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Then, too, there was a fiend in human shape, an organist, who reeled off some of the grand old hymns with an interpretation of his own, and I longed for the blood of a creature who could play the doxology with an amendment of minor chords which one hears only in a quartet of very young undergraduates.
Vengeance was not his. Down on the road without, not yet looked at but by the steadfast eyes of the Emperors, the last of the undergraduates lay dead; and fleet-footed Zuleika, with her fingers still pressed to her ears, had taken full toll now.
Agnes was apparently so named because it was the largest church in Cambridge. It was of no ancient date, but it was grim, grey, dark admirably suited to an occasion like the present. Under the high roof, lost in a grey cloud, resolving themselves into rows of white, intense faces, sat hundreds of undergraduates.
The bishop was right in saying that his chief occupation must needs be the teaching of elementary mathematics to undergraduates. For any satisfactory results, prolonged observations must be made from twilight to dawn, and such periods of wakefulness were impossible when he must present himself before a class at nine o'clock in the morning. Not that this was necessary each day.
And this mode of dealing with himself and the undergraduates whom he liked, made them like him, but also made them really undervalue his talent, which, as we now see, was what he meant they should do.
He heretically calls the Isis 'a mere moat, the Cherwell 'a ditch. The brilliant dare-devil from Italy despised alike the raw, limitary, reputable, priggish undergraduates and the dull, snuffling, smug-looking, fussy dons. The torpor of academic dulness, indeed, was as irksome to Burton at Oxford as it had been to FitzGerald and Tennyson at Cambridge. After a little coaching from Dr.
If proof were needed both of his reckless contempt for public opinion and the malignancy with which he was misjudged, it could be found in an incident which took place towards the end of 1894. A journal entitled "The Chameleon" was produced by some Oxford undergraduates. Oscar wrote for it a handful of sayings which he called "Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young."
And I may as well get the thing done now. In the summer term of '93 a bolt from the blue flashed down on Oxford. It drove deep; it hurtlingly embedded itself in the soil. Dons and undergraduates stood around, rather pale, discussing nothing but it. Whence came it, this meteorite? From Paris. Its name? Will Rothenstein. Its aim? To do a series of twenty-four portraits in lithograph.
He loved me"... Well, he had called out "Zuleika!" and every one around had heard him. That was something. But how glad all the old women in the world would be to shake their heads and say "Oh, no, my dear, believe me! It wasn't anything to do with HER. I'm told on the very best authority," and so forth, and so on. She knew he had told any number of undergraduates he was going to die for her.
However unsocial in the proper sense of the word, he by no means lacked company in these Oxford days. He knew many, both dons and undergraduates. His long stride, and determined absence of direction, had severely tried all those who could stomach so slow a pastime as walking for the sake of talking. The country knew him though he never knew the country from Abingdon to Bablock Hythe.
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