Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/87

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in the exterior and in the interior of the Brazenose of to-day. And Mr. Verdant Green is an established tradition there. The Hall-porter, an unusually intelligent Hall-porter, will show one, for a shilling—well spent—the rooms of the original of Mr. Bouncer, on "No. Eight Staircase, Cloister Quadrangle, in the Hall-passage," which are precisely as Verdant saw and knew them. Mr. Bouncer seems to have been founded on fact; and an undergraduate friend of his, who had far-away recollections of Mr. Bouncer as "sounding his octaves" and as doing other eccentric and comic things, in those very rooms, pointed them out once to the intelligent Hall-porter in question. Mr. Bouncer's famous Letters to the maternal lady whom he affectionately termed " The Mum," are hardly literature; but they are most effective reading; and the rooms on No. Eight Staircase, Cloister Quadrangle, as having been the scene of their composition, can hardly be ignored in the records of the Literary Landmarks of Oxford.

An ancient statue of Cain in combat with Abel, or of Samson slaying a Philistine, which stood in what is called "The Old Quad," as late as Mr. Bouncer's days, and which was never, even at its best, an especially attractive piece of sculpture, was taken down, not long ago, and destroyed, for the reason that it afforded the ingenious undergrad-