Now the Average Undergraduate, as he exists, and has for ages existed, is not, perhaps, a very wise young man.  Nor does he possess those brilliant qualities which bring the Precocious Undergraduate to premature ruin.  He has his follies, but they are not very foolish; he has his affectations, but they are innocent; he has his extravagances, but they pass away, and leave him not very much the worse for the experience.  On the whole, however, he is a fine specimen of the young Englishman—­brave, manly, loyal, and upright.  He is the salt of his University, and an honour to the country that produces him.

The Average Undergraduate will have been an average schoolboy, not afflicted with too great a love of classics or mathematics, and gifted, unfortunately, with a fine contempt for modern languages.  But he will have taken an honourable part in all school-games, and will have acquired through them not only vigorous health and strength, but that tolerant and generous spirit of forbearance without which no manly game can be carried on.  These qualities he will carry with him to the University which his father chooses for him, and to which he himself looks forward rather as a home of liberty slightly tempered by Proctors, than as a temple of learning, moderated by examiners.

During the October term which makes him a freshman, the Average Undergraduate devotes a considerable time to mastering the etiquette of his University and College.  He learns that it is not customary to shake hands with his friends more than twice in each term, once at the beginning, and again at the end of the term.  If he is a Cambridge man, he will cut the tassel of his academical cap short; at Oxford he will leave it long; but at both he will discover that sugar-tongs are never used, and that the race of Dons exists merely to plague him and his fellows with lectures, to which he pays small attention, with enforced chapels, which he sometimes dares to cut, and, with general disciplinary regulations, to which he considers it advisable to submit, though he is never inclined to admit their necessity.  He becomes a member of his college boat-club, and learns that one of the objects of a regular attendance at College Chapel is, to enable the freshman to practise keeping his back straight.  Similarly, Latin Dictionaries and Greek Lexicons are, necessarily, bulky, since, otherwise, they would be useless as seats on which the budding oarsman may improve the length of his swing in the privacy of his own rooms.  These rooms are all furnished on the same pattern.  A table, a pedestal desk for writing, half-a-dozen ordinary chairs, a basket arm-chair, perhaps a sofa, some photographs of school-groups, family photographs in frames, a cup or two, won at the school athletic sports, a football cap, and a few prints of popular pictures, complete the furniture and decorations of the average College rooms.  Of course there are, even amongst undergraduates, wealthy aesthetes, who furnish their rooms extravagantly—­but the Average Undergraduate is not one of them.