of seven. The lower orders, seen in the High Street at noon-day, are here and there a college servant, a pastrycook's boy with his tray, or perhaps a well-dressed tradesman or his messenger with goods. Caps and gowns seem the costume of the people of Oxford: when they are gone you see no one, but the whole city reminds me of a rookery after shooting. During term time, Oxford is a city of gentlemen of those, at least, who are wholly employed in liberal pursuits, and in all that tends to spiritualise the man, and to sublimate and divest him of the grosser part of his nature. This is the ostensible purpose for which they meet together. As to any provision for eating and drinking, or the moneymaking cares which doom most men to spend more hours in a smoky office than in a drawing room these things are out of sight and out of mind. In short, Oxonians seem a privileged class. They are exempt from all kinds of labour which would cause them to receive money; their sole business with it is to pay, what is gratuitously supplied and imported for the purpose. The circulation of money at Oxford is almost a misnomer. It does not circulate; it passes, but rarely repasses. Near a million of money is yearly brought into Oxford by the collegians, and, being paid to the tradesmen, scarcely a note of it returns to any collegian's hand again. It is not like other towns, where much of the money long remains the same, the lawyer or the doctor receiving for advice the same coin which other lawyers and doctors have paid for meat and bread. But at Oxford the golden stream flows but one way. Living by the sweat of their brow seems only partially to apply to Oxonians, unless to such as belong to a cricket club, pull in an eight-oar, or run up by the boats on a racing night. In short, Oxford is a place where a man feels it to be guaranteed that if he will only take care of his mind, his body shall be safe of itself. Oxford, therefore, is a community of gentlemen ; but they are few and far between in the country. Where, then, is your fancied independence, if you are not free to live among your equals? Many a country clergyman has not one within miles of him. "The army," said a man of fifty years of age, "is slavery to me: here have I been in a manufacturing town recruiting, without scarcely a gentleman to speak to for three months together, and now I am ordered out to Canada. See what I pay for liberty to leave school early, and to figure in every ball room in the country, and see the world, instead of fagging at college. At fifty years of age I am not at liberty to be quiet!" "I have scarcely had leisure to look in a Latin or Greek book since I left college," said a writer in the East India Company's service. guages repay you far less for have leave to be absent three must return for twelve more. "The Oriental lanstudying them. I years, and then I Sometimes I have been sent up the country, and have not had any one to speak to but the natives for several months!" There is independence for you! There are restraints at college, I allow; but, compared with the restraints of this busy world, they are as silken bands to adamantine fetters. Many a man has found, like Prometheus in Eschylus, that the consequence of taking a hearty interest in the affairs of mortals, which every profession involves, is to be shackled, as it were, hand and foot, to some ungenial clime far from the haunts of men. Give full weight to these reflections, collegians, and you will feel your yoke sit easy on you. Dream not, at all events, of greater independence than you now enjoy, should you live to the age of a hundred. The truth is, that happiness consists in the exercise of energies which would lie dormant for ever if we were allowed to choose, and change, and choose again. Providence has determined that most men shall be limited to a single choice, and that by that they shall be bound to abide. Of all new things, new employments and a new sphere of action is the least likely to fit comfortably at first; but the power of adaptation is in ourselves. Each bears within him a principle of self-adjustment. The rough points which grate and fret us wear smooth by time; nor is there any independence so delightful to a noble mind as that which is felt in struggling with misfortune, mastering difficulties, and defeating, by the pliancy and versatility of our nature, the capricious demands of an imperious fortune. READING FOR A FIRST CLASS. 309 CHAP. XII. READING FOR A FIRST CLASS. Ir is now time to indulge in a more pleasing view of academical studies as we visit our friend Whitbread, who, as I have already mentioned, had been up the greater part of the long vacation reading for a first class. "Have the passmen done their paper work yet?" asked Whitbread. "However, the schools, I dare say, will not be open to the classmen till Monday. I should like to have about one week more to secure two or three weak points; but Churton tells me that no man was ever known to feel quite ready. I suppose no man ever went into the schools but was conscious of some deficiency in which an examiner might floor him if he were told whereabouts it was." - Come, Whitbread, let me see your list of books." "If you had asked a fortnight ago I could not have shown it you; for when a man must make up a list of fifteen or sixteen, he will be a long time hesitating between another science or another poet, though he has made up his mind about his histories--for they are too heavy to leave to the last. Churton tells me, that in his day most men used to put down on their list two Decades of Livy when they had only read one, or the Annals of Tacitus, when they had not read fifty pages. At that time it was deemed necessary to make a great show, and the examiners were not so severe as they now are if they detect any thing hollow or inaccurate in a man's reading. Whitbread's books were,— SCIENCE: Aristotle's Ethics, Plato's Phædon, Butler's Analogy. POETRY: Virgil, Horace, Juvenal and Persius, Sophocles, Eschylus, Aristophanes' four plays. HISTORY: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xen. Hellenics, Books 1. and 2., Livy, 1st Decade, Tacitus' Annals. To explain the meaning of a classman's list of books, I must observe, that every candidate is required to name the authors of which he considers he has a |