Note 70 — Chapter III · THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY UP TO 1758.

This character, intended to enliven the solemnity of public acts, appears to have been borrowed from the precedent of Oxford. In a curious book intitled Terræ Filius (London, 1726), which consists of a series of satires upon that University, the anonymous author says—“It has, till of late, been a custom, from time immemorial, for one of our family to mount the Rostrum at Oxford at certain seasons [during the Acts of the Term], and divert an innumerable crowd of spectators, who flocked to hear him from all parts, with a merry oration, interspersed with secret history, raillery, and sarcasm.... Several indignities having been offered to the grave fathers of the University, they said to one another—‘Gentlemen, these are no jests; if we suffer this, we shall become the sport of freshmen and servitors. Let us expel him.’ And, accordingly, Terræ Filius was expelled during almost every Act.” And again (p. xi.)—“Though it has, of late years, been thought expedient to lay aside the solemnity of a Publick Act, and it is very uncertain when Terræ Filius will be able to regain his antient privileges.”

There is a frontispiece to the book, signed W. Hogarth, which represents an enraged Don tearing in pieces the libel of the Terræ Filius, who is in the middle of an excited crowd of collegians and ladies. The author speaks of the seditious spirit of Oxford in the very way that the spirit of Dublin is censured at the same time; and just as the Terræ Filius of Oxford had been censured and persecuted when his jests became libellous, so in Swift’s day, just before the Centenary time, one Jones, an intimate of Swift’s, had been deprived of his degrees for a satire, which Barrett has published as possibly composed by Swift to aid his friend.—Cf. Barrett’s Early Life of Swift (London, 1808).

The heads at Oxford, holding public acts in 1712, stopt the mouth of the Terræ Filius (who is called a statutable orator at this solemnity), having intelligence that he designed to utter something in derogation of the Reverend Mr. Vice-Chancellor, op. cit. p. 100. This is probably the affair spoken of in J. C. Jeaffreson’s Annals of Oxford, ii. 224, but referred to the year 1713. Mr. Jeaffreson has a whole chapter on the subject.