VI OXFORD LIFE
1853-1855
" When I recall my youth, what I was then,
What I am now, ye beloved ones all : It seems as though these were the living men, And we the coloured shadows on the wail."
MlLNES.
"You are not bound to follow vulgar examples, nor to succeed — Fais ce que dois." — AMIEL.
" Study as if you would never reach the point you seek to attain, and hold on to all you have learnt as if you feared to lose it."
— CONFUCIUS.
DURING a visit at Lime, Arthur Stanley had spent a whole evening in entertaining us with a most delightful description of the adventures of Messrs. Black, White, Blue, Green, and Yellow 011 their first arrival at Oxford, so that I was not wholly unprepared for what I had to encounter there. His kindness had also procured me a welcome from his most eccentric, but kind-hearted, friend Jowett, then a Fellow and tutor of Balliol,1 which prevented any forlornness I might otherwise have experienced; but indeed so great was my longing for change and a freer life, that I had no need of consolation, even under the
1 Afterwards (1878) Master of Balliol. He died October 1893.s on the Edmonton levels. We went through Chingford churchyard, and then through the muddy forest to the old Hunting Lodge, which I had never reached before, and felt to be the one tiling I must see. It is a small, gabled, weather-beaten house, near a group of magnificent oaks on a hill-top. Inside is_ the staircase up which Elizabeth rode to dinner in her first ecstasy over the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Afterwards, I suppose because she found it easy, she had a block put at the top from which she mounted to ride down again. To prove the tradition, a pony is now kept in the house, on which you may ride up and down the stairs inn-r \vav> if hail a. very itawhultsntnt inthiem-r. ami sliai, tin* habit ••!'n.i! !M' i-^«HH|; and hr has t|nt lilll»' \uu-^< hLr u».**