Page:Terræ-filius- or, the Secret History of the University of Oxford.djvu/38

 innumerable crowd of pectators, who flock'd thither to hear him from all parts, with a merry oration in the Fecennine manner, interpers'd with ecret hitory, raillery, and arcam, as the occaions of the times upply'd him with matter.

If a venerable Head of a college was caught nug a-bed with his neighbour's wife; or haking his elbows on a unday morning; or flattering a prime miniter for a bihoprick; or coaxing his bed-maker's girl out of her maindenhead; the boary old inner might expect to hear of it from our lay-pulpit the next Act. Or if a celebrated toat and a young tudent were een together at midnight under a hady myrtle-tree, billing like two pretty turtle-doves, to him it belong'd, being a poet as well as an orator, to tell the tender tory in a melancholy ditty, adapted to patoral muick.

Something like this jovial olemnity were the famous Saturnalian feats amont the Romans, at which every cullion and skipkennel had liberty to tell his mater his own, as the Britih mobility emphatically tile it. Who, aid one of them, help'd Phillis the chambermaid to make the beds one day, when his lady was a viiting? Or, whoe lady kis'd Damon the butler behind a hoghead of Falernian, when her husband was hunting the boar? Or, who lot five thouand eterces at play, and mortgaged his etate to pay it?—'Twas all water-language at thee times, and no exceptions were to be taken.

I cannot indeed ay, that our Oxford act agrees with the old Roman feats in every particular; for we do not find upon record one intance of any gentleman-lacquey, who was turn'd out of doors upon this account, or met with o much as a broken head for his impertinence. An old manucript, I confes, in the Bodleian library, takes ome notice of one Cladius Snappius, an old Sabine farmer, who