Specimen of a College Exercise
By the Younger Bowyer, Written at St. John’s College, Cambridge, November 29, 1719
“Ne quicquam sapit, qui sibi ipsi non sapit.”
A goodly parson once there was,
To ’s maid would chatter Latin;
(For that he was, I think, an ass,
At least the rhyme comes pat in.)
One day the house to prayers were met,
With well united hearts;
Below, a goose was at the spit,
To feast their grosser parts.
The godly maid to prayers she came,
If truth the legends say,
To hear her master English lame,
Herself to sleep and pray.
The maid, to hear her worthy master,
Left all alone her kitchen;
Hence happened much a worse disaster
Than if she’d let the bitch in.
While each breast burns with pious flame,
All hearts with ardours beat,
The goose’s breast did much the same
With too malicious heat.
The parson smelt the odours rise;
To ’s belly thoughts gave loose,
And plainly seemed to sympathise
With his twice-murdered goose.
He knew full well self-preservation
Bids piety retire,
Just as the salus of a nation
Lays obligation higher.
He stopped, and thus held forth his Clerum,
While him the maid did stare at,
Hoc faciendum; sed alterum
Non negligendum erat.
Parce tuum Vatum sceleris damnare.
TULIP-TIME
Writing of the death of a former Master of Magdalen College, “whose whole delight was horses, dogs, sporting, &c.,” which, says Cole, happened on the first of September, the legal day for partridge-shooting to begin, “it put me in mind of the late Dr. Walker, Vice-master of Trinity, a great florist (and founder of the Botanical Garden at Cambridge,) who, when told of a brother florist’s death, by shooting himself in the spring, immediately exclaimed, ‘Good God! is it possible? Now, at the beginning of tulip-time!’”
THE COLLEGE BELL
When Dr. Barrett, Prebend of St. Paul’s, was a student at Peter-house, Cambridge, he happened to make one of a party of collegians, where it was proposed that each gentleman should toast his favourite belle; when it came to his turn, he facetiously gave “the college-bell!”
COLLEGE FUN
“Previous to my attending Cambridge,” says Henry Angelo, in his Reminiscences, “one of my scholars (whom I had taught at Westminster School,) at Trinity College, engaged an Irish fencing-master, named Fitzpatrick,” more remarkable for his native humour than science, and when he had taken too much of the cratur, “was amusing to the collegians, who had engaged him merely to keep up their exercise.” One day, during a bout, some wag placed a bottle of his favourite “mountain dew” (whisky) on the chimney-piece, which proved so attractive, “that as his sips increased, so did the numerous hits he received, till the first so far prevailed, aided by exertion and the heat of the weather, that he lay, tandem, to all appearance dead.” To keep the fun up, he was stripped and laid out like a corpse, with a shroud on, a coffin close to him, and four candles placed on each side, ready to light on his recovery. This jeu de plaisanterie might have been serious; “however, Master Push-carte took care not to push himself again into the same place.”
THE KING OF DENMARK AT CAMBRIDGE
When the late King of Denmark was in England, in 1763, when he visited Eton, &c., he is said to have made a brief sojourn at Cambridge, where he was received with “all the honours,” and took up his abode (as is usual for persons of his rank) in the lodge of the Master of Trinity. In his majesty’s establishments for learned purposes, as well as throughout all Germany, &c., no provision is made for lodging and otherwise providing for the comforts of students, as in the two English universities; and when he surveyed the principal court of Trinity, he is said to have had so little notion of an English university, that he asked “whether that court did not comprise the whole of the university of Cambridge?” This royal anecdote reminds me that his present gracious Majesty,