Details have altered since then, but the general scheme of college discipline remains much the same. Even in the days when practice was slackest, theory retained its ancient stringency. When Mr. Gibbon of Magdalen absented himself from his lectures, his excuses were received ’with an indulgent smile;’ when he desired to leave Oxford for a few days, he appears to have done so without let or hindrance; but both residence and attendance at lectures were theoretically necessary. The compromise was hardly satisfactory, but as the scholars’ age increased and the disciplinary rule meant for fourteen had to be applied to eighteen, what was to be done? So, too, we are informed that in the days of our fathers undergraduates endured a Procrustean tyranny. So many chapel services you must attend; so many lectures you must hear, connected or not with your particular studies; and there was no relaxation of the rule; no excuse even of ’urgent business’ would serve the pale student who wanted to follow the hounds or play in a cricket match. Things, in fact, would have been at a deadlock had not the authorities recognised the superiority of expediency to mere morality, and invariably accepted without question the plea of ill-health. To ’put on an _aeger_’ when in the enjoyment of robust health was after all as justifiable a fiction as the ’not at home’ of ordinary society. You announced yourself as too ill to go to a lecture, and then rode with the Bicester or played cricket to your heart’s content. This remarkable system is now practically obsolete; perhaps we are more moral.
[Illustration: _CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE. Drawn by F. H. Lorimer._]
Modern collegiate discipline is a parlous matter. There are still the old problems to be faced--the difficulty of adapting old rules to new conditions--the danger on the one hand of treating boys too much like men, and on the other of treating men too much like boys. Hence college authorities generally fall back on some system of more or less ingenious compromise--a course which is no doubt prudent in the long run, and shows a laudable desire for the attainment of the Aristotelian ’mean,’ but which, like most compromises, manages to secure the disapproval alike of all shades of outside opinion. We live with the fear of the evening papers before our eyes, and an erring undergraduate who has been sent down may quite possibly be avenged by a newspaper column reflecting on college discipline in general, and the dons who sent him down in particular. Every day martinets tell us that the University is going to the dogs from excess of leniency; while critics of the ’Boys-will-be-boys’ school point out the extreme danger of sitting permanently on the safety valve, and dancing on the edge of an active volcano.