Базовый курс английского языка - Эккерсли К.Э.
ISBN 5-7871-0174-X
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... but 1 want to tell you about the pleasantest time I have had since I came to England. John, Mr. Priestley's son, invited me to Oxford for a week-end. He's an undergraduate there. He loves Oxford and seems to know all about it. He met me at the station and took me to the "guest room" at his college where I was to stay during my visit. Then we went to his rooms. They are on one side of the "Quad" (quadrangle) up a little narrow stairway with the number of his room and his name, "47 J. Priestley", painted neatly on the wall in white letters. He has a big study, with a desk, bookcase (with lots of books in it), armchairs, cupboards, reading-lamp, and some pleasant drawings of Oxford on the walls. It looked very comfortable, I must say. He has also a bedroom and a tiny kitchen where he can make tea or coffee if he has friends in his rooms. He took wine-glasses from the cupboard and we had a glass of sherry and then went out to see Oxford. Nearly all the students are on vacation just now but we saw a few of them about. They were wearing black gowns and queer-looking caps. Some of the gowns looked very old and even rather ragged, and I asked John if these students were very poor and couldn't afford new gowns. He laughed and said that undergraduates, especially those who had just come up, tried to get old, torn-looking gowns so that people would think they had been in Oxford for years. One student passed us, looking rather worried and wearing a black suit under his gown, a white collar and a white bow-tie. John said they had to wear that dress when they were taking an examination, and that unhappy-looking student was either going to or coming from the examination room.
We went into some of the colleges, through the quadrangle and gardens and into the dining-halls and chapels. The colleges are where the students live and they all have dinner together in the big dining-
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halls. Most of the halls are wonderful, especially the hall of Christ Church. This is the biggest, at least as far as buildings are concerned, and, perhaps, the most magnificent of the colleges. Its chapel is the Cathedral of Oxford; this is a much older building than the college and had originally been an abbey.
The college was founded by Cardinal Wolsey in the 16th century. His hat and his chair are there in the college, but before Wolsey could finish the college he fell from power and died in disgrace and the building was completed by King Henry VIII. All round the hall are portraits of great men who have been members of the college: Wolsey himself, Sir Philip Sidney, William Penn (who founded Pennsylvania), John Wesley, John Locke, Ruskin, Sir Robert Peel, Gladstone, Sir Anthony Eden (Christ Church gave England five Prime Ministers in a single century), and a great many other famous people. These men are merely from one college-and there are twenty-six other colleges. So there are many other great names connected with Oxford: Shelley, Dr. Johnson, Sir Christopher Wren, Gibbon, and dozens of others. I should think nearly every great man in England must have been at Oxford, though John admitted that a few had been at Cambridge. One of the portraits in Christ Church that interested me very much was that of Charles Dodgson, better known as "Lewis Carroll", the writer of the most delightful of all children's books, Alice in Wonderland. Alice belongs to Oxford, for it was told to the little daughter of Liddell, Dean of Christ Church, during an excursion up the river to Godstow, and I think it is characteristic of the odd things you meet with in Oxford that
it was written, not by a typical "children's author", but by a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford. There is a story that Queen Victoria was so charmed with Alice in Wonderland that she gave orders that the next book by this writer should be sent to her. In due course it arrived, and was: The Condensation of Determinants, a new and brief method of computing Arithmetical Values.
* * *
While we were talking, a scholarly-looking man in a cap and gown walked past and smiled at John. As he walked away I said: "Surely he's not an undergraduate "
JOHN: No, that's my tutor.
OLAF: What is a tutor?
JOHN: The Tutorial System is one of the ways in which Oxford and Cambridge differ from all the other English universities. Every student has a tutor and as soon as you come to Oxford one of the first things you do is to go and see your tutor. He, more or less, plans your work, suggests the books you should read and sets work for you to do, for example an essay to write. Each week you go to him in his rooms, perhaps with two or three other students, and he discusses with you the work that you have done, criticizes in detail your essay and sets you the next week's work.
OLAF: Does the tutor also give lectures?
JOHN: Yes, he may.
OLAF: But aren't lectures given by the professors?
JOHN: Yes, though professors don't give a great many lectures. They are often appointed not so much to do teaching work as to carry on research in their particular subjects.
