Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/195

161 are his own. "The only gentleman" [italicized] "I ever saw venturning to use one, was a Fellow and Tutor of New College. His name, curiously enough, was Walker [also italicized]. When he dismounted he exclaimed (like the Irishman who took a ride in the bottomless sedan-chair), 'Well, if it were not for the fashion, I would as lieve walk.'"

In 1899 the son, or rather the daughter, of the velocipede, calling herself a bicycle, absolutely infested Oxford, like a plague of locusts. She was "all the go" there was; her inhabitant, in ninety cases out of a hundred, was a young woman, going somewhere, with a handle-bar and an umbrella in one fist, a handle-bar and a book or a parcel in the other; and no man who could get into a fly or on top of a tram-car "would as lieve walk" through High Street or the Cornmarket, if she were in his wake. For she had no hand left to sound her gong; and if she did not run into him or on to him, she made him wish he were armorplated by a sedan-chair!

The Hon. George C. Broderick, in his "Memorials of Merton," says that while there is no inherent impossibility of Roger Bacon having taught, or lectured, at Merton, as tradition hath it, there is no proof of his not having done so!

He is said to have died at the Franciscan