Nuts to crack; or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars. Gooch Richard
Sir Busick;
Sir Busick,
Sir Isaac;
’Twould make you and I sick
To taste their physick.
Another, perhaps the same Cambridge wag, penned the following quaternion on Sir Isaac, which appeared under the title of
AN EPIGRAM ON A PETIT-MAITRE PHYSICIAN.
When Pennington for female ills indites,
Studying alone not what, but how he writes,
The ladies, as his graceful form they scan,
Cry, with ill-omen’d rapture, “killing man!”
But Sir Isaac, too, was a wit, and chanced on a time to be one of a Cambridge party, amongst whom was a rich old fellow, an invalid, who was too mean to buy an opinion on his case, and thought it a good opportunity to worm one out of Sir Isaac gratis. He accordingly seized the opportunity for reciting the whole catalogue of his ills, ending with, “what would you advise me to take, my dear Sir Isaac?” “I should recommend you to take advice,” was the reply.
PORSON,
Whose very name conjures up the spirits of ten thousand wits, holding both sides, over a copus of Trinity ale and a classical pun, would not only frequently “steal a few hours from the night,” but see out both lights and liquids, and seem none the worse for the carouse. He had one night risen for the purpose of reaching his hat from a peg to depart, after having finished the port, sherry, gin-store, &c., when he espied a can of beer, says Dyer, (surely it must have been audit,) in a corner. Restoring his hat to its resting place, he reseated himself with the following happy travestie of the old nursery lines—
“When wine is gone, and ale is spent,
Then small beer is most excellent.”
It was no uncommon thing for his gyp to enter his room with Phœbus, and find him still en robe, with no other companions but a Homer, Æschylus, Plato, and a dozen or two other old Grecians surrounding an empty bottle, or what his late Royal Highness the Duke of York would have styled “a marine,” id est “a good fellow, who had done his duty, and was ready to do it again.” Upon his gyp once peeping in before day light, and finding him still up, Porson answered his “quod petis?” (whether he wanted candles or liquor,) with
ου τοδε ουδ’ αλλο.
Scotticè—neither Toddy nor Tallow.
At another time, when asked what he would drink? he replied?—“aliquid” (a liquid.)
He was once
BOASTING AT A CAMBRIDGE PARTY,
That he could pun upon anything, when he was challenged to do so upon the Latin Gerunds, and exclaimed, after a pause—
“When Dido found Æneas would not come.
She mourned in silence, and was Di-do-dum(b).”
BISHOP HEBER’S COLLEGE PUNS.
The late amiable, learned, and pious Bishop Heber was not above a pun in his day, notwithstanding Dr. Johnson’s anathema, that a man who made a pun would pick a pocket. Among the jeux des mots attributed to him are the following: he was one day dining with an Oxford party, comprises the élite of his day, and when the servant was in the act of removing the table-cloth from off the green table-covering, at the end of their meal, he exclaimed, in the words of Horace—
“Diffugere nives: redeunt jam gramina campis.”
At another time he made one of a party of Oxonians, amongst whom was a gentleman of great rotundity of person, on which account he had acquired the soubriquet of ‘heavy-a—se;’ and he was withal of very somniferous habits, frequently dozing in the midst of a conversation that would have made the very glasses tingle with delight. He had fallen fast asleep during the time a mirth-moving subject was recited by one of the party, but woke up just at the close, when all save himself were “shaking fat sides,” and on his begging to know the subject of their laughter, Heber let fly at him in pure Horatian—
“Exsomnis stupet Evias.”
The mirth-loving Dr. Barnard, late Provost of Eton, was cotemporary, at Cambridge, with
A WORTHY OF THE SAME SCHOOL,
Who, then a student of St. John’s College, used to frequent the same parties that Barnard did, who was of King’s. Barnard used to taunt him with his stupidity; “and,” said Judge Hardinge, who records the anecdote, “he one day half killed Barnard with laughter, who had been taunting him, as usual, with the simplicity of the following excuse and remonstrance: You are always running your rigs upon me and calling me ‘stupid fellow;’ and it is very cruel, now, that’s what it is; for you don’t consider that a broad-wheeled wagon went over my head when I was ten years old.” And here I must remark upon the injustice of persons reflecting upon the English Universities, as their enemies often do, because every man who succeeds in getting a degree does not turn out a Porson or a Newton. I knew one Cantab, a Caius man, to whom writing a letter to his friends was such an effort, that he used to get his medical attendant to give him an ægrotat (put him on the sick list,) and, besides,
KEEP HIS DOOR SPORTED FOR A WEEK,
till the momentous task was accomplished. And two Oxonians were of late
PLUCKED AT THEIR DIVINITY EXAMINATION,
Because one being asked, “Who was the Mediator, between God and man?” answered, “The Archbishop of Canterbury.” The other being questioned as to “why our Saviour sat on the right hand of God?” replied, “Because the Holy Ghost sat on the left.”
COMPLIMENT TO THE MEN OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXON.
“The men of Exeter College, Oxon,” says Fuller, in his Church History, “consisted chiefly of Cornish and Devonshire men, the gentry of which latter, Queen Elizabeth used to say, are courtiers by birth. And as these western men do bear away the bell for might and sleight in wrestling, so the scholars here have always acquitted themselves with credit in Palæstra literaria.”
And writing of this society reminds me that
HIS GRACE OF WELLINGTON
Is a living example of the fact, that it does not require great learning to make a great general; nor is great learning always necessary to complete the character of the head of a college. The late Rector of Exeter College, Dr. Cole, raised that society, by his prudent management, from the very reduced rank in which he found it amongst the other foundations of Oxford, to a flourishing and high reputation for good scholarship. Yet he is said one day to have complimented a student at collections, by saying, after the gentleman had construed his portion of Sophocles, “Sir, you have construed your Livy very well.” He nevertheless redeemed his credit by one day posing a student, during his divinity examination, with asking him, in vain, “What Christmas day was?” Another Don of the same college, once asking a student of the society some divinity question, which he was equally at a loss for an answer, he exclaimed—“Good God, sir, you the son of a clergyman, and not answer such a question as that?” Aristotle was of opinion that knowledge could only be acquired, but our tutor seems to have thought, like the opponents of Aristotle, that a son of a parson ought to be born to it.
ANOTHER OXONIAN WAS POSED,
Whom