Literary Landmarks of Oxford/Trinity
TRINITY
Trinity College, dedicated in 1554 "To the Holy and Undivided Trinity," occupies the site, and some fragments of the buildings, of Durham College, a much older institution, which was founded toward the end of the Thirteenth Century for the students of the Benedictine Monastery of Durham.
The original cost of the beautiful Lime Walk of Trinity, planted during the opening years of the Eighteenth Century, was, we are told, nine pounds sterling! For that sum, in dollars at Princeton, New Jersey, and in the beginning of the Twentieth Century, one can plant a short, consumptive, hemlock hedge, which will live, if it is lucky, not two centuries, but a couple of weeks, without rain!
Tradition says that Richard de Bury was a student of the ancient Durham at Oxford; but the tradition is based upon another tradition to the effect that de Bury, after leaving Oxford, became a Benedictine Monk! He had, most certainly, something to do with Oxford; and to Oxford, unquestionably, he intended to bequeath his great and famous library. But his books were sold and scattered after his death; and only two books of the collection are now known to exist, in all the book-loving world. One volume is in the Library of the British Museum, and his copy of "Anselm" is, where by rights it should be, preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Thomas Allen, Mathematician, Philosopher, and Antiquary, was a Scholar of Trinity in 1561, and a Fellow in 1565; but about 1570 he went to Gloucester Hall, afterwards Worcester College, where the rest of his life was spent. John Denham, Poet, went, according to Wood, full ripe for the University, to Trinity in 1631; but being looked upon by his contemporaries and his seniors as "a slow and dreamy young man, given more to cards and to dice than to study, his seniors and contemporaries could never in the least imagine, at that time, that he would be able to enrich the world with his fancy, or by the issue of his brain, as he afterwards did. He continued about three years at the College, and then to London."
"Honest "or "Worthy" John Aubrey, as his contemporaries liked to call him, was emphatically an Oxford man, although his career as an undergraduate at Trinity was short. He entered as a Gentleman Commoner in 1642, when he began at once to turn his attention to antiquarian lore. But the next year, by a curious complication of disasters, including small-pox and Civil War, he was driven from the University, and for many months "he led a sad life in the country."
Nevertheless he came back whenever he could to Oxford, where, according to his own statement, he "enjoyed the greatest felicity of his life"; where, in a way, he collaborated with Wood, and where, in accidental transit to London, he died. He was buried, according to the "Dictionary of National Biography," in the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, at the west end of Broad Street, although, curiously enough, none of the local guidebooks of Oxford record the fact.
There is a portrait of Dr. Johnson at Trinity (supposed to be by Romney), in the Common Room; and in the Library is the copy of the Baskerville "Virgil" which he presented to the College. In this Library he worked diligently gathering material for his Dictionary in the summer of 1769. A fragment of his Diary is in the Bodleian.
Notwithstanding his devotion to his own Nourishing Mother, Pembroke, Johnson confessed once that if he ever went to Oxford to live, he would take up his abode at Trinity, partly moved thereto by his friendship for Bennet Langton, Topham Beauclerk and Thomas Warton, all Trinity men. Of Dr. Warton he was often the guest, at Kettell Hall.
Warton was "Poet Laureate of England," a title of doubtful glory, from 1785 to 1790. He entered Trinity in 1743; he was graduated in 1747; he was a Tutor for some years; he became a Fellow in 1751; he was appointed Professor of Poetry in 1757; Professor of History in 1785; and he was thus, in one way or another, associated with Trinity for the greater part of his life. He wrote verses in his undergraduate days, and he continued to write verses. Wilson ("Christopher North") said once that, "the gods had made Warton poetical but not a poet"; but that he was, nevertheless, the finest fellow who ever breathed. There was very little medium in Wilson's opinions of any of the fellows who breathed. If they were in his eyes not the finest, they were apt to be altogether the reverse.
Someone else has described Warton as a fat little man; with a thick utterance, resembling the gabble of a turkey-cock. His taste for amusements does not seem to have been particularly refined despite his scholarly habits and acquirements and his general studious disposition; and his favorite associates in Oxford, next to Johnson and the Thinkers, and sometimes even in preference to the Thinkers, were the barge-men on the river, with whom, as on equal terms, he was wont in public to walk, and to talk, and to smoke pipes and drink beer, to Johnson's great distress.
Warton was taken ill suddenly in the Commons Room of Trinity one day, and the next day he died. His grave is in the Ante-Chapel of the college he loved, and which was for so many years his home.
Dr. Kettell, who gave his name to Kettell Hall, was President of Trinity in the Seventeenth Century, and somewhat of an eccentric. His pet aversion was long hair, as worn by the students; and Aubrey tells us that the dignified old gentleman was in the habit of carrying "a pair of scissors in his muff, and woe to him that sat on the outside of the table." Once he was known to cut, with a bread-knife, the locks of an unwary, but easily approached, youth; an operation which must have hurt the youth.
An unusually intelligent local guide in Trinity, when asked lately if he knew the rooms which Walter Savage Landor had occupied there, gave a startled look, and confessed that his own name was Walter Savage Landor; and that he was the only Walter Savage Landor of whom he had ever heard as having had any connection with the College since its foundation, nearly four centuries and a half ago!
Mr. J. Wells, author of "Oxford and its Colleges," says that neither here nor anywhere else, in his youth, or at any other time, was Walter Savage Landor "a sweetly reasonable person." The phrase is a happy one!
Landor entered Trinity in 1793, and he retired a year later. He went out of Oxford literally with a bang. An undergraduate of his College, whom Landor did not like, had rooms opposite Lander's, where he had the bad taste, one day, to give a party to other men who were equally disliked by Landor. What was the natural consequence is here set down in Landor's own words: "All the time I was only a spectator, for I should have flushed 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. I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and as the shutters were on the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick, and accordingly I went into my bedroom and fired!"
Who thought it a good trick the poet does not say.
The recipients of the shot did not like the trick, the authorities objected to it, and Landor was forced to go elsewhere to fire his guns.
It will be remembered that, in later life, he fired an obnoxious cook out of his own dining-room window at Florence, Italy, thereby, to his great regret, spoiling a tulip-bed in the garden below!
Apropos of the sudden and unceremonious departure of Landor from Trinity, and of similar unpremeditated exits, it may not be amiss here to give a list, taken quite at random, of the men, since well-known in the World of Letters, who have, voluntarily, or involuntarily, left the University without taking their degrees. Among them were Seldon, Antiquary; Evelyn, Diarist; Davenant, Poet Laureate; Withers, Poet; Gibbon, Historian; Richard Steele, Essayist and Dramatist; Raleigh, Poet and Historian; Theodore Hook, Novelist and Humorist; Calverley, Poet; Beaumont, Poet and Dramatist; Shenstone, Poet; Wycherley, Dramatist; Mitford, Historian; Shirley, Dramatist; Killigrew, Dramatist; Denham, Poet; Aubrey, Antiquary and Biographer; Jeffrey, Essayist and Critic; Herbert of Cherbury, Historian and Philosopher; Shelley, Poet; Kenelm Digby, Natural Philosopher; Otway, Poet; George Colman, the Younger, Dramatist; Thomas Day, Novelist and Philosopher; Philip Sidney, Poet; De Quincey, Essayist, and Samuel Johnson, Poet, Essayist, Biographer and Lexicographer.
John Henry Newman was admitted to Trinity as a Commoner in 1816; he became a Scholar in 1818; and he left Oxford in 1846. He was made an Honorary Fellow in 1878, and he presented a set of his works to the College Library in 1885. "Trinity was dear to me," he said, "and never unkind." But it is as a Fellow of Oriel that he is best remembered in Oxford. His rooms at Trinity, on No. Fourteen Staircase, little changed and still used by students, unfamiliar, no doubt, with the name of Newman, can be inspected upon the payment of the traditional shilling to the obliging Hall-porter.
After Newman's return to Oxford in 1884, he lived at No. 16 St. Giles Street and became a very familiar figure in the University circles. Edward Augustus Freeman, the Historian, gained a Scholarship at Trinity in 1841, was graduated in 1845; was a Fellow until 1847; was several times Examiner in Modern History, and was Regius Professor of Modern History in 1884.
As an undergraduate he was slight in figure, retired in manner, and very shy and silent in the presence of strangers. The entries in his Journal, which he began to keep in Oxford, show that it was his habit to attend chapel twice a day; that almost invariably he went to hear the University sermon at St. Mary's; and that not infrequently he attended the celebration of Holy Communion in that church.
Sometimes he read all night, until two o'clock in the morning; at other times he rose early, even at four o'clock in the winter months; now and then he would fall asleep in his study chair, wake up again to read until four or five, go to bed and to sleep, until the hour of morning chapel. In 1845 he wrote to his affianced wife: "After the requisite cursing and swearing the former as usual directed against his Holiness I knelt down before the President, and was admitted a Probationary Fellow of the noble Society [Trinity]. Since then I have been chiefly engaged in investigating a great problem, as to wherein the duties of a Probationary Fellow consist; for, as far as I have yet done, my chief business is reading newspapers in the Common Room, and drinking ale out of a silver tankard instead of a crockery-ware mug." His Fellowship was vacated by his marriage. His figure at this time, we are told, was still slight; and his old habit of skipping in his walk was not overcome. He had also, it seems, an odd way of flapping the sleeves of his Scholar's gown like wings, which earned for him the nickname, among his fellow Fellows, of "The Bantam Cock."
One John Skinner, who entered Trinity in 1790 has given some accounts of the student life at that college at that time, not differing greatly from the contemporary pictures of the day's doings in sister institutions, but interesting in themselves. He had chapel at eight, breakfast, of tea, rolls, and toast, at eight thirty; read Demosthenes for Kett's lectures until one P.M.; walked or sailed; was shaved and powdered by the college barber, and dined at three. At half past nine he and his friends supped on meat and beer, and sometimes wine; and he closes the evening's history by saying, that "those who could, helped the rest to bed"!