always plentifully imbedded in the soil of University life.
Fellowships were then sold, at Magdalen and New, when they were not
given by favour. Prideaux grumbles (July 28th, 1674) at the laxness
of the Commissioners, who should have exposed this abuse: "In town,
one of their inquirys is whether any of the scholars weare pantaloons
or periwigues, or keep dogs." The great dispute about dogs, which
raged at a later date in University College, had already begun to
disturb dons and undergraduates. The choice language of Oxford
contempt was even then extant, and Prideaux, like Grandison in Daniel
Deronda, spoke curtly of the people whom he did not like as "brutes."
"Pembroke--the fittest colledge in the town for brutes." The
University did not encourage certain "players" who had paid the place
a visit, and the players, in revenge, had gone about the town at
night and broken the windows.

When the journey from London to Oxford is so easily performed, it is
amusing to read of Prideaux's miserable adventures, in the diligence,
between a lady of easy manners, a "pitiful rogue," and two
undergraduates who "sordidly affected debauchery."


"This ill company made me very miserable all the way. Only once I
could not but heartily laugh to see Fincher be sturdyly belaboured by
five or six carmen with whips and prong staves for provoking them
with some of his extravagant frolics."


The "violent affection to vice" in the University, or in the country,
was, of course, the reaction against the godliness of Puritan
captains of horse. Another form of the reaction is discernible in