# Literary Landmarks of Oxford/Brazenose

BRAZENOSE
Brazenose is not very certain, to this day, as to why it is so called. Some antiquarian authorities derive the title from "Brasen-hus," or the Brewing house, or Brewery, whose ancient site it is supposed to occupy; while others are in doubt as to whether or not it took its name from its famous brass-knocker, representing a grotesque head of abnormal nasal protuberance, or, if the knocker was given to the College on account of the College's name.
The Institution was founded in 1509; and it received its charter from Henry VIII. some three years later. Its full title is "The King's Hall and College of Brazenose; "its original object was "the study of Philosophy and Sacred Theology, to the praise and honor of Almighty God;" and its boat has been at the head of the River many times since 1837, when the records of such things were begun!
In the days when Sacred Theology and Philosophy were receiving more attention at Brazenose than were Aquatics, the rules for the guidance of the students were rather severe. Corporal punishment was introduced within the walls of Brazenose ​before it became habitual in any of the other Institutions of Learning in Oxford, and the undergraduate complained that he was stripped of all his mediaeval liberty and reduced to the school-boy level. If his lessons were unprepared, if he whispered in chapel, or if he was guilty of "odious comparisons"—whatever that last may mean—he was liable to be soundly birched, not by the upper-class men, who would naturally resent comparisons of any kind as being particularly odious, but by the tutors and masters in charge.
W. M. Wade, in his "Walks in Oxford," printed in 1817, gravely states that until the present handsome and ample fireplace in the College Hall of Brazenose was built, about 1760, the room was warmed by a fire made on the hearth, in the centre of the floor; and he adds that this was also the case in other colleges in Oxford, although the practice, in general, was not retained so long as in Brazenose.
In this Hall hangs now the famous Brazenose knocker, which was carried to Stamford many years ago; and not returned until 1890.
​records; and Magdalen has every reason to claim him exclusively for its own.
Robert Burton, the Anatomist of Melancholy, was a Commoner of Brazenose in 1590; but he migrated to Christ Church a little later, and he is more fully identified with that College.
A contemporary of Burton at Brazenose was John Marston, Dramatist and Divine. He entered with Burton, according to the latest authorities, who believe that the John Marston or Marson whom Wood placed in Corpus Christi was another man of the same, or a similar, name.
It is pleasant to dwell, in Brazenose, over a certain breakfast in the rooms of Reginald Heber on "Staircase Six, One Pair Left," when the occupant read to Walter Scott, in 1803, from the manuscript, his Newdigate Prize Poem on "Palestine;" and, at Scott's suggestion that Solomon's Temple was builded without tools, added, as an impromptu, the lines:
   "No workman's steel, no pondrous axes rung,
   Like some tall palm the noiseless fabric sprung."
Lockhart tells the tale; and Oxford contains no Literary Landmark more interesting to the lovers of either poet.
This apartment is comparatively unchanged, except in the matter of electric lights. The sitting​room is fairly spacious, as such things go in college buildings at Oxford; but the bed-room is smaller than is the ordinary sleeping-cabin of an ocean steamer. Heber writes that he could see, from his window, the battlements of All Souls. And the fine old tree, which shades the window, and of which he was very fond, is still called "Heber's Chestnut." It stands in Exeter Gardens, on the opposite side of the narrow Brazenose Lane. Certain guide-books and historians put this room on "Staircase No. Four, in the corner of the Quadrangle;" but from the window of that apartment can be had no glimpse of any part of All Souls.
Heber entered Brazenose in the year 1800; and he became a Fellow of All Souls in 1805. An intimate of Heber, in Oxford, of the same College, but not at the same time, was Henry Hart Milman, who entered Brazenose in 1810. In 1812 he won the Newdigate Prize with a poem, which Stanley pronounced to be the most perfect of its kind ever produced in Oxford. He became a Fellow of the College in 1814, and Professor of Poetry in 1821. He is best known, now, as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral; and it is perhaps forgotten that he contributed several familiar songs of praise and devotion to Heber's "Hymnology."
​to Brazenose, in 1817. There he is said to have led a wild life, although not altogether an idle one. Cards and dice were fashionable among the undergraduates in those days, and Barham had the great luck to lose, on the occasion of his single gambling venture, much more than he could afford to pay. His guardian refused to advance the money, as a trustee; but he loaned it, as a friend. Thus the debt of honor was paid, and the lesson was never forgotten. The man who begins by winning at poker, or in stocks, is not apt to learn his lesson until it is too late for his friends or guardians to come to his relief.
Some idea of the length of the nights in Brazenose, in Barham's time, is given in the biography by his son, who preserves the legend that the future creator of Thomas Ingoldsby, when asked by a tutor to account for his continuous absence from chapel, explained that the hour was too late for him. He was a man of regular habits, he said; he usually retired at four or five o'clock A. M.; and he found himself utterly unfit for work all day if he sat up until chapel time—which was seven in the morning!
Frederick W. Robertson entered Brazenose in 1837, where he gained the friendship of John Ruskin, and worked hard, without achieving any particular distinction.
​For a few months in 1847 he had charge of the parish church of St. Ebbe's, one of the poorest in Oxford, and his sermons were beginning to attract much attention, when he removed to Brighton, in the same year.
The lodgings of Robertson are still remembered at Brazenose! They were distinguished as "Staircase No. One. Room No. Five." The little window of the little sleeping-apartment looked out on to Lincoln; and, by standing on the bed, or on a chair, its occupant could have had a glimpse of the House of the Rector of Lincoln, and of a corner of his bright, green garden. These chambers were left intact until the summer of 1899, when a wall was removed, and the rooms were made a part of the Senior Common Room, at the west end.
After Walter Pater was graduated from Queen's he lodged on High Street, read with private pupils, lost, in a measure, his constitutional shyness, and moved more freely among the men of his own world.
In 1865 he became a fellow of Brazenose, and took his sisters to live with him, in a house which he hired, at No. 2 Bradmore Road, a short street of private residences, running from Norham Gardens to Norham Road. Here he remained until 1886, leading a quiet but uneventful existence, associating himself chiefly with the little band of ​men known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who were then beginning to do and to talk, and to get themselves talked about. He was back in Oxford in 1893, taking up his abode at No. 64 St. Giles Street, near Pusey House, and nearly opposite St. John's College; and here, during the next year, he died. He lies in the Cemetery of the Holy Cross, commonly known, in Oxford, as Holywell Cemetery.
For many years, however, Pater's real home in Oxford was in his rooms at Brazenose. He is described as disliking the society of strangers; as hating all unnecessary noise and all extravagance of any kind; as loving to surround himself with beautiful things, caring nothing for their association or for their money-value, only for their beauty. He is said to have been simple in manner, and to have had a sense of fun, which was as playful as that of a child.
These Brazenose rooms of Pater's are still remembered as being on "No. Seven Staircase, Room Three." They look out on to Radcliffe Square, with slight views of All Souls and St. Mary's. They are more cheerful than are Heber's rooms; and Pater could almost have swung a kitten, if it were a small kitten, between his bed, his window, and his door.
Mr. Robert Filcher, the Scout of "Brazeface," ​described Mr. Verdant Green's rooms as "Third Floor, No. Four Staircase, First Quad," and Mr. Bouncer was next door. The budding Freshman found that "the once whitewashed walls of his own apartments were coated with the uncleansed dust of the three past terms; and, where the plaster had not been chipped off by flying porter-bottles or the heels of Wellington boots, its surface had afforded an irresistible temptation to those imaginative undergraduates, who were fond of displaying their artistic genius in candle-smoke cartoons of the heads of the University, and of other popular and unpopular characters." "The bed," he discovered later, "was very hard; and so small that had it not been for the wall his legs would have been visible, literally, at the foot." But he spent many happy years in those rooms, for all that; and although there are rooms and rooms in the colleges, those of Mr. Green are a very fair average specimen of the lot.
​in the exterior and in the interior of the Brazenose of to-day. And Mr. Verdant Green is an established tradition there. The Hall-porter, an unusually intelligent Hall-porter, will show one, for a shilling—well spent—the rooms of the original of Mr. Bouncer, on "No. Eight Staircase, Cloister Quadrangle, in the Hall-passage," which are precisely as Verdant saw and knew them. Mr. Bouncer seems to have been founded on fact; and an undergraduate friend of his, who had far-away recollections of Mr. Bouncer as "sounding his octaves" and as doing other eccentric and comic things, in those very rooms, pointed them out once to the intelligent Hall-porter in question. Mr. Bouncer's famous Letters to the maternal lady whom he affectionately termed " The Mum," are hardly literature; but they are most effective reading; and the rooms on No. Eight Staircase, Cloister Quadrangle, as having been the scene of their composition, can hardly be ignored in the records of the Literary Landmarks of Oxford.
An ancient statue of Cain in combat with Abel, or of Samson slaying a Philistine, which stood in what is called "The Old Quad," as late as Mr. Bouncer's days, and which was never, even at its best, an especially attractive piece of sculpture, was taken down, not long ago, and destroyed, for the reason that it afforded the ingenious ​undergraduates too marked a peg upon which to hang their practical jokes. It seemed to invite, literally, coats of red and green paint; and the wearing of old hats; and as a target for old boots and porter bottles it is said to have had no equal in Oxford.