Part 16

At the outset the uninitiated must prepare to have some of their favourite theories rudely shattered. We are in the habit of assuming that a quadrangle is one of the essential features of a college. It is almost amazing to learn that the quadrangular arrangement was adopted very gradually.

Again, we are often assured that the colleges at the two older universities are the only relics of the monastic system, and are themselves monastic in their origin. A greater fallacy could hardly be propounded. It would be nearer the truth to say that the founding of the colleges was at once a protest against the monasteries and an attempt to supersede them.

More startling still is the fact that a college did not at first necessarily imply that there was a chapel attached. So far from this being the case, it is certain that Peterhouse, the oldest college in Cambridge, never had a chapel till the present building was consecrated in 1632. It was with great difficulty that the Countess of Pembroke in 1366 was allowed to build a chapel within the precincts of her new college; and, so far from these convenient adjuncts to a collegiate establishment having been considered an essential in early times, no less than eight of the college chapels at Cambridge and four at Oxford date from a time after the Reformation. In the fourteenth century and later the young scholars, as a rule, attended their parish church. Sometimes the college added on an aisle for the accommodation of its members; sometimes it obtained a licence to use a room in which Divine Service might be conducted for a time; once the founder of a college erected a collegiate quire in the middle of the parish church, a kind of gigantic pew, for the accommodation of his scholars. Downing College has never had a chapel to the present hour.

Of all the developments, however, in the college idea, none has been more remarkable than that of the master's lodge. In the fourteenth century the master of a college was but primits inter pares, and the distance between him and his fellows or scholars was less than that which exists now between the Commanding officer of a regiment in barracks and his brother officers. The master had no sinecure; the discipline of the place depended upon him almost entirely, for in those days the monarchial idea was in the ascendant; the king was a real king, the bishop a real bishop, the master a real master. Everything was referred to him, everything originated with him, everything was controlled by him. But as for the accommodation assigned to him in the early colleges, it was very inferior indeed to that which every graduate at Trinity or St. John's expects to find in our time. The Provost of Oriel in 1329 was permitted by the statutes to dine apart if he pleased, and to reside outside the precincts of the college if he chose to provide for himself another residence; but this was clearly an exceptional case, for the master was at this time the actual founder of the college, and Adam de Brune might be presumed to know what was good for his successors in the office for which he himself had made provision. But for generations the master enjoyed no more than a couple of chambers at the most, and it was not till the sixteenth century that an official residence was provided, and then such residence consisted only of lodgings a little more spacious and convenient than those of any of the fellows, and in no case separated from the main buildings of the college. Even when masters of colleges began to marry (and the earliest instance of this seems to have been Dr. Heynes, Master of Queens' College, in 1529), it was long before the master's wife was so far recognized as to be received within the precincts; and as late as 1576, when the fellows of King's complained of their provost's wife being seen within the college, Dr. Goad replied that she had not been twice in the college "Quad" in her life, as far as he knew. When the great break-up came in the next century, then the establishment of the master demanded increased accommodation for his family, and the master's lodge began to grow slowly, until university architects of the nineteenth century displayed their exalted sense of what was due to the dignity of a "head of a house" by erecting two such palaces as the lodges of Pembroke and St. John's Colleges; for the glorification of the artist, it may be, but whether for the advantage of the college, the university, or the occupants of the aforesaid lodges may be reasonably doubted. One master's lodge in Cambridge is at this moment let, presumably for the benefit of the head of the house, whose official residence it is; and, if things go on as they are tending, the day may come--who knows how soon?--when Cambridge shall at last be able to boast of a really good hotel, "in a central and very desirable situation, commanding a delightful view of"--what shall we say?--"fitted up with every convenience, and formerly known as the Master's Lodge of St. Boniface College."

I am inclined to think that there is such a thing as architecture run to seed.

* * * * * * *

If any one imagines that it would be possible within the limits of a single essay to follow Mr. Clark through the exhaustive processes of investigation which he has pursued, or to summarize at all satisfactorily the results which he has arrived at and set forth in so masterly a manner, let such an one spend only a single hour in turning over the leaves of these splendid volumes. The exquisite illustrations alone (which count by hundreds), and the elaborate maps and ground-plans, are full of surprises; they speak with an eloquence of their own to such as have eyes to see and in whom there is a spark of imagination to enlighten the paths along which their accomplished guide can lead them. Do you think that such a work as this tells us no more than how the stone walls rose and the buildings assumed their present form, and court was added to court, and libraries and museums and lecture-rooms and all the rest of them were constructed by the professional gentlemen who drew the plans, and piled up by the masons and the bricklayers? Then you will do it a grievous injustice.

Horizons rich with trembling spires On violet twilights, lose their fires

if there be no human element to cast a living glow upon them. The authors of this architectural history knew better than any one else that they were dealing with the architectural history of a great national institution. They knew that these walls--some so old and crumbling, some so new and hard and unlovely--bear upon them the marks of all the changes and all the progress, the conflicts and the questionings, the birth-throes of the new childhood, the fading out of a perplexed senility, the earnest grappling with error, the painful searching after truth which the spirit of man has gone through in these homes of intellectual activity during the lapse of six hundred years. Do you wish to understand the buildings? Then you must study the life; and the converse is true also. Either explains, and is the indispensable interpreter of, the obscurities of the other. Mr. Clark could not have produced this exhaustive history of university and collegiate fabrics if he had not gained a profound insight into the student life of Cambridge from the earliest times.

How did they live, these young scholars in the early days? Through what whimsical vagaries have the fashions changed? As the centuries have rolled on, have the youth of England become better or wiser than their sires? Neither better nor wiser seems to be the answer. The outer man is not as he was; the real moral and intellectual stamina of Englishmen has at least suffered no deterioration. Our habits are different; our dress, our language, the look of our homes, are all other than they were. Our wants have multiplied immensely; the amount of physical discomfort and downright suffering which our ancestors were called upon to endure doubtless sent up the death-rate to a figure which to us would be appalling. We start from a standing-point in moral, social, and intellectual convictions so far in advance of that of our forefathers that they could not conceive of such a terminus ad quern as serves us as a terminus a quo. In other words, we begin at a point in the line which they never conceived could be reached. Yet the more closely we look into the past the more do we see how history in all essentials is for ever repeating herself--impossible though it may be to put the clock back for ourselves.

How significant is the fact that through all these centuries of building and planting, of pulling down and raising up, the makers of Cambridge--that is, the men who achieved for her her place in the realms of thought, inquiry, and discovery--never seemed to have thought that Death could play much havoc among them. In the old monasteries there was always a cemetery. The canon or the monk who passed into the cloister came there once for all--to live and die within the walls of his monastery. The scholar who came to get all the learning he could, and who settled in some humble hostel or some unpretentious college of the old type, came to spend some few years there, but no more. He came to live his life, and when there was no more life in him--no more youthful force, activity, and enthusiasm-there was no place for him at Cambridge, There they wanted men of vigour and energy, not past their work. Die? No! as long as he was verily alive it was well that he should stay and toil. When he was a dying man, better he should go. No college at Cambridge had a cemetery. Let the dead bury their dead!

Indeed, it must have been hard for the weak and sickly--the lad of feeble frame and delicate organization-to stand that rugged old Cambridge life. "College rooms" in our time suggest something like the ne plus ultra of aesthetic elegance and luxury. We find it hard to realize the fact that for centuries a Fellow of a college was expected to have two or three chamber fellows who shared his bedroom with him; and that his study was no bigger than a study at the schoolhouse at Rugby, and very much smaller than a fourth-form boy enjoys at many a more modern public school. At the hostels, which were of course much more crowded than the colleges were, a separate bed was the privilege of the few. What must have been the condition of those semi-licensed receptacles for the poorer students in the early times, when we find as late as 1598 that in St. John's College there were no less than seventy members of the college "accommodated" (!) in twenty-eight chambers. This was before the second court at St. John's was even begun, and yet these seventy Johnians were living in luxury when compared with their predecessors of two hundred years before.

"In the early colleges the windows of the chambers were unglazed and closed with wooden shutters; their floors were either of clay or tiled; and their halls and ceilings were unplastered." We have express testimony that at Corpus Christi College not even the master's lodge had been glazed and panelled before the beginning of the sixteenth century. By an inventory which Mr. Clark has printed, dated July 3, 1451, it appears that in the master's lodge at King's College, "the wealthiest lodge of the university, there was then only one chair; that the tables were supported on trestles; and that those who used them sat on forms or stools." As for the chambers and studies, not only were they destitute of anything in the shape of stoves or fire-places, but their walls were absolutely bare, while in the upper chambers there were not even lath and plaster between the tiles and the beams of the roof. It is to us almost incomprehensible how vitality could have been kept up in the winter under such conditions. The cold must have been dreadful.

At four only of five earlier and smaller colleges was there any fire-place in the hall, and the barbaric braziers in which first charcoal and afterwards coke was burned, were actually the only heating apparatus known in the immense halls of Trinity and St. John's till within the last twenty years! The magnificent hall of Trinity actually retained till 1866 the brazier which had been in use for upwards of 160 years! The clumsy attempt to fight the bitter cold which was usual in our mediaeval churches and manor-houses, by strewing the stone floor with rushes, was carried out too in the college halls, and latterly, instead of rushes, sawdust was used, at least in Trinity. "It was laid on the floor at the beginning of winter, and turned over with a rake as often as the upper surface became dirty. Finally, when warm weather set in, it was removed, the colour of charcoal!" Well might the late Professor Sedgwick, in commenting upon this practice, exclaim; "The dirt was sublime in former years!"

Yet in the earliest times a lavatory was provided in the college halls, and a towel of eight or nine yards long, which at Trinity, as late as 1612, was hung on a hook--the refinement of hanging a towel on a roller does not appear to have been thought of. These towels were for use before dinner; at dinner the fellows of Christ's in 1575 were provided with table-napkins. If they wiped their fingers on the table-cloth they were fined a penny. The temptation must have been strong at times, for no forks were in use--not even the iron-pronged forks which some of us remember in hall in our young days. The oldest piece of furniture in the college halls were the stocks, set up for the correction of refractory undergraduates who should have been guilty of the enormity of bathing in the Cam or other grave offence and scandal.

Of the amusements indulged in by the undergraduates at Cambridge in the early times we hear but little. The probability seems to be that they had to manage for themselves as best they could. Gradually the bowling-green, the butts for archery, and the tennis-courts were provided by several colleges. Tennis seems to have been the rage at Cambridge during the sixteenth century, and the tennis-courts became sources of revenue in the Elizabethan time, It is clear that by this time the old severity and rigour had become relaxed, the colleges had become richer, and in another hundred years the combination-rooms had become comfortable and almost luxurious before the seventeenth century closed. In Queens' College in 1693 there were actually flowers in the combination-room, and at Christ's College in 1716 a card-table was provided "in the fellows' parlour."

It may be said that the immense expansion of the University, as distinct from a mere aggregate of colleges, dates from the beginning of the eighteenth century. Up to that time the colleges had for four hundred years been steadily growing into privileged corporations, whose wealth and power had been too great for the Commonwealth, of which they were in idea only members. With the Georgian era the new movement began. When Bishop Moore's vast library was presented by George II. to the University, when the first stone of the Senate House was laid in 1722, when the University arranged for the reception of Dr. Woodward's fossils in 1735--these events marked the beginning of a new order of things. Whatever confusion may have existed in the minds of our grandfathers, who had a vague conviction that the University meant no more than the aggregate of the colleges, and a suspicion that what the University was the colleges made it--we, in our generation, have been assured that the colleges owed their existence to the sufferance of universities; or, if that be putting the case too strongly, that the colleges exist for the sake of the University. The new view has at any rate gained the approval of the Legislature; the University is in no danger of being predominated over by the colleges in the immediate future; the danger rather is lest the colleges should be starved or at least impoverished for the glorification of the University, the college-fellowships being shorn of their dignity and emoluments in order to ensure that the University officials shall become the exclusive holders of the richest prizes.

For good or evil we have entered upon a new career. The old Cambridge, which some of us knew in our youth, with its solemn ecclesiasticism, its quaint archaisms, its fantastic anomalies, its fascinating picturesqueness, its dear old barbaric unintelligible odds and ends that met us at every turn in street and chapel and hall--that old Cambridge is as dead as the Egypt of the Pharaohs. The new Cambridge, with its bustling syndics for ever on the move--its bewildering complexity of examinations--its "sweet girl-graduates with their golden hair," its delightful "notion of grand and capacious and massive amusement," its glorious wealth of collections and appliances and facilities for every kind of study and research, is alive with an exuberant vitality.

What form will the new life assume in the time that is coming? Will the Cambridge of six centuries hence be able to produce such a record of her past as that which she can boast of now? Among her alumni of the future will there arise again any such loyal and enlightened historians as these who have raised to themselves and their University so noble a monument?

VII.

THE PROPHET OF WALNUT-TREE YARD.

"Did you ever hear tell of Lodowick Muggleton?"

"Not I."

"That is strange. Know then that he was the founder of our poor society, and after him we are frequently, though oppro-briously, termed Muggletonians, for we are Christians. Here is his book; I will sell it cheap." --LAVENGRO.

Scrupulous veracity was hardly a characteristic of the late George Borrow. A man of great memory, he was also a man of fertile imagination, and where the two are found in excess, side by side in the same intellect, they are apt to twine round one another, so to speak, and the product is something which the matter-of-fact man abhors. I do not doubt that Borrow did meet a Muggletonian at Bristol--I think it was there--some sixty years ago; but I am pretty sure that he knew very little indeed about the Muggletonians, and that he could have hardly opened the book which he implies that he purchased, and which I am almost certain he never read. I have a strong suspicion that he very much antedated the incident which he narrates, for I myself knew an old secondhand bookseller in a back street at Bristol, who was a Muggletonian, with whom I made acquaintance when a lad. He was a slow-speaking, wary, suspicious, and dirty old man, and as I had not sufficient funds to be a good customer, I daresay he did not think it worth his while to be communicative, but he told me one day that he had been one of the original subscribers to the Spiritual Epistles which were reprinted in quarto years before I was born; though, as he confessed, his name does not appear on the list of names printed at the end of the preface, which list, he assured me, was very incomplete, as he from his own knowledge could certify. This old man would have been very old indeed if he had been old when Borrow was a youth; and yet, as I say, I suspect he was the very man of whom mention is made in the extract I have given above. He was the only Muggletonian I ever knew, but he certainly was not the last of his sect, and I should not be at all surprised to hear that it is a flourishing sect still, and that it still has its assemblies, its votaries, its literature, and its propaganda. It is true that the name Muggletonians does not appear in that astonishing list of religious denominations which the Registrar-General was enabled to compile for the year 1883; but that proves little, inasmuch as the closer a religious corporation is, the more exclusive, the less does it care to register the name of the building in which it may choose to assemble for worship; and I observe that the Southcotians are no longer to be found upon that list, though I happen to know that they are not extinct yet, nor has their faith in their prophetess and her mission quite died out from the face of the earth.

This is certain, that as late as 1820 an edition of the Spiritual Epistles, which must have cost at that time two or three hundred pounds to print, was subscribed for, and that nine years afterwards appeared Divine Songs of the Muggletonians--they were not ashamed of the name--printed also by subscription, filling 621 pages, and showing pretty clearly that there had of late been a strange revival of the sect: an outburst of new fervour having somehow been awakened, and an irrepressible passion for writing "Songs" having displayed itself, which had not been without its effect in resuscitating dormant enthusiasm. The vagaries of the human mind in what, for want of any better designation, we call "religious belief" have always had for me a peculiar fascination, as they have for others. Epiphanius, whose name is and used to be a terror to her Royal Highness in days gone by, when I insisted upon reading to her about the peculiar people who made it a matter of faith to eat bread and cheese at the Eucharist--Epiphanius is to me positively entertaining, and Pagitt's Heresiography is none the less instructive because it is a vulgar catch-penny little book, made up, like Peter Pindar's razors, to sell. To me it seems that to dismiss even the wildest and foolishest opinion which makes way, as if it were a mere absurdity that does not deserve notice, is to show a certain flippancy and shallowness. Do not all thoughtful men pass through certain stages of intellectual growth, and are not the convictions of our youth held very differently from those which we find ourselves swayed by in our later years? The beliefs which the multitude take up with are such as the untrained and the half-trained are always captivated by, whether individually or in the mass. There are limits to our powers of assimilation according as our development has been arrested or is still going on, and he who hopes to understand the course of human affairs or to make any intelligent forecast of what is coming can never afford to neglect the study of morbid appetites or morbid anatomy in the domain of mind.

There is a strong family likeness among all fanatics; and this is characteristic of them all, that they are profusely communicative and absolutely honest. Prophets have no secrets, no reserve, no doubts, they are always true men. John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton are no exception to the general rule. We can follow their movements pretty closely for some years. The book of The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit furnishes us with quite as much as we want to know about the sayings and doings of the grotesque pair and their early extravagances; and Muggleton's letters cover a period of forty years, during all which time he was going in and out among the artisans and small traders of the city, obstinately asserting himself in season and out of season, and leaving behind him in his eccentric chronicle such a minute and faithful picture of London life among the middle--the lower middle--class during the last half of the seventeenth century as is to be found nowhere else. The reader must be prepared for the most startling freaks of language, for very vulgar profanity, the more amazing because so manifestly unintended. When people break away from all the traditions of the past and surrender themselves to absolute anarchy in morals and religion the old terminology ceases to be employed in the old way, ceases indeed to have any meaning. The prophet or the philosopher who sets himself to invent a new theory of the universe or a new creed for his followers to embrace, can hardly avoid shocking and horrifying those who are content to use words as their forefathers did and attach to these words the same sort of sacredness that the Hebrews did to the Divine name. There is no need to do more than allude to this side of the Muggletonian writing. What we are concerned with is the story of the prophet's life, which has been told with the utmost frankness and simplicity; a more unvarnished tale it would be difficult to find, or one which bears more the stamp of truth upon its every line.

The Acts of the Witnesses of the Spirit is a posthumous work written by Muggleton when he was very old, and left behind him in manuscript with directions that it should be published after his death. It is a quarto volume of 180 pages and is a book of some rarity. It was published in 1699, with an epistle dedicatory to all true Christian people, apparently written by Thomas Tomkinson, one of the chosen seed. After preparing us for what is coming by dwelling upon the wonderful stories in the Old Testament and the New, Muggleton plunges into his subject by giving us a brief account of his own and his brother prophet's parentage and early biography. Let the reader understand that here beginneth the third chapter of The Acts of the Witnesses at the third verse:--