Cambridge Act and Tripos Verses, 1565–1894 (review)

The scholastic disputation remained in use as an exercise to be performed by candidates for degrees, or as a display for eminent visitors, long after it had ceased to be taken seriously as a means of advancing knowledge. At Cambridge the exercise came to be enlivened by verses, which at least from 1565 were distributed in print or manuscript; this custom outlived the actual exercises, lasting nearly to the end of the nineteenth century, till it ceased not by abolition but from indifference. The verses, as we learn from this diligent book, were generally in the academic language, Latin; down to 1602 there was sometimes a coda in Greek, which from 1866 onwards was used for whole poems. One poem was written in Hebrew, but not recorded.

The author, sometime Under-Librarian of Cambridge University Library, expresses the hope (p. 1) that his work will 'be of interest to students of neo-Latin (and neo-ancient Greek) verse, and to those interested in the history of university ceremonies'; accordingly he presents an extensive historical introduction on the ceremonies, the degrees awarded, the lists of honours men, the theses ('positions') for disputation, and the verses themselves, although no literary comment is offered except on the metres used. We learn that 'Tripos' originally denoted the more junior (and often more frivolous) of the two performers, who sat on a three-legged stool. There follows a brief comparison with proceedings at Oxford and Dublin.

Despite the title, this book is not an edition of the verses, entire or select, but a list in chronological order of all those that can be traced, with heading, summary, metrical indication, and occasional notes. Each poem is given a unique identification indicating its date and occasion, followed by a notice of its source or sources. Translations are added of those Latin headings that consist of 'positions' to be defended, but not of the epigraphs in Latin or Greek that increasingly replace them, consisting of quotations, mottoes, incipits, or dramatis personae; instead the poem is summarized. Some translations are not quite literal: at 1659.1.com.the.A 'ministerii', properly 'of the ministry', becomes 'of the ministers'; at 1730.8 com.law B 'servitus' is translated 'easement', a term of common law, but since the law taught at the university was civil, the correct rendering is 'servitude'. Explanations are sometimes given, but more would have been welcome for those not as familiar with William Battie's teachings on insanity (1760.2A, 1775.2A) or Richard Mead's 'de canium [sic] rabiosorum morsibus' (1757.2A) as readers must be with classical literature to identify unaided such quotations as 1758.1A (from Horace, Ars poetica, 395 and 397), 1825.2A (from Homer, Odyssey 1. 33–34), 1831.2B (from Vergil, Georgics 4. 221–22), and 1841.2A (from Aeschylus, Eumenides 329–30). However, references to the Digest and Codex are converted to their modern form.

It would of course have been impractical to reproduce all these poems, even were any found so chalcenteric as to read them all; nevertheless, one might have been grateful for those by a Milton or a Bentley, not to mention G. C. Macaulay's scandalous dialogue (as the heading and the iambic metre suggest), demurely registered as 1875B, in which a prostitute who has failed to seduce an undergraduate successfully turns her attention to the interfering Proctor. (Despite Macaulay's denial that any particular Proctor was intended, others thought the name Megatherus, or 'Great Beast', an apt description of E. H. Morgan; the grounds are not stated.)

As it is, we must make do with the few poems illustrated, which are too much reduced to read with comfort; the last, on p. 268, presenting three verse papers, as they were called, one laid over the other, is particularly small, as if we were not expected to con the text...