# Letters from England/Cambridge and Oxford

​Cambridge and Oxford
AT first you have the impression of a provincial town; but suddenly you wonder whose this old castle can be. It is courtyards, a chapel of its own, a royal hall where the students eat, a park, and I know not what else. And here is a second one, bigger still, with four courtyards, a park beyond the river, a cathedral of its own, a still bigger Gothic dining-hall, rafters five hundred years old, a gallery of old portraits, still older traditions and still more famous students’ college with three names. Then there is a third one which is the oldest, a fourth one distinguished for scholarship, a fifth for athletic records, a sixth because it has the finest chapel, a seventh for I know not what, and as there are at least fifteen of them, I have mixed them all ​up; I see only the castellated palaces in Perpendicular style, the huge quadrangles, where the pupils move about in black gowns and square tasselled caps, each of whom has his two or three rooms in the wings of these castles; I see the Gothic chapels disembowelled by Protestantism, the banquet-halls with a dais for the “masters” and “fellows,” the venerable smoked portraits of earls, statesmen and poets, who went forth from there; I see the renowned “backs,” i.e. the rear of the colleges above the river Cam, ​over which there are bridges leading to the ancient college parks; I float on the gentle river between the “backs” and the parks, and I think of our students, of their hollow bellies and their boots down-at-heel with trudging from lecture to lecture. I bow down to you, O Cambridge, for upon me was conferred the honour of eating on the dais among the learned masters in a hall so vast and old that I felt as if I were only dreaming about it; I greet you with both hands, O Cambridge, for I was vouchsafed the joy of eating with students, masters and other young people from earthenware dishes in the Half Moon; and happy I was among them. And I have seen lawns where only the masters and not the undergraduates may walk, and staircases where only the graduates and not the students may play billiards; I have seen professors in rabbits’ fur and cloaks as red as lobsters, I have seen the graduates kneel and kiss the hand of the Vice-Chancellor; of all these wonders I ​have been able to make a drawing only of one venerable college provost, who poured out for me a glass of sherry at least as old as the elder Pitt.
Sometimes, too, I dream about the Cambridge rabbit. They made him breathe some gas or other, to see what his rabbity spleen would say to it. I saw him die; he gasped and rolled his eyes. Now he haunts my dreams. God be merciful to his long-eared soul.
​What evil am I to say now about Oxford? I cannot praise Oxford after having praised Cambridge; and my friendly connection with Cambridge makes it incumbent upon me to shower fire and brimstone upon haughty Oxford. Unfortunately, I liked the latter place very much; the colleges, there are still bigger and still older, they have beautiful quiet parks, galleries of equally famous ancestors, banquet-halls, memorials and dignified janitors, but all this display and tradition is not aimless; it would seem that the purpose of it is to train not learned specialists, but gentlemen. It is necessary to know this in order to comprehend England in a ​somewhat different aspect. Just imagine our students lunching at the very least in the Waldstein castle hall on massive old silver, served by waiters in liveries, and prepared for examinations by household professors in lecture halls equipped with all kinds of settees, arm-chairs and sofas; just imagine—but no, my young friends, never mind about this.