associated with Oriel; and as a part of Oriel now, its graduates and undergraduates are here treated.
The name of Erasmus is associated by tradition with St. Mary's Hall, but by tradition only. There is another tradition to the effect that when asked by the authorities to sign the necessary "Thirty Nine Articles," Theodore Hook expressed his entire willingness to sign Forty Articles, if it would do any good! No doubt Hook said this, under the circumstances; although it was not original with him; and he put it, later, into the mouth of one of his own creations. He was more than of age when he entered St. Mary's Hall as an undergraduate, and he was a post-graduate in the art of horse-play and practical joking. He had already perpetrated, among many other similar feats, the immortal Berner Street Hoax; and naturally he was an impossible factor in any college. St. Mary's at that period had no very high standard of rigidity of morals, or of temperance in living. It has been described as the most "gentlemanly" residence in Oxford; a "gentleman " being then defined as a man who did nothing, who spent his own and his father's money with brilliant indifference to consequences, and who applied his mind solely to the indulgence of frolic of all kinds. But even "Skimmery"
