CHAPTER XIII.

THE LOST IDOL FOUND.

ON my return, I found my cousin already at home, in high spirits at having, as he informed me, "bumped the first Trinity." I excused myself for my dripping state, simply by saying that I had slipped into the river. To tell him the whole of the story, while the insult still rankled fresh in me, was really too disagreeable both to my memory and my pride.

66

Then came the question, What had brought me to Cambridge?" I told him all, and he seemed honestly to sympathize with my misfortunes.

Never mind; we'll make it all right somehow. Those poems of yours-you must let me have them and look over them; and I daresay I shall persuade the governor to do something with them. After all, it's no loss for you; you couldn't have gone on tailoring-much too sharp a fellow for that; you ought to be at college, if one could only get you there. These sizarships, now, were meant for just such cases as yours-clever fellows who could not afford to educate themselves; but, like every thing in the university, the people for whom they are meant never get them. Do you know what the golden canon is, Alton, for understanding all university questions?"

"Then I'll tell you. That the employment of any money whatsoever, for any purpose whatsoever, is a certain sign that it was originally meant for some purpose totally different." What do you mean?" I asked.

"Oh! you shall stay here with me a few days, and you'll soon find out. Hush! now; don't come the independent dodge. One cousin may visit another, I hope, without contracting obligations, and all that. I'll find you a bedroom out of college, and you'll live in my rooins all day, and I'll show you a thing or two. How do you like the university ?" The buildings," I said, "strike me as very noble and reverent."

They are the only noble and reverent things you'll find here, I can tell you. It's a system of humbug, from one end to the other. But the Dons get their living by it, and their livings too, and their bishopricks, now and then; and I intend

to do the same, if I have a chance.

Do at Rome as Rome does." And he lighted his pipe and winked knowingly at me. I mentioned the profane use of sacred names which had so disgusted me at the boat-race. He laughed.

Ah! my dear fellow, it's a very fair specimen of Cambridge-shows what's the matter with us all-putting new wine into old bottles, and into young bottles, too, as you'll see at my supper party to-night."

Really," I said, "I am not fit for presentation at any such aristocratic amusements."

"Oh! I'll lend you clothes till your own are dried; and as for behavior, hold your tongue, and don't put your knife in your mouth, are quite rules enough to get any man mistaken for a gentleman here." And he laughed again in his peculiar sneering way.

66

By-the-by, don't get drunk; for in vino veritas. You know what that means."

"So well," I answered, "that I never intend to touch a drop of fermented liquor."

Capital rule for a poor man. I've got a strong head, luckily. If I hadn't, I should keep sober on principle. It's great fun to have a man taking you into his confidence after the second bottle; and then to see the funk he's in next day, when he recollects he's shown you more of his hand than is good for his own game.'

All this sickened me; and I tried to turn the conversation, by asking him what he meant by new wine in old bottles.

"Can't you see? The whole is monastic-dress, unmarried fellows, the very names of the colleges. I dare say it did very well for the poor scholars in the middle ages, who, threefourths of them, turned either monks or priests; but it won't do for the young gentlemen of the 19th century. Those very names of colleges are of a piece with the rest. The colleges were dedicated to various sacred personages and saints, to secure their interest in heaven for the prosperity of the college; but who believes in all that now? And therefore the names remain only to be desecrated. The men can't help it.

They must call the colleges by their names."

'Why don't they alter the names?" I said.

Because, my dear fellow, they are afraid to alter any thing, for fear of bringing the whole rotten old house down about their ears. They say themselves, that the slightest innovation will be a precedent for destroying the whole system, bit by bit. Why should they be afraid of that, if they

did not know that the whole systern would not bear canvassing an instant? That's why they retain statutes that can't be observed; because they know, if they once began altering the statutes the least, the world would find out how they have themselves been breaking the statutes. That's why they keep up the farce of swearing to the Thirty-Nine Articles, and all that; just because they know, if they attempted to alter the letter of the old forms, it would come out, that half the young men of the university don't believe three words of them at heart. They know the majority of us are at heart neither churchmen nor Christians, nor even decently moral: but the one thing they are afraid of is scandal. So they connive at the young men's ill-doings; they take no real steps to put down profligacy; and, in the mean time, they just keep up the forms of Church of Englandism, and pray devoutly that the whole humbug may last out their time. There isn't one Don in a hundred who has any personal influence over the gownsmen. A man may live here from the time he's a freshman, to the time he's taken his degree, without ever being spoken to as if he had a soul to be saved; unless he happens to be one of the Simeonite party; and they are getting fewer and fewer every year; and in ten years more there won't be one of them left, at the present rate. Besides, they have no influence ever the rest of the under-graduates. They are very good, excellent fellows in their way, I do believe; but they are not generally men of talent; and they keep entirely to themselves; and know nothing, and care nothing for the questions of the day."

And so he rambled on, complaining and sneering, till supper time; when we went out and lounged about the venerable cloisters, while the room was being cleared and the cloth laid.

To describe a Cambridge supper party among gay young men is a business as little suited to my taste as to my powers. The higher classes ought to know pretty well what such things are like; and the working-men are not altogether ignorant, seeing that Peter Priggins and other university men have been turning Alma Mater's shame to as lucrative account in their fictions, as the Irish scribblers have that of their mother country. But I must say, that I was utterly disgusted; and when, after the removal of the eatables, the whole party, twelve or fourteen in number, set to work to drink hard and deliberately at milk punch, and bishop, and copus, and grog, and I know not what other inventions of

F*

bacchanalian luxury, and to sing, one after another, songs of the most brutal indecency, I was glad to escape into the cool night air, and under pretense of going home, wander up and down the King's Parade, and watch the tall gables of King's College Chapel, and the classic front of the Senate-house, and the stately tower of St. Mary's, as they stood, stern and silent, bathed in the still glory of the moonshine, and seeming to watch, with a steadfast sadness, the scene of frivolity and sin, pharisaism, formalism, hypocrisy, and idleness below.

Noble buildings! and noble institutions! given freely to the people, by those who loved the people, and the Saviour who died for them. They gave us what they had, those mediæval founders whatsoever narrowness of mind or superstition defiled their gift was not their fault, but the fault of their whole age. The best they knew they imparted freely, and God will reward them for it. To monopolize those institutions for the rich, as is done now, is to violate both the spirit and the letter of the foundations; to restrict their studies to the limits of middle-age Romanism,* their conditions of admission to those fixed at the Reformation, is but a shade less wrongful. The letter is kept-the spirit is thrown away. You refuse to admit any who are not members of the Church of England; say, rather, any who will not sign the dogmas of the Church of England, whether they believe a word of them Useless formalism which lets through the reckless, the profligate, the ignorant, the hypocritical; and only excludes the honest and the conscientious, and the mass of the intellectual working-men. And whose fault is it that THEY are not members of the Church of England? Whose fault is it, I ask? Your predecessors neglected the lower orders, till they have ceased to reverence either you or your doctrines; you confess that, among yourselves, freely enough. You throw the blame of the present wide-spread dislike to the Church of England on her sins during "the godless 18th century." Be it so. Why are those sins to be visited on us? Why are we to be shut out from the universities, which were founded for us, because you have let us grow up, by millions, heathens and infidels, as you call us? Take away your

or not.

*This, like the rest of Mr. Locke's Cambridge reminiscences may appear to many exaggerated and unfair. But he seems to be speaking of both universities, and at a time when they had not even commenced the process of reformation. We fear, however, that in spite of many noble exceptions, his picture of Cambridge represents, if not the whole truth, still the impression which she leaves on the minds of too many, strangers and, alas! students also.-ED.

subterfuge! It is not merely because we are bad churchmen that you exclude us, else you would be crowding your colleges, now, with the talented poor of the agricultural districts, who, as you say, remain faithful to the church of their fathers. But are there six laborers' sons educating in the universities at this moment? No! The real reason for our exclusion, churchmen or not, is because we are poor-because we can not pay your exorbitant fees, often, as in the case of bachelors of arts, exacted for tuition which is never given, and residence which is not permitted-because we could not support the extravagance which you not only permit, but encourage, because, by your own unblushing confession, it insures the university "the support of the aristocracy."

But, on religious points, at least, you must abide by the statutes of the university."

Strange argument, truly, to be urged literally by English Protestants in possession of Roman Catholic bequests! If that be true in the letter, as well as in the spirit, you should have given place long ago to the Dominicans and the Franciscans. In the spirit it is true, and the Reformers acted on it when they rightly converted the universities to the uses of the new faith. They carried out the spirit of the founders' statutes by making the universities as good as they could be, and letting them share in the new light of the Elizabethan age. But was the sum of knowledge, human and divine, perfected at the Reformation? Who gave the Reformers, or you, who call yourselves their representatives, a right to say to the mind of man, and to the teaching of God's Spirit, "Hitherto, and no farther!" Society and mankind, the children of the Supreme, will not stop growing for your dogmas-much less for your vested interests; and the righteous law of mingled development and renovation, applied in the sixteenth century, must be re-applied in the nineteenth; while the spirits of the founders, now purged from the superstitions and ignorances of their age, shall smile from heaven, and say, "So would we have had it, if we had lived in the great nineteenth century, into which it has been your privilege to be born."

But such thoughts soon passed away. The image which I had seen that afternoon upon the river-banks, had awakened imperiously the frantic longings of past years; and now it reascended its ancient throne, and tyrannously drove forth every other object, to keep me alone with its own tantalizing and torturing beauty. I did not think about her-No; I only stupidly and steadfastly stared at her with my whole soul and