Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/74



As it was Long Vacation at Oxford, and I could not take rooms at once in Trinity College, where my name had been put down, it was necessary to place me somewhere out of mischief. At the intervention of friends, a certain Doctor Greenhill agreed to lodge and coach me till the opening term. The said doctor had just married a relation of Dr. Arnold, of Rugby, and he had taken his bride to Paris, in order to show her the world and to indulge himself in a little dissecting. Meanwhile I was placed pro tem. with another medical don, Dr. Ogle, and I enjoyed myself in that house. The father was a genial man, and he had nice sons and pretty daughters. As soon as Dr. Greenhill returned to his house in High Street, Oxford, I was taken up there by my father, and was duly consigned to the new tutor. Mr. Du Pré vanished, and was never seen again.

The first sigh of Oxford struck me with a sense of appal. "O Domus antiqua et religiosa," cried Queen Ilizabeth, in 1664, standing opposite Pembroke College, which the Dons desecrated in 1875. I could not imagine how such fine massive and picturesque old buildings as the colleges could be mixed up with the mean little houses that clustered around them, looking as if they were built of cardboard. In after days, I remembered the feeling, when looking at the Temple of the Sun in Palmyra, surrounded by its Arab huts, like swallows' nests planted upon a palace wall. And everything, except the colleges, looked so mean.

The good old Mitre was, if not the only, at least the chief hostelry of the place, and it had the outward and visible presence of a pothouse. The river with the classical name of Isis, was a mere moat, and its influent, the Cherwell, was a ditch. The country around, especially just after Switzerland, looked flat and monotonous in the extreme. The skies were brown-grey, and, to an Italian nose, the smell of the coal smoke was perpetual abomination. Queer beings