Conferences on Books and Men Author:Henry Charles Beeching Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: II. OXFORD WIT AND HUMOUR. THERE was lately put into my hand a little book called Memories of Oxford, written by a young Frenchman, M. Jacques Bardoux, who t... more »o an unfeigned admiration of our heavier virtues seems to have added an unfeigned contempt for our lighter intelligence. His strictures and compliments set me in my turn thinking and remembering, and my rumination has resulted in a very simple proposition. Assuming the current division of Jocnlaria into wit and humour to be substantially sound, I should say that there is an academic variety of each : the former being found for the most part among the fellows and scholars of colleges, the latter among the undergraduates ; for the obvious reason that academic wit postulates learning, while academic humour is the child of high spirits. University wit, therefore, is apt to change its form from age to age, for sciences have their fashions, and the learning of one age is often the folly of the next; but University humour, relying almost entirely upon the genial sense of youth, is afar more constant quantity. It might be illustrated from the traditions of the remotest ages, and be certain to awake an answering chord in the undergraduate bosom of to-day. I have a neighbour who, whenever talk falls upon the Universities, as it is apt to do just before Easter, will relate how in his youth, when a certain set of his fellow-collegians affected to wear their hair longer than the custom of the hour dictated, they were torn by night from their quiet beds and conveyed to the college pump. On one occasion, when this story had been told with more than ordinary gusto, I could not help suggesting that the process would have been more in character as shampooing if the water had been warmed ; but, as my neighbour pointed out, in that case where...« less