Transcribed from the 1922 Seeley, Service & Co. edition byDavid Price,

OXFORD

BY
ANDREW LANG
SOMETIME FELLOW
OF MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR
BY
GEORGE F. CARLINE
R.B.A.

LONDON
SEELEY, SERVICE & CO LTD
38 GREET RUSSELL STREET
1922

TO
A. M. LEE

PREFACE

These papers do not profess even tosketch the outlines of a history of Oxford.  They are merelyrecords of the impressions made by this or that aspect of thelife of the University as it has been in different ages. Oxford is not an easy place to design in black and white, withthe pen or the etcher’s needle.  On a wild winter orlate autumn day (such as Father Faber has made permanent in abeautiful poem) the sunshine fleets along the plain, revealingtowers, and floods, and trees, in a gleam of watery light, andleaving them once more in shadow.  The melancholy mistcreeps over the city, the damp soaks into the heart ofeverything, and such suicidal weather ensues as has beendescribed, once for all, by the author ofJohn-a-Dreams.  How different Oxford looks when theroad to Cowley Marsh is dumb with dust, when the heat seemsalmost tropical, and by the drowsy banks of the Cherwell youmight almost expect some shy southern water-beast to comecrashing through the reeds!  And such a day, again, isunlike the bright weather of late September, when all the goldand scarlet of Bagley Wood are concentrated in the leaves thatcover the walls of Magdalen with an imperial vesture.

Our memories of Oxford, if we have long made her a Castle ofIndolence, vary no less than do the shifting aspects of herscenery.  Days of spring and of mere pleasure in existencehave alternated with days of gloom and loneliness, of melancholy,of resignation.  Our mental pictures of the place are tingedby 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, maybecome a dingy ante-room, where we kick our heels with otherweary, waiting people.  At last, if men linger there toolate, Oxford grows a prison, and it is the final condition of theloiterer to take ‘this for a hermitage.’  It iswell to leave the enchantress betimes, and to carry away few butkind recollections.  If there be any who think and speakungently of their Alma Mater, it is because they haveoutstayed their natural ‘welcome while,’ or becausethey have resisted her genial influence in youth.

CONTENTS