X. QUEM TU, MELPOMENE 185

without any contrary comment of mine, on the results of the exploded system of things in my own college life.

My father did not like the word “commoner,”-all the less, because our relationships in general were not uncommon. Also, though himself satisfying his pride enough in being the head of the sherry trade, he felt and saw in his son powers which had not their full scope in the sherry trade. His ideal of my future,-now entirely formed in conviction of my genius,-was that I should enter at college into the best society, take all the prizes every year, and a double first to finish with; marry Lady Clara Vere de Vere; write poetry as good as Byron’s, only pious; preach sermons as good as Bossuet’s, only Protestant; be made, at forty, Bishop of Winchester, and at fifty, Primate of England.

213. With all these hopes, and under all these temptations, my father was yet restrained and embarrassed in no small degree by his old and steady sense of what was becoming to his station in life: and he consulted anxiously, but honestly, the Dean of Christ Church, (Gaisford,) and my college tutor that was to be, Mr. Walter Brown,¹ whether a person in his position might without impropriety enter his son as a gentleman-commoner. I did not hear the dialogues, but the old Dean must have answered with a grunt, that my father had every right to make me a gentleman-commoner if he liked, and could pay the fees; the tutor, more attentively laying before him the conditions of the question, may perhaps have said, with courtesy, that it would be good for the college to have a reading man among the gentlemen-commoners, who, as a rule, were not studiously inclined; but he was compelled also to give my

Undergraduates should be of two classes only: Scholars, wearing their comely gown, and Commoners, condemned to that sorry garment which all Undergraduates naturally despise. The great lawyer mildly defended this move; it was with characteristic vehemence opposed by the statesman. Mr. Gladstone held that the distinctions of the outer world should have their echo in Oxford; that it was a lesson in the structure of society; that it protected poor men from the temptations to high expenditure” (Ruskin in Oxford and other Papers, 1904, p. 2).]

¹ [See below, pp. 200, 202, 291, 306.]

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