them once more in shadow. The
melancholy mist creeps over the city, the damp soaks into the heart of
everything, and such suicidal weather ensues as has been described,
once for all, by the author of John-a-Dreams. How different Oxford
looks when the road to Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat
seems almost tropical, and by the drowsy banks of the Cherwell you
might almost expect some shy southern water-beast to come crashing
through the reeds! And such a day, again, is unlike the bright weather
of late September, when all the gold and scarlet of Bagley Wood are
concentrated in the leaves that cover the walls of Magdalen with an
imperial vesture.
Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle of
Indolence, vary no less than do the shifting aspects of her scenery.
Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existence have alternated with
days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy, of resignation. Our
mental pictures of the place are tinged by many moods, as the
landscape is beheld in shower and sunshine, in frost, and in the
colourless drizzling weather. Oxford, that once seemed a pleasant porch
and entrance into life, may become a dingy ante-room, where we kick
our heels with other weary, waiting people. At last, if men linger there
too late, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final condition of the
loiterer to take "this for a hermitage." It is well to leave the enchantress
betimes, and to carry away few but kind recollections. If there be any

who think and speak ungently of their Alma Mater, it is because they
have outstayed their natural "welcome while," or because they have
resisted her genial influence in youth.

CHAPTER I
--THE TOWN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY

Most old towns are like palimpsests, parchments which have been
scrawled over again and again by their successive owners. Oxford,
though not one of the most ancient of English cities, shows, more
legibly than the rest, the handwriting, as it were, of many generations.
The convenient site among the interlacing waters of the Isis and