Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/194

160 Boat-racing became a national pastime in Britain. In the multitudinous literature of Oxford, one finds, here and there, allusion, in early days, to poaching in the forest. Merton had a ball court, at the west end of the Chapel, until the Eighteenth Century. One writer of that period speaks of no less than three tennis-courts, together with billiard-tables, nine-pin and skittle-alleys, as "being frequented by the Academical youth." He also alludes to boating, to gunnery, to phaëton-driving, to horsemanship, to tumbling in the hay, to leaping, to wrestling, to playing at quoits, to archery, and to fives. There are ancient rules against bull-baiting and cock-fighting and against the attending of the same. But, nevertheless, G. V. Cox, in his "Recollections of Oxford," tells of a prize fight, in 1824, where an undergraduate Viscount acted as second for one professional combatant, while an undergraduate Baronet held the sponge for another.

The same historian, a delightfully gossipy old gentleman, with a wonderfully prolonged power of recollection, for he begins to recollect in 1789, and he stops recollecting in 1860, says that "in the spring of 1819 appeared a silly sort of anomalous vehicle, called a Velocipede, in which the motion was half-riding and half-walking; it had a run," he says, "but turned out to be no go." The italics