twelve, or ride twenty" across country," at the shortest notice, or to eat half a leg of mutton and drink a quart of ale after it. One would hardly suspect them to be students at all, did not the number of glasses hint that those who carried them had impaired their sight by late reading.

The young American who noted these particulars felt somewhat bashful among a crowd of strangers, even as he does now on making his appearance before you, reader. Yet it is necessary that he should go on, however painful it may be to his modesty, to tell how he came there, and for what purpose, which he will do as briefly as possible in the next chapter.

SOME PRELIMINARIES RATHER EGOTISTICAL BUT VERY

I

NECESSARY.

Oro te, quis tu es?-CICERO TO TREBATIUS.

In

WAS fifteen years old when I went to New Haven to enter the Freshman class, at Yale College. the school where I prepared, one of the masters was an Englishman, and the instruction given partly on the English model. I had been fitted for Columbia College, the standard for the Freshman class in which institution was then nearly equal to that for the Sophomore at Yale. (I never met a New Englander who knew this, or could be made to believe it, but it is perfectly true notwithstanding.) The start which I had thus obtained confirmed me in the habits of idleness to which a boy just emancipated from school is prone, when he has nothing immediately before him to excite his ambition. During the first year I did little but read novels and attend debating societies; and the comparison of my experience with that of others leads me to conclude that this is the case with most boys who enter well prepared at a New England College; they go backwards rather than forwards the first year. In the second year came on a great deal of mathematics, laborious rather than difficult; much of it consisted in mere mechanical working of examples in trigonometry and mensuration, which were nearly as great a bore to the best mathematicians in the class as to the worst. I never had any love for or skill in pure science; and my health, moreover, being none of the best, I very early in the Sophomore year gave up all

thoughts of obtaining high honors, and settled down contentedly among the twelve or fifteen who are bracketed after the first two or three, as "English Orations." There were four prizes, one in each year, which could be obtained by classics alone, and of these I was fortunate enough to gain three. But they were very imperfect tests; indeed there was at that time no direct means of determining who was the best, or second, or third, classical scholar in any class.

Most of our young countrymen are eager to rush into their destined profession immediately on leaving college, at the age of eighteen or nineteen. Several of my contemporaries did not wait for Commencement day to begin, nominally at least, their professional studies; but I was by no means in a hurry to finish my education, thinking that a long start is often the safest; especially as I was looking forward to a profession which, above all others, should be entered on after much deliberation and mature judgment. But when it came to starting, my courage failed me; I was afraid to expose my ignorance abroad, and determined to stay at home another year. This year I would willingly have spent in my native city, as affording more advantages for study; but those who had the disposal of me thought it best that I should remain at New Haven, where accordingly I took up my quarters again as a resident graduate-a very rare animal in those parts. Poor Mason, who was to have been our great American astronomer, was my only companion in that position. The experience of that year fully justifies me in asserting, that if I wished to unmake a partially formed scholar, and to divert the attention of a young man who had a taste that way from such studies, I would send him to reside in no place sooner than in a New England college town. There was no one able to

instruct me or inclined to sympathize with me, except two or three gentlemen whose professional duties in the college rendered it impossible for them to give me any regular assistance; but there were plenty of debating societies all about, and no end of young debaters. Without being considered much of a "speaker" or "writer" as an under-graduate, I had figured to some extent in the Yale Literary, and had just attained that beau jour de la vie when a young man gets his first "piece" into a city magazine. All this fostered the habits of semi-literary idleness which the (so-called) studies of the senior year appear purposely framed to encourage. Moreover, I formed rather an intimate acquaintance with a Mississippian (it was before the days of repudiation), who was always anxious to talk politics, and we used to read about a dozen newspapers a day, and throw the contents of them at each other. When it is stated that I was an ultra abolition Whig, and he a slaveholding Democrat, the quantity of belligerent nonsense we interchanged, and the valuable result of our discussions may be easily imagined. The only tangible residuum that I ever realized from our debates was a pretty large bill for cakes, ice cream, and sherry cobblers. Indeed, so put to it was I for some daily work to balance me, as it were, and give me regular habits of study, that for the last three months of the year I joined the Law School; and then finding what I ought to have known before, that I should never make any progress in scholarship by myself at New Haven, I packed my trunks for England.

Still it would be unjust to myself to say that I had absolutely wasted the twelve months. They were only comparatively lost. I did about as much in them as I ought to have done in three or four. I had broken ground in Juvenal, Thucydides, Aristophanes, and Pin

dar, authors who then seldom entered into the reading of an American college student: on the whole, it may fairly be said that I was a favorable specimen of a graduate from a New England College, and rather above the average than below it. Of mathematics I knew only a little Euclid and algebra, having gone through the college course of Mechanics, Conic sections, etc., to as much purpose as some travellers go through various countries.

As to the rest of my education and accomplishments, they were the usual ones of an American student; that is to say, I could talk a little French and Spanish, and read a little German; had a boarding-school girl's knowledge of the names and rudimentary formulæ of two or three sciences; could write newspaper articles in prose or verse; had a strong tendency to talk politics; and never saw a crowd of people together without feeling as if I should like to get up and make them a speech about things in general. I had read abundance of novels, poetry, and reviews; a fair share of English history, and a great deal of what the school books and the newspaper reporters call "specimens of eloquence." I had a supreme opinion of my country (except in matters of scholarship), and a pretty good opinion of myself. To complete the list, it should be added, that I could black my own boots, and, on a pinch, wash my own handkerchiefs. In short, with the exception of easiness of manner and presence of mind (two qualities in which I have always been deficient), I made a very tolerable representative for the reading section of Young America to send among English scholars.

It is very awkward to write these things about one's self, but it seems impossible to dispense with them. In the course of this book, different standards of education, and the comparative knowledge of instructors, as well