Nuts to crack: Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars

 Nuts to crack : or Quips, quirks, anecdote and facete of Oxford and Cambridge Scholars

Had its origin in 1564, when Queen Elizabeth visited the University of Cambridge, and “the Public Orator, addressing Her Majesty, embraced the opportunity of extolling the antiquity of the University to which he belonged above that of Oxford. This occasioned Thomas Key, Master of University, College, Oxford, to compose a small treatise on the antiquity of his own University, which he referred to the fabulous period when the Greek professors accompanied Brute to England; and to the less ambiguous era of 870, when Science was invited to the banks of the Isis, under the auspices of the great Alfred. A MS. copy of this production of Thomas Key accidentally came into the hands of the Earl of Leicester, from whom it passed into those of Dr. John Caius (master and founder of Gonvile and Caius Colleges, Cambridge,) who, resolving not to be vanquished in asserting the chronological claims of his own University, undertook to prove the foundation of Cambridge by Cantaber, nearly four hundred years before the Christian era. He thus assigned the birth of Cambridge to more than 1200 anterior to that which had been secondarily ascribed to Oxford by the champion of that seat of learning; and yet it can be hardly maintained that he had the best of the argument, since the primary foundation by the son of Æneas, it is evident, remains unimpeached, and the name of Brute, to say the least of it, is quite as creditable as that of Cantaber. The work which Dr. John Caius published, though under a feigned name, along with that which it was written to refute, was entitled, ‘De Antiquitate Catabrigiensis Academiæ, libri ii. in quorum 2do. de Oxoniensis quoque gymnasii antiquitate disseritur, et Cantabrigiense longe eo antiquius esse definitur, Londinense Authore: adjunximus assertionem antiquitatis Oxoniensis Academiæ ab Oxoniensi quodam annis jam elapsis duobus ad reginam conscriptam in qua docere conatur, Oxoniense gymnasium Cantabrigiensi antiquius esse: ut ex collatione facile intelligas, utra sit antequior. Excusum Londini, A. D. 1568, Mense Augusto, per Henricum Bynnenum, 12mo.’” and is extant in the British Museum. As may well be supposed by those who are acquainted with the progress of literary warfare, this work of Dr. John Caius drew from his namesake, Thomas Caius, a vindication of that which it was intended to refute; and this work he entitled “Thomæ Caii Vindiciæ Antiquitatis Academiæ Oxoniensis contra Joannem Caium Cantabrigiensem.” These two singular productions were subsequently published together by Hearne, the Oxford antiquary, who, with a prejudice natural enough, boasts that the forcible logic of the Oxford advocate “broke the heart and precipitated the death of his Cambridge antagonist.” In other words, Dr. John Caius, it is said,