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 the Cherwell has commended itself to men in one age after
another. Each generation has used it for its own purpose: for war,
for trade, for learning, for religion; and war, trade, religion, and
learning have left on Oxford their peculiar marks. No set of its
occupants, before the last two centuries began, was very eager to