I suspect that Oxford had
attracted the reading men, and Cambridge possessed charms for the
fast ones. How else are we to explain Archbishop Stratford's
stringent order in 1342 for the repression of the dandyism that
prevailed among the young scholars? These young Cantabs of the
fourteenth century were exquisites of the first water. Their fur-
trimmed cloaks and their tippets; their shoes of all the colours of
the rainbow; their dainty girdles, bejewelled and gilt, were a sight
to see. And then their hair! positively curled and powdered, and
growing over their shoulders, too; and when they passed their fingers
through the curls, look you, there were rings on their fingers! Call
you these scholars? Chaucer's "Clerk of Oxenforde" was of a very
different type:--
For all that he might of his frendes hentc
On books and in learning he it spente.
Nevertheless it can hardly have been but that the foundation of so
many colleges at Cambridge brought in a stricter discipline; the new
collegiate life of the scholars began. Perhaps for the majority of
readers no part of Mr. dark's great work will prove so attractive as
the last four hundred pages, with their delightful essays on "The
Component Parts of a College." Here we have traced out for us in the
most elaborate manner, the gradual development of the collegiate
idea, from the time when it expressed itself in a building that had
no particular plan, down to our own days, when colleges vie with one
another in architectural splendour and in the lavish completeness of
their arrangements.
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