At college I lived the quiet life of a reading-man; though I varied continually the desk and the book with the “constitutional” up Headington Hill, or the gallop with Mr. Murrell’s harriers, or the quick scull to Iffley, or the more perilous sailing in a boat (no wonder that Isis claims her annual victims), or the gig to Blenheim or Newton-Courtnay,—­or that only once alarming experience of a tandem when the leader turned round and looked at me in its nostalgic longing to return home,—­or the geological ramble with Dr. Buckland’s class,—­or the botanic searchings for wild rarities with some naturalist pundit whose name I have forgotten; and so forth.  In matters theological, I was strongly opposed to the Tractarians, especially denouncing Newman and Pusey for their dishonest “non-naturalness” and Number Ninety:  and I favoured with my approval (valeat quantum) Dr. Hampden.  I attended Dr. Kidd’s anatomical lectures, and dabbled with some chemical experiments—­which when Knighton and I repeated at his father’s house, 9 Hanover Square, the baronet in future blew us up to the astonishment of the baronet in praesenti, his famous father.  Also, I was a diligent student in the Algebraic class of Dr. Short, afterwards the good Bishop of St. Asaph; and I have before me now a memoria technica of mine in rhyme giving the nine chief rules of trigonometry, but not easily producible here as full of “sines and cosines, arcs, chords, tangents, and radii,” though helpful to memory, and humorous at the time, ending with

    “At least I have proved that nothing is worse
    Than Trigonometrical Problems in verse:” 

there are also similarly to be recorded my mathematical seances with that worthy and clever Professor, A.P.  Saunders, afterwards headmaster of Charterhouse; and my Hebrew lectures with the mild-spoken Dr. Pusey, afterwards so notorious; and I know not whatever else is memorable, unless one condescended to what goes without saying about Hall and Chapel, and Examinations:  however, some frivolous larks in the Waterford days, wherewith I need not say the present scribe had nothing to do, may amuse.  Here are three I remember; 1.  An edict had gone out from the authorities against hunting in pink,—­and next morning the Dean’s and the Canons’ doors in quad were found to have been miraculously painted red in the night. 2.  There was a grand party of Dons at the Deanery, and as they hung their togas in the hall (for they couldn’t conveniently dine in them) there was filched from each proctorial sleeve that marvellous little triangular survival of a stole which nobody can explain, and all these collectively were nailed on the Dean’s outer door in a star. 3.  A certain garden of small yews and box trees was found one morning to have been transplanted bodily into Peckwater Quadrangle, as a matter of mystery and defiance.  And there were other like exploits; as the immersion of that leaden Mercury into its own pond; and town and gown rows, wherein I remember to have seen the herculean Lord Hillsborough on one side of High Street, and Peard (afterwards Garibaldi’s Englishman) on the other, clear away the crowd of roughs with their fists, scattering them like duplicates of the hero of Corioli.