Another man I met, whose head
    Was crammed with pastime’s annals,
  And who, to judge from what he said,
    Must simply live in flannels: 
  A shallow mind his talk proclaimed,
    And showed of culture no trace: 
  One “book” and one alone he named—­
    His own—­’twas on the Boat-race.

  “Of course,” you cry, “some brainless lad,
    Some scion of ancient Tories,
  Bob Acres, sent to Oxford ad
    Emolliendos mores,
  Meant but to drain the festive glass
    And win the athlete’s pewter!”
  There you are wrong:  this person was
    That undergraduate’s Tutor.

* * * *

  Twas but a dream, I said above,
    In concrete truth deficient,
  Belonging to the region of
    The wholly Unconditioned: 
  Yet, when I see how strange the ways
    Of undergrad. and Don are,
  Methinks it was, in classic phrase,
    Not upar less than onar. [1]

[1.  Transcriber’s note:  the words “upar” and “onar” were transliterated from the Greek as follows:  “upar”—­upsilon (possibly with the rough-breathing diacritical), pi, alpha, and rho; “onar”—­omicron (possibly with the rough-breathing diacritical), nu, alpha, and rho.]

THE SCHOOL OF AGRICULTURE

  I gazed with wild prophetic eye
    Into the future vast and dim: 
  I saw the University
    Indulge its last and strangest whim: 
  It did away with Mods and Greats,
    Its other Schools abolished all: 
  And simply made its candidates
    Read Science Agricultural.

  They learnt to hoe:  they learnt to plough: 
    To delve and dig was all their joy: 
  But O in ways we know not now
    Those candidates we did employ: 
  No more, accepting of a bribe
    To take these persons off our hands,
  We sent them off, a studious tribe,
    To distant climes and foreign lands.

  We did not then examine in
    The subjects which we could not teach
  To those who Honours aimed to win
    We taught their subjects, all and each
  We made the Professoriate
    Take from its Professorial shelf
  Authorities of ancient date,
    And teach the candidates itself

  My scanty page could ne’er contain
    Of works the long and learned list
  By which it was their plan to train
    The sucking agriculturist: 
  In brief, the arts of tilling land
    Sufficiently imparted were
  By great Professor Ellis, and
    By great Professor Bywater.

  One taught th’ aspiring candidate
    In Hesiod each alternate day: 
  One showed him how the crops rotate
    From Cato De Re Rustica: 
  The bee that in our bonnets lurks
    He taught to yield its honied store
  By reading Columella’s works
    And also Virgil (Georgic Four).