Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/186

152 help thinking that there was some little shrinkage in that string of Dr. Holmes's, during his passage over the Atlantic, or that his own giant elm had held its breath and drawn itself in at his embrace.

It is only just to Oxford and to Magdalen to say, in this connection, that G. V. Cox, in his "Recollections of Oxford," states that he recollected the collapse of the famous " Magdalen oak," which was twenty-one feet nine inches in girth, which stood at the entrance of what were then commonly called "Magdalen Water Walks," and which, in the middle of the night, accompanied by a violent rushing noise, fell down, literally of old age, in 1789. It was certainly a giant in years, and in bulk; it is believed to have antedated the College; and it is greatly to be regretted that it did not wait a century longer, that it might have given the Autocrat, the Poet, the Guardian Angel, and the Professor, a chance to have further stretched his string.

To the Max Muller house on High Street went, once for dinner, bed, and breakfast, during the Long Vacation, Mr. Tennyson. He seems to have been a little trying to his hostess, for he did not like the sauce on the salmon at dinner, and he said so frankly; while he declared, at breakfast, that "mutton chops were the staple of every bad inn