gownsman

Don Quixote, then, having risen to his feet, trembling from head to foot like a man dosed with mercury, said in a hurried, agitated voice, "The place I am in, the presence in which I stand, and the respect I have and always have had for the profession to which your worship belongs, hold and bind the hands of my just indignation; and as well for these reasons as because I know, as everyone knows, that a gownsman's weapon is the same as a woman's, the tongue, I will with mine engage in equal combat with your worship, from whom one might have expected good advice instead of foul abuse.

James Austen argues that such "prejudice" is intensified by the town-gown divisions of university life-"In Oxford the wind always blows from one quarter, gownsman meet s gownsman, they strengthen each other in their own line of life, and in the contempt of what is opposite to their own" (142)- and he brings home the callousness to which it leads in a series of chilling anecdotes.