Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 101.djvu/73

Rh to explain in a footnote, as being the resultant of Port wine, mulled with roasted lemons—just as Claret similarly embellished is yclept Cardinal; and Burgundy, Pope);—a fox-hunting raid to Newnham Harcourt, viâ roads all alive withand the gallop, at Parson Hooker's "hark, hark!" to the music of hound and horn,—pell-mell, priest and layman, squire, curate, bachelor, and freshman—away over bush and furze, bog and briar, hedge and stile, ditch and double-ditch—"tramp, tramp across the stubble; splashy splash across the dubble;"—boating engagements at Mother Davies's;—dunning blockades against the "sported oak;"—scuffles with proctors and bull-dogs;—a duel in the meadows, and a lodgement in the Castle;—such are some of the topics ungrudgingly set forth in Reginald's Oxford career. Little enough there is to glorify the ideal Oxford of scholarship, and earnest study, and gracious refinement—to echo Warton's apostrophe,The hero's university course is only an episode; but to it the leading interest of the work attaches, and upon it the novelist has expended the best of his power and pains. Reginald's subsequent experiences in London and elsewhere are dull, and loosely put together. The table-talk—wine-table, breakfast-table, supper-table, or what not—so profusely detailed, is too frequently of the veriest weak tea-table sort: weak enough, mawkish and vapid enough, to make one almost incredulous of its coming from the trenchant pen of the editor of the Quarterly, and the manly,