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VII.

VARIOUS.

IF I were giving a complete natural history of the genus undergraduate, I should still have many subvarieties to describe. I should have, for example, to depict the extreme High Churchman, of whom a few choice specimens still linger amongst us. Certain annual ceremonies plunge our townsmen into a frenzy, which seeks relief by denouncing the Scarlet Woman in the local journals. Not very long ago a youth opened an " oratory" in his rooms. For this pious purpose he selected his "gyp-room," a small apartment generally consecrated to pots and pans, decanters, and slop-pails. In it he erected an altar, decked with the due amount of candles and flowers,

and opened it with a solemn procession, headed by certain weak-minded University officials. Of course, he was put down. Tomfoolery of this kind thrives ill in our soil. We prefer, of the two, the more manly, if less refined, evangelical fanaticism. Overzealous youths preach open-air sermons, or invite the University at large to "prayer meetings conducted by undergraduates." I should be sorry to speak of these well-meant efforts, because I could not describe them in the simplest terms without making them ridiculous. They make but little impression, too, on the dogged common sense of the ordinary undergraduate. Their worst effect is that they lead him to class all rather eccentric religious manifestations under the head (I apologize for quoting his rather inelegant slang) of "awful bosh."

Nor am I going to speak of those who form in some sort the antipodes to these zealots, the young gentlemen whose talk is of horse-racing, or of betting, or of billiards. They are a mere faint reflection of the great outside sporting world, who have neither engrafted any special characteristics upon our little society, nor taken any strong colour

ing from their (sometimes very precarious) sojourn amongst us. Both in athletic sports and in study we flatter ourselves that we occasionally are at the head of English progress; in this department we are merely feeble imitators, and the model from which we copy may be studied in London or elsewhere.

I will conclude the subject of undergraduate manners and customs by touching shortly upon one or two further illustrations of their intellectual and social tendencies. Every one who has left the University for a few years looks back with special interest upon some of the pet amusements of the little set to which he belonged. He remembers the absorbing interest which he gave to the noble study of whist, or his occasional excursions into the more gambling mysteries of loo or vingt-un. He recollects the morning on which he startled the early dean on his way to chapel by the profane cry of "Bobs up!" proceeding from a belated card-party; or how, on escaping from the torments of a scholarship examination, he signalized his liberty by playing cards for twenty-four consecutive hours, declining gradually, as his intellect grew weak, from the intellectual

strain of whist down to cutting through the pack for shillings. He remembers that glorious long vacation, when lectures were not and chapels were few: and when he met a few quiet friends for "a Shakspeare," when he was ready for every character, from Hamlet down to "a confused noise within," and finished the evening with a domestic rubber. Or, to go a step higher, he remembers the knot of youthful philosophers who met on Saturday evenings to discuss all problems in heaven or earth:

Where once we held debate, a band

Of youthful friends, on mind, and art,
And labour, and the changing mart,

And all the framework of the land;

and, indeed, talked incredible nonsense on all those subjects. And yet few things probably did him more good than those rambling and not very orthodox discussions. He learnt to use the tools of his trade, and if his youthful confidence led him to solve a good many problems incapable of solution, it stimulated his powers, and prepared them for maturer struggles.

I well remember the awe with which I listened to a young logician, who declared himself to have discovered seventy-six new forms of syllogism, most of

which, as he added, were inexpressible in human language, and, indeed, totally unthinkable by human faculties. I discovered for myself an ingenious system, which somehow combined the results of Locke and Hegel. It requires, indeed, either a very childish mind or the mind of a German philosopher (which comes to much the same thing) to study metaphysics with any expectation of coming to a useful result; but Sir W. Hamilton was doubtless right in vaunting its merit as a system of mental gymnastics, and I always thought it very wrong in Milton to consign the question of fate and free-will to diabolic disputants. The study is very pleasant, and requires a certain youthful confidence and buoyancy of spirit. If the tendency of our arguments would have occasionally shocked our parents and guardians, I don't think we were any the worse for them permanently: it is no bad preparation even for an orthodox theologian to have talked something verging upon infidelity in his youth; he will have learned the trick of it, and will at least remember the use of free speech and honest, though absurdly superficial, inquiry.

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