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"As to myself," said he, in his letter written in old age to Anthony Wood, who had inquired whether he was an Oxonian graduate, "my faults are no disgrace to a university, for I was of none; I have but little but what I had out of books and inconsiderable help of country divines.
Whether this be owing more to Pride, than a want of an Easy, Free, and polite Conversation, I do not take upon me to Determine; but I believe it must be generally Imputed to the Former, as it cannot be suppos'd, that either of the Universities, are at any time without a polite Converse; tho' I take leave to observe, that there is a great deal of difference between a finish'd Oxonian, and a sprightly Senator.
He despised foreigners, unless they were Catholic saints, could not bear the sight of the tricolor, and hated all the 'ideas of the Revolution. His dictum, 'Luther is dead, but Hildebrand and Loyola are alive, throws a flood of light upon the contents of his mind, as does the truly British prejudice which caused him to be horrified at the sight of ships coaling at Malta 'on a holy day. His range of ideas was so much restricted that Bremond, a sincere admirer, says that his imagination lived on 'une poignée de souvenirs d'enfant. How tragic was the fate which caught this loyal Englishman and more than loyal Oxonian in the meshes of a cosmopolitan institution in which England counted for little and Oxford for nothing at all!
All this with the utmost placidity. Then, as if to extinguish all doubt, Julia flung them a heavenly smile; she had been furtively watching them all the time, and she saw they were talking about her. The other Oxonian squeezed up to Hardie. "Do you know the beauty? She smiled your way.
A young Oxonian, who had for some time been watching the city in the sunset, from a rising ground in its vicinity, lost, as it would seem, in meditation, suddenly rose, and looking at his watch, as if remindful of some engagement, hastened his return at a rapid pace.
They were, indeed, without a meaning, as without an excuse. The irksomeness of a cloistered life repeatedly tempted me to wander; but my chief pleasure was that of travelling; and I was too young and bashful to enjoy, like a Manly Oxonian in Town, the pleasures of London.
The young Oxonian, on the contrary, had led out one of his maiden aunts, on whom the rogue played a thousand little knaveries with impunity: he was full of practical jokes, and his delight was to tease his aunts and cousins, yet, like all madcap youngsters, he was a universal favorite among the women.
Such men, it is evident, were not likely to see the Revolution in the light in which it appeared to an Oxonian nonjuror. On the other hand they were not, like the aboriginal Irish, urged to take arms by impatience of Saxon domination. To such domination the Scottish Celt had never been subjected. He occupied his own wild and sterile region, and followed his own national usages.
We already begin to fear, that we have indulged too much in extracts, and we must save some room for Persuasion, or we could not resist giving a specimen of John Thorpe, with his horse that cannot go less than 10 miles an hour, his refusal to drive his sister "because she has such thick ankles," and his sober consumption of five pints of port a day; altogether the best portrait of a species, which, though almost extinct, cannot yet be quite classed among the Palaeotheria, the Bang-up Oxonian.
The unconquerable unconventionality of his character and his literary tastes had shown themselves while he was still a schoolboy, and in the last year of his Etonian and the first of his Oxonian residence he published two of the most absurd novels of the most absurd novel kind that ever appeared, Zastrozzi and St. Irvyne, imitations of Monk Lewis.
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