I was getting into bed that night, when Van Haubitz knocked at my door, and entered the room with a downcast and dejected air, very different from his usual boisterous headlong manner.
"I am off to Holland," he said; "'tis my only chance, bad though it be."
"I sincerely wish you success," replied I. "In any case, do not despair; something will turn up. You have friends in your own country, I have heard you say. They will help you to occupation."
He shook his head.
"Good friends over a bottle and a dice-box," said he, "but useless at a pinch like this. Pleasant fellows enough, but scamps like"—myself, he was going to add, but did not. "I am come to sayfarewell," he continued. "I must be off before daybreak. I have debts in Frankfort, and if my departure gets wind, I shall have a dozen duns on my back. Misfortunes never come alone. As for paying, it is out of the question. Amongst us we have only about enough money to reach Amsterdam. Once there—à la grace de Dieu!but I confess my hopes are small. Thanks for your advice—and for your sympathy too, for I saw this morning you were sorry for me, though you did not think I deserved pity. Well, perhaps not. God bless you."
He was leaving the room, but returned.
"I think you said you should stay at Coblenz before returning to England."
"I shall probably be there a few days towards the end of the month."
"Good. If I succeed, you shall hear from me. What is your address there?"
"Poste restantewill find me," I replied, not very covetous of the correspondence, and unwilling to give a more exact direction.
Van Haubitz nodded and left me. At breakfast the next morning I learned that the Dutch baron, as the waiter styled him, had taken his departure at peep of day.
The first days of October found me still at Coblenz, lingering amongst the valleys and vineyards, and loth to exchange them for the autumnal fogsand emptiness of London. Thither, however, I was compelled to return; and I endeavoured to console myself for the necessity by discovering that the green Rhine grew brown, the trees scant of leaves, the evenings long and chilly. I had heard nothing of Van Haubitz, and had ceased to think of him, when, walking out at dusk on the eve of the day fixed for my departure, I suddenly encountered him. He had just arrived by a steamboat coming up stream; his wife and mother-in-law were with him, and they were about to enter a fifth-rate inn, which, two months previously, he would have felt insulted if solicited to patronise. I was shocked by the change that had taken place in all three of them. In five weeks they had grown five years older. Emilie had lost her freshness, her eye its sparkle; and the melancholy smile with which she welcomed me made my heart ache. Madame Sendel's rotund cheeks had collapsed, she looked cross and jaundiced, and more snuffy than ever. Van Haubitz was thin and haggard, his hair and mustaches, formerly glossy and well-trimmed, were ragged and neglected, his dress, once so smart and carefully arranged, was soiled and slovenly. My imagination supplied a rapid and vivid sketch of the anxieties, and disappointments, and heart-burnings, which, more than any actual bodily privations, had worked so great a change in so short a time. Van Haubitz started on seeing me, and falteredin his pace, as if unwilling to enter the shabby hotel in my presence. The hesitation was momentary. "Worse quarters than we used to meet in," said he, with a bitter smile. "I will not ask you into this dog-hole. Wait an instant, and I will walk with you."
Badly as I thought of Van Haubitz, and indisposed as I was to keep up any acquaintance with him, I had not the heart, seeing him so miserable and down in the world, to turn my back upon him at once. So I entered the hotel, and waited in the public room. In a few minutes he reappeared with the two ladies, and we all four strolled out in the direction of the Rhine. I did not ask the Dutchman the result of his journey. It was unnecessary. His disheartened air and general appearance told the tale of disappointment, of humiliating petitions sternly rejected, of hopes fled and a cheerless future. He kept silence the while we walked a hundred yards, and then, having left his wife and mother-in-law out of ear-shot, abruptly began the tale of his mishaps. As I conjectured, he had totally failed in his attempt to mollify his father, who was furious at his temerity in appearing before him, and whose rage redoubled when he heard of his ill-omened marriage. Unfortunately for Van Haubitz, the jeweller and some other tradesmen at Frankfort, so soon as they learned his departure, had forwarded their accounts to the care of theAmsterdam firm; and, although his father had not the remotest intention of paying them, he was incensed in the extreme at the slur thus cast upon his house and name. In short, the unlucky artilleryman at once saw he had no chance of a single kreuzer, or of the slightest countenance from his father. His applications to his brothers, and to one or two more distant relatives, were equally unsuccessful. All were disgusted at his irregularities, angry at his marriage, incredulous of his promises of reform; and, after passing a miserable month in Amsterdam, he set out to accompany his wife to Vienna, whither she was compelled to repair under pain of fine and forfeiture of her engagement. Although living with rigid economy—on bread and water, as Van Haubitz expressed it—their finances had been utterly consumed by their stay in the Dutch capital, and it was only by disposing of every trinket and superfluity (and of necessaries too, I feared, when I remembered the slender baggage that came up with them from the boat) that they had procured the means of travelling, in the cheapest and most humble manner, and with the disheartening certainty of arriving penniless at Vienna. Van Haubitz told me all this, and many other details, with an air of gloomy despondency. He was hopeless, heart-broken, desperate; and certain circumstances of his position, which by some would have been held an alleviation, aggravated itin his eyes. He said little of his wife; but, from what escaped him, I easily gathered that she had shown strength of mind, good feeling and affection for him, and was willing to struggle by his side for a scanty and hard-earned subsistence. His cares and irritable mood prevented his appreciating her attachment, and he looked upon her as an encumbrance, without which he might again rise in the world. He had always entertained a confident expectation of enriching himself by marriage; and this hope, which had buoyed him up under many difficulties, was now gone.
"I have one resource left," said Van Haubitz. "I have pondered over it for the last two days, and have almost determined on its adoption."
"What is it?" I asked.
"If I decide upon it," he replied, "you shall shortly know. 'Tis a desperate one enough."
We had insensibly slackened our pace, and at this moment the ladies came up. Van Haubitz made a gesture, as of impatience at the interruption.
"Wait for me here," he said, and walked away. Without speculating upon the motive of his absence, I stood still, and entered into conversation with the ladies. We were on the quay. The night was mild and calm, but overcast and exceedingly dark. A few feet below us rolled the dark mass of the Rhine, slightly swollen by recent rains. Alight from an adjacent window illuminated the spot, and cast a flickering gleam across the water. Unwilling to refer to their misfortunes, I spoke to Emilie on some general topic. But Madame Sendel was too full of her troubles to tolerate any conversation that did not immediately relate to them, and she broke in with a long history of grievances, of the hard-heartedness of the Amsterdam relations, the cruelty of Emilie's position, her son-in-law's helplessness, and various other matters, in a querulous tone, and with frightful volubility. The poor daughter, I plainly saw, winced under this infliction. I was waiting the smallest opening to interrupt the indiscreet old lady, and revert to common-place, when a distant splash in the water reached my ears. The women also heard it, and at the same instant a presentiment of evil came over us all. Madame Sendel suddenly held her tongue and her breath; Emilie turned deadly pale, and without saying a word, flew along the quay in the direction of the sound. She had gone but a few yards when her strength failed her, and she would have fallen, but for my support. There was a shout, and a noise of men running. Leaving Madame Van Haubitz to the care of her mother, I ran swiftly along the river side, and soon reached a place where the deep water moaned and surged against the perpendicular quay. Here several men were assembled, talking hurriedly and pointing to the river. Otherseach moment arrived, and two boats were hastily shoved off from an adjacent landing-place.
"A man in the river," was the reply to my hasty inquiry.
It was so dark that I could not distinguish countenances close to me, and at a very few yards even the outline of objects was scarcely to be discerned. There were no houses close at hand, and some minutes elapsed before lights were procured. At last several boats put off, with men standing in the bows, holding torches and lanterns high in the air. Meanwhile I had questioned the bystanders, but could get little information; none as to the person to whom the accident had happened. The man who had given the alarm was returning from mooring his boat to a neighbouring jetty, when he perceived a figure moving along the quay a short distance in his front. The figure disappeared, a heavy splash followed, and the boatman ran forward. He could see no one either on shore or in the stream, but heard a sound as of one striking out and struggling in the water. Having learned this much, I jumped into a boat just then putting off, and bid the rowers pull down stream, keeping a short distance from the quay. The current ran strong, and I doubted not that the drowning man had been carried along by it. Two vigorous oars-men pulled till the blades bent, and the boat, aided by the stream, flew through the water. A thirdman held a torch. I strained my eyes through the darkness. Presently a small object floated within a few feet of the boat, which was rapidly passing it. It shone in the torchlight. I struck at it with a boat-hook, and brought it on board. It was a man's cap, covered with oilskin, and I remembered that Van Haubitz wore such a one. Stripping off the cover, I beheld an officer's foraging cap, with a grenade embroidered on its front. My doubts, slight before, were entirely dissipated.
When the search, rendered almost hopeless by the extreme darkness and power of the current, was at last abandoned, I hastened to the hotel, and inquired for Madame Sendel. She came to me in a state of great agitation. Van Haubitz had not returned, but she thought less of that than of the state of her daughter, who, since recovering from a long swoon, had been almost crazed with anxiety. She knew some one had been drowned, and her mind misgave her it was her husband. The foraging-cap, which Madame Sendel immediately recognised, removed all uncertainty. The only hope remaining was, that Van Haubitz, although carried rapidly away by the power of the current, had been able to maintain himself on the surface, and had got ashore at some considerable distance down the river, or had been picked up by a passing boat. But this was a very feeble hope, and for my ownpart, and for more than one reason, I placed no reliance on it. I left Madame Sendel to break the painful intelligence to her daughter, and went home, promising to call again in the morning.
As I had expected, nothing was heard of Van Haubitz, nor any vestige of him found, save the foraging-cap I had picked up. Doubtless, the Rhine had borne down his lifeless corpse to the country of his birth. The next day Coblenz rang with the death of the unfortunate Dutchman. A stranger, and unacquainted with the localities, he was supposed to have walked over the quay by accident. I thought differently; and so I knew did Madame Sendel and Emilie. I saw the former early the next day. She was greatly cast down about her daughter, who had passed a sleepless night, and was weak and suffering, but who nevertheless insisted on continuing her journey the following morning.
"We must go," said her mother; "if we delay, Emilie loses her engagement, and how can we both live on my poor jointure? Weeping will not bring him back, were he worth it. To think of the misery he has caused us!"
I ventured to hint an inquiry as to their means of prosecuting their journey. The old lady understood the intention, and took it kindly. "But she needed no assistance," she said; Van Haubitz (andthis confirmed our strong suspicion of suicide) had given their little stock of money into his wife's keeping only a few hours before his death.
That afternoon I left Coblenz for England.
On a certain Wednesday, about ten years after the incidents I have sketched, I had been enjoying the excellent acting of Bouffé in two of his best characters, and paused for a moment to speak to a friend in the crowded lobby of the St James's Theatre. Whilst thus engaged, I became aware that I was an object of attention to two persons, whom I had an indistinct notion of having seen before, but when or where, or who they might be, I had not the remotest idea. One of them was a comfortable-looking, middle-aged man, with a bald head, a smooth, clean-shaven face, and an incipient ventral rotundity. His complexion was clear and wholesome, his countenance good-humoured, his whole appearance bespoke an existence free from care, nights of sound sleep, and days of tranquil enjoyment. His face was too sleek to be very expressive, but there was a shrewd, quick look in the eye, and I set him down in my mind as a wealthy German merchant or manufacturer (some small peculiarities of costume betrayed the foreigner) come to show London to his wife—a well-favoured dame,fat, fair, but some years short of forty—who accompanied him, and who, as well as her better half, seemed to honour me with very particular notice. My confabulation over, I was leaving the theatre, when a sleek soft hand was gently passed through my arm. It was my friend the stout foreigner. I strained my eyes and my memory, but in vain; I felt very puzzled, and doubtless looked so, for he smiled, and advancing his head, whispered a name in my ear. It was that of Van Haubitz.
I started, looked again, doubted, and was at last convinced.Minusmustache and whisker, which were closely shaven, and half his hair, of which the remainder was considerably grizzled;plusa degree of corpulence such as I should never have thought the slender lieutenant of artillery capable of acquiring; his heated, sunburnt complexion and dissipated look, exchanged for a fresh colour and benevolent placidity—the Dutchman I had left in the Rhine stood beside me in the lobby of the French theatre. I turned to the lady: she was less changed than her companion, and now that I was upon the track, I recognised Emilie Sendel. By this time we were in the street. Van Haubitz handed his wife into a carriage.
"Come and sup with us," he said, "and I will explain."
I mechanically obeyed, and in less than three minutes, still tongue-tied by astonishment, I alightedat the door of a fashionable hotel in a street adjoining Piccadilly.
A few lines will convey to the reader the substance of the long conversation which kept the resuscitated Dutchman and myself from our beds for fully two hours after our unexpected meeting. I had been right in supposing that he had thrown himself voluntarily into the river; wrong in my belief that he meditated suicide. An excellent swimmer, he had taken the water to get rid of his wife. He might certainly have chosen a drier method, and have given her the slip in the night-time or on the road; but she had shown, whenever he referred to the possibility of their separation, such a determination to remain with him at all risks and sacrifices, that he felt certain she would pursue him as soon as she discovered his absence. He had formed a wild scheme of returning to Amsterdam, and haunting his family until, through mere weariness and vexation, they supplied him with funds for an outfit to Sumatra. There he trusted to redeem his fortunes, as he had heard that others of no greater abilities or better character than himself had already done. A more extravagant project was never formed, and indeed all his acts, during the six weeks that followed his marriage, were more or less eccentric and ill-judged. This he admitted, when relating them to me, and probably would not have been sorry to place them to the score of actual mentalderangement. The redeeming touch in his conduct at that, the most discreditable period of his life, was his leaving, as I have already mentioned, what money he had to his wife and her mother, reserving but a few florins for his own support. With these in his pocket, he proposed proceeding on foot to Amsterdam. After landing on the right bank of the Rhine, he walked the greater part of the night as the best means of drying his saturated garments. When weariness at last compelled him to pause, it was not yet daylight, no house was open, and he threw himself on some straw in a farmyard. He awoke in a high fever, the result of his immersion, of exposure and fatigue, acting on a frame heated and weakened by anxiety and mental suffering. He obtained shelter at the neighbouring farm-house, whose kind-hearted inhabitants carefully tended him for several weeks, during which his life was more than once despaired of. His convalescence was long, and not till the close of the year could he resume his journey northwards, by short stages, chiefly on foot. Unfavourable as his prospects were, his good star had not yet set. This very illness, as occasioning a delay, was a stroke of good fortune. Had he at once proceeded to Holland, his family, in hopes to get rid of him for ever, would probably have given him the small sum he needed for an outfit to the Indian Archipelago, and he would have sailed thither before the 31st of December, onwhich day his father, a joyous liver and confirmed votary of Bacchus, eat and drank to such an extent to celebrate the exit of the old year and commencement of the new, that he fell down, on his way to his bed, in a thundering fit of apoplexy, and was a corpse before morning. The day of his funeral, Van Haubitz, footsore and emaciated, and reduced to his last pfenning, walked wearily into the city of Amsterdam. There a great surprise awaited him.
"Your father had not disinherited you?" I exclaimed, when the Dutchman made a momentary pause at this point of his narrative.
"He had left a will devising his entire property to my brothers, and not even naming me. But a slight formality was omitted, which rendered the document of no more value than the parchment it was drawn upon. The signature was wanting. My father had the weakness, no uncommon one, of disliking whatever reminded him of his mortality. He would have fancied himself nearer his grave had he signed his will. And thus he had delayed till it was too late. I found myself joint heir with my brothers. By far the greater part of my father's large capital was embarked in his bank, and in extensive financial operations, which it would have been necessary to liquidate at considerable disadvantage, to operate the partition prescribed by law. Seeing this, I proposed to my brothers to admit me as partner in the firm, with the stipulation that Ishould have no active share in its direction, until my knowledge of business and steadiness of conduct gave them the requisite confidence in me. After some deliberation they agreed to this; and three years later their opinion of me had undergone such a change, that two of them retired to estates in the country, leaving me the chief management of the concern."
"And Madame Van Haubitz; when did she rejoin you?"
"Immediately the change in my fortunes occurred. Reckless as I at that time was, and utterly devoid of feeling as you must have thought me, I could not remember without emotion the disinterested affection, delicacy, and unselfishness she had exhibited on discovery of my real circumstances. During my long illness I had had time to reflect, and when I left my sick-bed in that rude but hospitable German farm-house, it was as a penitent for past offences, and with a strong resolution to atone them. Within a week after my father's funeral, I was on my way to Vienna, to fetch Emilie to the opulent home she had anticipated when she married me. Her joy at seeing me was scarcely increased when she heard that I had become the rich banker she had at first thought me."
"And Madame Sendel?"
"Returned to Amsterdam with us. There was good about the old lady, and by purloining her artificials,limiting her snuff, and soaking her in tea, she was made endurable enough. Until her death, which occurred a couple of years ago, she passed her time alternately with us and her younger daughter."
"She became reconciled to Mademoiselle Ameline?"
"Ameline had been Countess J—— all the time. She was privately married. For certain family reasons the Count had conditioned that their union should for a while be kept secret. Seeing that her equivocal position and her mother's displeasure preyed upon her health and spirits, he declared his marriage. She left the stage to become a reigning beauty in the best society of Austria, lady of half-a-dozen castles, and sovereign mistress of as many thousand Hungarian boors."
Van Haubitz remained some time in London, and I saw him often. He was as much changed in character as in personal appearance. The sharp lessons received about the period of our first acquaintance had made a strong impression on him; and the summer tide of prosperity suddenly setting in, had enabled him to realise good intentions and honourable resolves, which the chill current of adversity might have frozen in the germ. Some of those who read these lines may have occasion, when visiting the country stigmatised by the snarling Frenchman as the land ofcanards,canaux, andcanaille,to receive cash in the busy counting-house, and hospitality in the princely mansion of one of its most respected bankers. None, I am well assured, will discern in their amiable and exemplary entertainer any vestige of the disreputable impulses and evil passions that sullied the early life of "My Friend the Dutchman."
No. II.
HORACE LEICESTER.
[MAGA.August 1845.]
Oxford! Alma Mater! not to love thee were indeed the ingratitude of a degenerate son. Let the whiners of the Conventicle rail at thee for a mother of heretics, and the Joseph Humes of domestic economy propose to adapt the scale of thy expenses to their own narrow notions—I uphold thee to be the queen of all human institutions—the incarnated union of Church and State—royal in thy revenues as in thy expenditure—thy doctrine as orthodox as thy dinners, thy politics as sound as thy port.
Oxford! who are they that rail at her? who dare to lift their voice against that seat of high and holy memories? The man who boasts a private education (so private, that his most intimate friends have never found it out), who, innocent himself of all academic experiences and associations, grudges toothers that superiority which they never boast indeed, but to which his secret soul bears envious witness. Or the rich nonconformist, risen perhaps from obscurity to a rank in society which gives him the choice of indulging either his spleen or his pride—either to send his eldest son as a gentleman-commoner to Christ-Church, to swallow the Thirty-nine Articles with his champagne; or to have his fling at the Church through her universities—accusing Churchmen of bigotry, and exclusiveness, and illiberality, because Dissenters do not found colleges of their own. Or, worse than all, the unworthy disciple who (like the noxious plant that has grown up beneath the shade of some goodly tree) has drawn no nobility of soul from the associations which surrounded his ungrateful youth: for whom all the reality and romance of academic education were alike in vain: sneering at the honours which he could not obtain, denying the existence of opportunities which he neglected; the basest of approvers, he quotes to his own eternal infamy the scenes of riot and dissipation, the alternations of idleness and extravagance, which make up his sole recollections of university life: and looking, without one glance of affection, upon the face of his fair and graceful mother, makes the chance mole, or the early wrinkle, which he traces there, the subject of his irreverent jest, forgets the kindness of which he was unworthy, and remembers for evil the wholesomediscipline which was irksome only to such as him.
"Non hæc jocosæ conveniunt lyræ;"
I admit mine is not the tongue or pen for such a subject; and Oxford has, I hope, no lack of abler champions. But it was geese, you know, who once saved the Capitol; and I must have my hiss at the iniquitous quackeries which people seek to perpetrate under the taking title of University Reform. And when I, loving Oxford as I do, see some of her own sons arrayed against her, I can only remember this much of my philosophy—that there are cases when to be angry becomes a duty. Men who, knowing nothing of the universities from experience, think proper to run them down, succeed at all events in exposing one crying evil—the absurdity of meddling with what one does not understand. We who know better may afford to smile at once at their spite and their ignorance. But he who lifts his voice against the mother that bore him, can fix no darker blot upon her fame than the disgrace of having given birth to him.
Show me the man who did not like Oxford, and I will show you either a sulky misanthrope or an affected ass. Many, many indeed, are the unpleasant recollections which, in the case of nearly all of us, will mingle with the joy with which we recall our college days. More than the ghosts of duns departed, perhaps unpaid; more than the heart-burningsof that visionary fellowship, for which we were beaten (we verily believe, unfairly) by a neck; more than that loved and lost ideal of a first class, which we deserved, but did not get (the opinions of our examiners not coinciding in that point with our own); yes, more than all these, comes forcibly to many minds, the self-accusing silent voice that whispers of time wasted and talents misapplied—kind advice, which the heat of youth misconstrued or neglected—jewels of price that once lay strewed upon the golden sands of life, then wantonly disregarded, or picked up but to be flung away, and which the tide of advancing years has covered from our view for ever—blessed opportunities of acquiring wisdom, human and divine, which never can return.
Yet in spite of all this, if there be any man who can say that Oxford is not to him a land of pleasant memories, "Μήτ' ἐμοὶ παρέστιος γένοιτο"—which is, being freely translated, "May he never put his legs under my mahogany"—that's all. I never knew him yet, and have no wish to make his acquaintance. He may have carried off every possible university honour for what I care; he is more hopelessly stupid, in my view of things, than if he had been plucked fifteen times. If he was fond of reading, or of talking about reading; fond of hunting, or talking about hunting; fond of walking, riding, rowing, leaping, or any possible exercise besides dancing; if he loved pleasant gardens or solemn cloisters; learned retirementor unlearned jollification—in a word, if he had any imaginable human sympathies, and cared for anything besides himself, he would have liked Oxford. Men's tastes differ, no doubt; but to have spent four years of the spring of one's life in one of the most magnificent cities and best societies in the world, and not to have enjoyed it—this is not a variety of taste, but its privation.
I fancy there is a mistaken opinion very prevalent, that young and foolish, older and wiser, are synonymous terms. Stout gentlemen of a certain age, brimful of proprieties, shake their heads alarmingly, and talk of the folly of boys; as if they were the only fools. And if at any time, in the fulness of their hearts, they refer to some freak of their own youth, they appear to do it with a sort of apology to themselves, that such wise individuals as they are now should ever have done such things! And as the world stands at present, it is the old story of the Lion and the Painter; the elderly gentlemen are likely to have it their own way; they say what they like, while the young ones are content to do what they like. And the more absurdity a man displays in his teens (and some, it must be confessed, are absurd enough), the more insupportable an air of wisdom does he put on when he gets settled. As there is no hope of these sedate gentry being sent to College again to teach the rising generation of under-graduates the art of precocious gravity, andstill less hope of their arriving at it of themselves, perhaps there is no harm in mooting the question on neutral ground, whether such a consummation as that of putting old heads upon young shoulders is altogether desirable.
Wherefore, I, Frank Hawthorne—being of the age of nine-and-twenty, or thereabouts, and of sound mind, and about to renounce for ever all claim and title to be considered a young man; having married a wife, and left sack and all other bad habits; having no longer any fellowship with under-graduates, or army subs, or medical students, or young men about town, or any other class of the heterogeneous irregulars who make up "Young England"—being a perfectly disinterested party in the question, inasmuch as having lost my reputation for youth, I have never acquired one for wisdom—hereby raise my voice against the intolerable cant, which assumes every man to be a harebrained scapegrace at twenty, and a Solomon at forty-five. Youth sows wild oats, it may be; too many men in more advanced life seem to me to sow no crop of any kind. There are empty fools at all ages; but "an old fool"——(musty as the proverb is, it is rather from neglect than over-application). I have known men by the dozen, who in their youth were either empty-headed coxcombs or noisy sots; does my reader think that any given number of additional years has made them able statesmen, sound lawyers,or erudite divines? that because they have become honourable by a seat in Parliament, learned by courtesy, reverend by office, they are therefore really more useful members of society than when they lounged the High Street, or woke the midnight echoes of the quadrangle? Nay, life is too short for the leopard to change his spots, or the Ethiopian his skin; one can but pare the claws of the first, and put a suit of the last European fashion upon the other.
Let any man run over in his own mind the list of those school and college companions with whom, after the lapse of ten years or so, he has still an opportunity of occasionally renewing his acquaintance, and judging of the effect which time has had upon their habits and characters. In how many cases can he trace any material alteration, beyond what results from the mere accidents of time and place? He finds, it is to be hoped, good principles developed, warm impulses ripened into active habits, exaggerations softened down (for I am giving him credit for not choosing his companions, even in youth, among the vicious in heart and principle); but if he finds in any what he can call achangeat all, then I ask, in how many instances is it a change for the better? or does he not find it rather where there was no sterling value in the metal, which, as the gloss of youth wears off, loses its only charm?
Thirty is the turning-point of a man's life; when marrying becomes a now-or-never sort of business,and dinners begin to delight him more than dancing. As I said just now, then, I stand just at the corner; and, looking round before I turn it, I own somewhat of a shyness for the company of those "grave and reverend seniors" who are to be my fellow-travellers hereafter through life. There are certain points on which I fear we are scarce prepared to agree. I must have one window open for the first few miles of the journey at all events—that I may look behind me. Life's a fast train, and one can't expect to be allowed to get out at the stations; still less to ask the engineer to put back, because we have left our youth behind us. Yet there are some things in which I hope always to be a boy; I hope ever to prefer thoughtlessness to heartlessness, imprudence to selfishness, impulse to calculation. It is hard enough to part with all the fiery spirits, the glowing imaginations, the elasticity of mind and body which we lose as age creeps on; but if, with the bright summer weather and cloudless skies of youth, to which we are content to bid farewell, we must lose, too, the "sunshine of the breast"—the "bloom of heart"—then well might the poet count him happy who died in early spring—who knew nothing of life but its fair promises, and passed away in happy scepticism of the winter which was to come.
Talk of putting old heads upon young shoulders! Heaven forbid! It would but be making them stoopprematurely. If indeed we could put young hearts into old bodies occasionally, we might do some good; or if there could ever be combined in some fortunate individual, throughout his life, the good qualities peculiar to each successive climacteric; if we could mix just enough of the acid and the bitter, which are apt to predominate so unhappily after a long rubbing through the world, to qualify the fiery spirit of youth, and prevent its sweetness from cloying, the compound would undoubtedly be a very pleasant one. But this, it is to be feared, like many other desiderata, is too good to be attainable; and the experience which we undoubtedly want in early life, we acquire too often at the cost of that freshness of heart, which nature intended as a gift still more valuable.
Nowhere does the old Stagyrite display a more consummate knowledge of what men are made of, than in his contrasted characters of youth and age. I wonder how many of the old gentlemen who call themselves philosophers in this degenerate age, ever read or remember what he says on the subject. It is a great comfort, when one is arguing against so much collective wisdom, to feel that one has such authority to fall back upon; and I have the less hesitation in bringing my old friend Aristotle forward to help me, because I can assure my unlearned readers, ladies and others, that I am not going to quote any thing nearly so grave and sensible asmodern philosophy. "Stingy, illnatured, suspicious, selfish, narrow-minded"—these, with scarce a redeeming quality, are some of the choice epithets which he strings together as the characteristics of the respectable old governors and dowagers of his day; while the young, although, as he confesses, somewhat too much the creatures of impulse, and indebted to it for some of their virtues as well as vices, are trustful towards others, honest in themselves, open-handed and open-hearted, warm friends and brave enemies. It is true, he observes, they have, in a large degree, the fault common to all honest men, they are "easily humbugged;" an admitted failing which perhaps may let us into the secret of their sitting down so quietly under the imputation of a hundred others. He urges, too, elsewhere, a fact I am not disposed to battle about, that young men do not make good philosophers; but this is in a book which he wrote for the use of his own son, wherein he probably thought it his duty to take the conceit out of his heir-apparent; but if he ever allowed the young philosopher to get a sight of the other book containing the two characters aforesaid, it may be doubted whether he found him as "easily humbugged" afterwards.
Remember, reader, as I said before, I claim to occupy neutral ground. If I essay to defend youth from some injustice which it suffers at the hands of partial judges, it is as an amateur advocate rather thanan accredited champion—for I am young no longer. If I am rash enough to couch a lance against that venerable phantom, which, under the name of Wisdom, hovers round grey hairs, I am but preparing a rod for my own back—for I feel myself growing old. I admit it with a sigh; but the sigh is not for the past only, but even more for the present. I mourn not so much for that which Time has taken away, as for the insufficiency of that which it brings instead. I would rejoice to be relieved from the dominion of the hot follies of youth, if I could escape at the same time the degrading yoke of the cooler vices of maturity. I do not find men grow better as they grow older; wiser they may grow, but it is the wisdom of the serpent. We scarce grow less sensual, less vain, less eager after what we think pleasure; I would we continued as generous and as warm. We gain the cunning to veil our passions, to regulate even our vices according to the scale (and that no parsimonious one) which what we call "society" allows; we lose the enthusiasm which in some degree excused our follies, with the light-heartedness which made them delightful. Few men among us are they who can look back upon the years gone by, and not feel that, if these may justly be charged with folly, the writing of the accusation that stands against their riper age is of a graver sort.
It is melancholy, rather than amusing, to hearmen of a certain age rail against the faults and extravagance of their juniors. Angry that they themselves are no longer young, they visit with a rod of iron such an intolerable offence in others. Even newspapers are always eloquent against the disgusting immoralities of breaking knockers and bonneting policemen. TheTimesturns censor upon such an "ungentlemanly outrage;" theWeekly Despatchhas its propriety shocked by such "freaks of the aristocracy;" and both, in their zeal to reprobate offences so dangerous to the best interests of society, sacrifice somewhat of that "valuable space" which should have been devoted to the bulletin of the health, or the history of the travels, of the "gallant officer" who last deliberately shot his friend in a duel; or the piquant details of the lastcrim. con., with the extraordinary disclosures expected to be made by the "noble defendant." Society has no sympathy with vices to which it has no temptation; it might have done foolish things in its day, but has long ago seen the folly of them. So we make a graceful acknowledgment of having been wrong once, for the sake of congratulating ourselves upon being so very right now.
Let me then, for some few moments, recall those scenes which, on the stage of life, have passed away for ever; and forgetting, as memory loves to do, the evil that was in them, let it be not idle repining to lament the good.
Oh! dark yet pleasant quadrangle, round whose wide area I might wander now, a stranger among strangers, where are they who once gave life and mirth to cheer those ancient walls? There were full a score of rooms, congeniallares, in which no hour of day or night would have found me other than a welcome guest. I had friends, yea, friends, within those prison-like windows—warm hearts walled in by thy cold grey stones—friends that had thoughts, and feelings, and pursuits in common—who were not hospitable in words alone, suffering each other's presence with well-concealedennui—but friends in something more than in the name. In vain, among the cold conventionalities of life, shall I look for the warm and kindly welcome, the sympathy of feeling, the unrestrained yet courteous familiarity of intercourse, which was part and parcel of a college life; and if for this only I should say of Oxford, that I shall not look upon its like again—if for this only, I doubt whether the years of my youthful pilgrimage were altogether evil, who shall gainsay me? Where, or in what society of wise, and orderly, and respectable "grown-up children," shall I find the sincerity and warm-heartedness that once were the atmosphere of my daily life? Where is the friend of my maturer choosing, into whose house I can walk at any time, and feel sure I am no intruder? Where is the man, among those with whom I am by hard fate compelled to associate, whodoes not measure his regard, his hospitality, his very smiles, by my income, my station in society—anything but by myself? Older and wiser!—oh yes!—youthful friendship is very foolish in such matters.
But I suppose I must put up, as I best may, with the accumulating weight of years and wisdom. It won't do to give up one's degree, and begin again at the university, even if they leave us a university worth going to. At all events, one could not go back and find there those "old familiar faces" that made it what it was; and it is more pleasant to look upon it all—the place and its old occupants—as still existing in some dream-land or other, than to return to find an old acquaintance in every stick and stone, while every human face and voice is strange to us.
Yet one does meet friends in old scenes, sometimes, when the meeting is as unexpected as delightful. And just so, in my last visit to Oxford, did I stumble upon Horace Leicester. We met in the quadrangle where we had parted some six years back, just as we might if we had supped together the night before; whereas we had been all the time hundreds of miles asunder: and we met as unrestrainedly, only far more cordially. Neither of us had much time to spare in Oxford, but we dined together of course; talked over old friends, and told old stories. As to the first, it was strange enough to moralise upon the after-fortunes of some of our contemporaries. One—of whom, for habitualabsence from lectures, and other misdemeanours many and various, the tutors had prophesied all manner of evil, and who had been dismissed by the Principal at his final leave-taking, with the remark that he was the luckiest man he had ever known, inasmuch as he had been perseveringly idle without being plucked, and mixed up in every row without being rusticated—was now working hard day and night as a barrister, engaged as a junior on committee business the whole Session, and never taking a holiday except on the Derby day. The ugliest little rascal of our acquaintance, and as stupid as a post, was married to a pretty girl with a fortune of thirty thousand. Another, and one of the best of us—Charley White—who united the business-habits of a man with the frolic of a schoolboy, and who ought to have been added to the roll of the College benefactors, as having been the founder of the Cricket and the Whist Club, and having restored to its old place on the river, at much cost and pains, the boat which had been withdrawn for the last five years, and reduced the sundry desultory idlenesses of the under-graduates into something like method and order—Charley White was now rector of a poor and populous parish in Yorkshire, busily engaged in building a new church and schools, opening Provident Societies, and shutting up beer-shops, and instructing the rising generation of his parishioners in catechism and cricket alternately. While thesteadiest (I was very near saying the only steady man) among our mutual acquaintance, who looked at every sixpence before he spent it, checked his own washing-lists, went to bed at ten o'clock, and was, in short, an exemplary character (he was held out to me, on my first entrance, as a valuable acquaintance for any young man, but I soon despaired of successfully imitating so bright a model)—well, this gentleman having been taken into partnership, somewhat prematurely perhaps on the strength of the aforesaid reputation, by his father's firm—they were Liverpool merchants of high standing—had thought proper, disgusted probably with the dissipations and immoralities of trade, to retire to America in search of purity and independence, without going through the form of closing his accounts with the house. The Liverpudleians, indeed, according to Horace's account, gave a somewhat ugly name to the transaction; he had been cashier to the firm, they said, who were minus some tens of thousands thereby; but as the senior partner was known to have smoked cigars at a preparatory school (thereby showing what hewouldhave done had he been sent to Oxford), whereas our friend was always "a steady man," I leave the reader to judge which party is entitled to the most credit.
It was after we had separated that a friend of mine, not an Oxford man, who had dined with us, and appeared much amused by some of Horace'sreminiscences, asked me the very puzzling question, "Was your friend Leicester what they call a 'rowingman' at College?" Now, I protest altogether against the division of under-graduates into reading men and rowing men, as arbitrary and most illogical; there being a great many who have no claim to be reckoned either in one class or the other, and a great many who hover between both. And this imaginary distinction, existing as it notoriously does at Oxford, and fostered and impressed upon men by the tutors (often unintentionally, or with the very best intentions), is productive in many cases of a great deal of harm. A man (orboyif you please) is taught to believe, upon his very first entrance, that one of these characters will infallibly cling to him, and that he has only to choose between the two. For the imaginary division creates a real one; in many colleges, a man who joins a boat's crew, or a cricket club, or goes out now and then with the harriers, is looked upon with suspicion by the authorities at once; and by a very natural consequence, a man who wants to read his five or six hours a-day quietly, finds that some of his pleasantest companions look upon him as a slow coach. So, probably before the end of his first term, he is hopelessly committed, at nineteen, to a consistency of character rarely met with at fifty. If he lays claim to the reputation of a reading man, and has an eye to the loaves and fishes in the way of scholarships and fellowships,he is compelled, by the laws of hiscaste, to renounce some of the most sensible and healthful amusements which a university life offers. He must lead a very humdrum sort of life indeed. It is not enough that he should be free from the stains of vice and immorality; that his principles and habits should be those of a gentleman; that he should avoid excesses, and be observant of discipline; this the university would have a right to expect from all who are candidates for her honours and emoluments. But there is a conventional character which he must put on besides this. I say "put on;" because, however natural it may be to some men, it cannot possibly be so to all. His exercise must be taken at stated times and places: it must consist principally of walking, whether he be fond of it or not, varied occasionally by a solitary skiffing expedition down the river, or a game of billiards with some very steady friend on the sly. His dress must exhibit either the negligence of a sloven (in case he be an aspirant for very high honours indeed), or the grave precision of a respectable gentleman of forty. He must eschew all such vanities as white trousers and well-cut boots. He must be profoundly ignorant of all university intelligence that does not bear in some way on the schools; must be utterly indifferent what boat is at the head of the river, or whether Drake's hounds are fox or harriers. He must never be seen out of his rooms, except at lecture, beforetwo o'clock, and never return to a wine-party after chapel. His judgment of the merits of port and sherry must be confined principally to the fact of one being red and the other white, and the compounding of punch must be to him a mystery unfathomable. Now, if he can be, or assume to be, all this, then he will be admitted into the most orthodox and steady set in his college; and if he have, besides, an ordinary amount of scholarship, and tact enough to talk judiciously about his books and his reading, he may get up a very fair reputation indeed. And when at his final examination he makes, as nine-tenths of such men do make, a grand crash, and his name comes out in the third or fourth class, or he gets "gulfed" altogether—it is two to one but his friends and his tutor look upon him, and talk of him, as rather an ill-used individual. He was "unlucky in his examination"—"the essay did not suit him"—they were "quite surprised at his failure"—"his health was not good the last term or two"—"he was too nervous." These are cases which have occurred in every man's experience: men read ten hours a-day, with a watch by their side, cramming in stuff that they do not understand, are talked about as "sure firsts" till one gets sick of their very names, assume all the airs which really able men seldom do assume, and take at last an equal degree with others who have been acquiring the same amount of knowledge with infinitely lesspretension, and who, without moping the best part of their lives in an artificial existence, will make more useful members of society in the end. "How was it," said an old lady in the country to me one day, "that young Mr C—— did not get a first class? I understand he read very hard, and I know he refused every invitation to dinner when he was down here in the summer vacation?" "That was the very reason, my dear madam," said I; "you may depend upon it." She stared, of course; but I believe I was not far out.
Let men read as much as they will, and as hard as they will, on any subjects for which they have the ability and inclination; but never let them suppose they are to lay down one code of practice to suit all tempers and constitutions. Cannot a man be a scholar, and a gentleman, and a good fellow at the same time?
And, after all, where is the broad moral distinction between thesesoi-disantsteady men, and those whom they are pleased to consider as "rowing" characters? it has always seemed to me rather apocryphal. If a man thinks proper to amuse himself with a chorus in his own rooms at one o'clock in the morning, it seems hardly material whether it be Greek or English—Sophocles or Tom Moore. It's a matter of taste, and tastes differ. Nor do I think the morality of Horace or Aristophanes, or the theology of Lucretius, so peculiarly admirable, asto render them,per se, fitter subjects for the exclusive exercise of a young man's faculties than "the Pickwick Papers," or "The Rod and the Gun." I have heard—(I never saw, nor will I believe it)—of the profanity of certain sporting under-graduates, who took into chapel the racing calendar, bound in red morocco, instead of a prayer-book; I hold it to have been the malicious fiction of some would-be university reformer; but, even if true, I am not sure that I much prefer that provident piety which I have noticed getting up its Greek within the same walls by means of a Septuagint and Greek liturgy. Religion is one thing, classical learning another, and sporting information another; all totally distinct, and totally different; the first immeasurably above the other two, but standing equidistant from both. It does not make a man one whit the better to know that Coræbus won the cup at OlympiaB.C.776, than it does to know that Priam didnotwin the St Leger at DoncasterA.D.1830; from all I can make out, the Greeks on the turf at present are not much worse than their old namesakes; I dare say there was a fair amount of black-legism on both occasions. Men injure their moral and physical health by reading as much as by other things; it takes quite as much out of a man, and puts as little in him to any good purpose, to get up his logic as to pull in an eight-oar.
Besides, if one is to read and enter into the spiritof a dozen different authors, one dull monotonous round of physical existence seems ill-fitted to call out the requisite variety of mental powers. I hold that there are divers and sundry fit times, and places, and states of mind, suited to different lines of reading. If a man is at work upon history, by all means let him sport oak rigidly against all visitors; let him pile up his authorities and references on every vacant chair all round him, and get a clear notion of it by five or six hours' uninterrupted and careful study. Or, if he has a system of philosophy to get up, let him sit down with his head cool, his window open (not the one looking into quad.), let him banish from his mind all minor matters, and not break off in the chain of argument so long as he can keep his brain clear and his eyes open. Even then, a good gallop afterwards, or a cigar and a glass of punch, with some lively fellow who is no philosopher, will do him far more good than a fagging walk of so many measured miles, with the studious companion whose head is stuffed as full of such matter as his own, and whose talk will be of disputed passages, and dispiriting anticipations of a "dead floorer" in the schools. But if a man wants to make acquaintance with such books as Juvenal, or Horace, or Aristophanes, he may surely do it to quite as good purpose, and with far more relish, basking under a tree in summer, or with a friend over a bottle in winter.
The false tone of society of which I have been speaking had its influence upon Horace Leicester. Coming up to the university from a public school, with a high character, a fair amount of scholarship, and a host of acquaintances, he won the good-will at once of dons and of under-graduates, and bid fair to be as universal a favourite at college as he had been at Harrow. Never did a man enter upon an academic life under happier auspices, nor, I believe, with a more thorough determination to enjoy it in every way. He did not look upon his emancipation from school discipline as a license for idleness, nor intend to read the less because he could now read what he pleased, and when he pleased. For, not to mention that Horace was ambitious, and had at one time an eye to the class list—he had a taste for reading, and a strong natural talent to appreciate what he read. But if he had a taste for reading, he had other tastes as well, and, as he thought, not incompatible; much as he admired his Roman namesake, he could not devote his evenings exclusively to his society, but preferred carrying his precepts into practice occasionally with more modern companions; and he had no notion that during the next four years of his life he was to take an interest in no sports but those of the old Greeks and Romans, and mount no horse but Pegasus. For a term or two, Leicester got on very well; attended lectures, read steadily till one ortwo o'clock, when there was nothing particular going on, kept a horse, hired an alarm, and seldom cut morning chapel, or missed a meet if within reasonable distance. It was a course of life which, in after days, he often referred to with a sigh as having been most exemplary; and I doubt whether he was far wrong. But it did not last. For a time his gentlemanly manners, good humour, and good taste, carried it off with all parties; but it was against the ordinary routine, and could not hold up against the popular prejudice. The reading men eyed his top-boots with suspicion; the rowing men complained he was growing a regularsap, always sporting oak when they wanted him. Then his wine-parties were a source of endless tribulation to him. First of all, he asked all those with whom he was most intimate among his old schoolfellows to meet each other, adding one or two of his new acquaintances: and a pretty mess he made of it. Men who had sat on the same form with him and with each other at Harrow, and had betrayed no such marked differences in their tastes as to prevent their associating very pleasantly there, at Oxford, he found, had been separated wide as the poles by this invisible, but impassable, line of demarcation: to such a degree, indeed, that although all had called upon Horace, as they had upon each other, before it seemed decided on which side they were to settle, yet when they now metat his rooms, they had become strangers beyond a mere civil recognition, and had not a single subject to converse upon in common. In fact, they were rather surprised than pleased to meet at all; and it was in vain their host tried to get them to amalgamate. Many seemed to take a pleasure in showing how decidedly they belonged to one set or the other. One would talk of nothing on earth besides hunting, and sat silent and sulky when Horace turned the conversation; another affected an utter ignorance of all that was going on in the University that was not connected with class-lists, scholarships, &c. What provoked him most was, that some of those who gave themselves the most pedantic airs, and would have been double first-class men undeniably, if talking could have done it, were those whose heads he well knew were as empty as the last bottle, and which made him think that some men must take to reading at Oxford, simply because they had faculties for nothing else.
At all events, Horace found the mixed system would not answer for entertaining his friends. So the next time he asked a few of the reading men, some of whom he knew used to be good fellows, together; and as he really had a kindred taste with them on many subjects, he found an hour or so pass away very pleasantly: when just as he was passing the wine about the third round, and his own brilliancy and good-humour were beginning to infectsome of his guests—so that one grave genius of twenty had actually so far forgotten himself as to fill a bumper by mistake—up jumped the senior man of the party, and declaring that he had an engagement to walk with a friend at seven, politely took his leave. This was the signal for a general dispersion; in vain did Horace assure them they should have some coffee in the course of an hour, and entreat some one or two to return. Off they all went, with sundry smiles and shakes of the head, and left their unfortunate host sitting alone in his glory over the first glass of a newly opened bottle of claret.
I happened to be crossing the quadrangle from chapel in company with Savile, at the moment when Leicester put his head out of his window as if to inquire of the world in general what on earth he was to do with himself for the next hour or two. Savile he hailed at once, and begged him to come up; and though I knew but little of him, and had never been in his rooms before, still, as I was one or two terms his senior, there was nothing contrary even to Oxford etiquette in my accompanying Savile. We laughed heartily when he explained his disappointment. Savile tried to comfort him by the assurance that, as he had an hour to spare, he would sit down and help him to finish a bottle or two of claret with a great deal of pleasure; and was inclined to attribute the failure of the evening, in a great measure, to his name not having beenincluded in the list of invitations—an omission by which he declared all parties had been the losers; Horace's reading friends standing very much in need of some one to put a little life into them, and himself, as a candidate for a degree, having missed a fair opportunity of meeting, among so many choice fellows, some one to "put him up to the examiners' dodges." But Leicester was irrecoverably disgusted. Nothing, he declared, would ever induce him to ask a party of reading men to his rooms again; and from that hour he seemed to eschew fellowship with the whole fraternity. Not that he became idle all at once; on the contrary, I believe, for some time he worked on steadily, or at least tried to work; but he was naturally fond of society, and having failed to find what he wanted, was reduced to make the best of such as he could find. So he gradually became acquainted with a set of men who, whatever their good qualities might be, had certainly no claim whatever to be considered hard readers, and who would have considered a symposium which broke up at seven o'clock as unsatisfactory as a tale without a conclusion. Amongst these, his gentlemanly manners and kindness of heart made him beloved, while his talents gave him a kind of influence; and, though he must have felt occasionally that he was not altogether in his right place, and that, besides his popular qualities, he had higher tastes and endowments with whichthe majority of his companions could hardly sympathise, he was too light-hearted to philosophise much on the subject, and contented himself with enjoying his popularity, occasionally falling back upon his own resources, and keeping up, in a desultory kind of way, his acquaintance with scholarship and literature. The reading men of course looked upon him as a lost sheep; the tutors shook their heads about him; if he did well, it was set down as the result of accident; while all his misdoings were labouring in his vocation. For, agreeably to the grand division aforesaid, Horace was now set down as a "rowing-man;" and he soon made the discovery, and did more thereupon to deserve the character than he ever would have done otherwise. He was very willing to go on in his own way, if all parties would but let him alone; he was not going to be made a proselyte to long walks, and toast and water, nor had he any conscientious abhorrence of supper-parties; and, as his prospects in life were in no way dependent upon a class or a scholarship, and he seemed to be tacitly repudiated by theliteratiof his college, young and old, on account of some of his aforesaid heterodox notions on the subject of study, he accustomed himself gradually to set their opinions at defiance; while the moderate reading, which encouragement and emulation had made easy at school, became every day more and more distasteful.
Horace's tottering reputation was at last completely overset in the eyes of the authorities by a little affair which was absurd enough, but in which he himself was as innocent as they were. It happened that a youthful cousin of his, whose sole occupation for the last twelve months of his life had been the not over-profitable one of waiting for a commission, had come up to Oxford for two or three days, pursuant to invitation, to see a little of the manners and customs of the inhabitants. I think he had some slight acquaintance with our then vice-principal—a good-natured, easy man—and Horace had got leave for him to occupy a set of very small, dark rooms, which, as the college was not very full, had been suffered to remain vacant for the last two or three terms; they were so very unattractive a domicile that the last Freshman to whom they were offered as a Hobson's choice, was currently reported, in the plenitude of his disgust, to have taken his name off the booksinstanter. It is not usual to allow strangers to sleep within college walls at all; but our discipline was somewhat lax in those days. So Mr Carey had a bed put up for him in the aforesaid quarters. He was, of course, dulyfêted, and made much of by Horace and his friends; and a dozen of us sat down to a capital dinner in the rooms of the former, on the strength of having to entertain a "stranger from the country;" the hospitality of Oxford relaxingits rules even in favour of under-graduates upon such occasions. It must have been somewhere towards the next morning, when two or three of us accompanied young Carey down to No. 8; and, after chatting with him till he was half undressed, left him, as we thought, safe and quiet. However, soon after we had retired, some noisy individual in the same staircase thought proper to give a view-hollo out of his window, for the purpose of wishing the public good-night. Now there was one of the Fellows, a choleric little old gentleman, always in residence, holding some office, in which there was as little to do, and as much to get as might be, and who seldom troubled himself much about college discipline, and looked upon under-graduates with a sort of silent contempt; never interfering with them, as he declared himself, so long as they did not interfere with him. But one point there was, in which they did interfere with his personal comfort occasionally, and whereby his peace of mind and rest of body were equally disturbed. Mr Perkins always took a tumbler of negus at ten precisely, and turned in as the college clock struck the quarter past; by the half-hour he was generally asleep, for his digestion was good and his cares few. But his slumbers were not heavy, and anything like a row in the quadrangle infallibly awoke him, and then he was like a lion roused. He was wont to jump up, throw up his window, thrust out a red face and a whitenightcap, and after listening a few seconds for the chance of the odious sounds being repeated, would put the very pertinent question usual in such circumstances, to which one so seldom gets an equally pertinent reply—"Who's that?" In case this intimation of Mr Perkins being wide awake proved sufficient, as it often did, to restore quiet, then after the lapse of a few more seconds the head and the nightcap disappeared, and the window was shut down again. But if the noise was continued, as occasionally it was out of pure mischief, then in a minute or two the said nightcap would be seen to emerge hastily from the staircase below, in company with a dressing-gown and slippers, and Mr Perkins in this disguise would proceed to the scene of disturbance as fast as his short legs could carry him. He seldom succeeded in effecting a capture; but if he had that luck, or if he could distinguish the tone of any individual voice so as to be able to identify the performer, he had him up before the "seniority" next morning, where his influence as one of the senior fellows insured a heavy sentence. But he had been engaged in so many unsuccessful chases of the kind, and his short orations from his window so often elicited only a laugh, though including sometimes brief but explicit threats of rustication against the noisy unknown, strengthened by little expletives which, when quoted by under-graduates, were made to sound somewhat doubtfully—thatat last he altered his tactics, and began to act in silence. And so he did, when upon opening his window he saw a light in the ground-floor rooms of the staircase whence the sounds proceeded on the evening in question. Carey, by his own account, was proceeding quietly in his preparations for bed, singing to himself an occasional stanza of some classical ditty which he had picked up in the course of the evening, and admiring the power of the man's lungs in the room above him, when he heard a short quick step, and then a double rap at his door. He was quite sufficiently acquainted, by this time, with the ways of the place, not to be much surprised at the late visit, and at the same time to consider it prudent to learn the name andstatusof his visitor before admitting him; so he retorted upon Mr Perkins, quite unconsciously, his own favourite query—"Who's that?" his first and obvious impression being that it was one of the party he had just quitted, coming probably in the plenitude of good fellowship, to bring him an invitation to wine or breakfast next day.