“Be it recorded in song who was first, who last, in dressing. 
  Hope was the first, black-tied, white-waistcoated, simple, his Honor;
  For the postman made out he was a son to the Earl of Ilay,
  (As, indeed, he was to the younger brother, the Colonel);
  Treated him therefore with special respect, doffed bonnet, and ever
  Called him his Honor:  his Honor he therefore was at the cottage;
  Always his Honor at least, sometimes the Viscount of Ilay.

“Hope was the first, his Honor; and, next to his Honor, the Tutor.  Still more plain the tutor, the grave man nicknamed Adam, White-tied, clerical, silent, with antique square-cut waistcoat, Formal, unchanged, of black cloth, but with sense and feeling beneath it; Skilful in ethics and logic, in Pindar and poets unrivalled; Shady in Latin, said Lindsay, but topping in plays and Aldrich.

  “Somewhat more splendid in dress, in a waistcoat of a lady,
  Lindsay succeeded, the lively, the cheery, cigar-loving Lindsay,
  Lindsay the ready of speech, the Piper, the Dialectician: 
  This was his title from Adam, because of the words he invented,
  Who in three weeks had created a dialect new for the party.

  “Hewson and Hobbes were down at the matutine bathing; of course
  Arthur Audley, the bather par excellence glory of headers: 
  Arthur they called him for love and for euphony:  so were they bathing
  There where in mornings was custom, where, over a ledge of granite,
  Into a granite bason descended the amber torrent. 
  There were they bathing and dressing:  it was but a step from the cottage,
  Only the road and larches and ruinous millstead between. 
  Hewson and Hobbes followed quick upon Adam; on them followed Arthur.

  “Airlie descended the last, splendescent as god of Olympus. 
  When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway;
  He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber.”—­pp. 5, 6.

A peculiar point of style in this poem, and one which gives a certain classic character to some of its more familiar aspects, is the frequent recurrence of the same line, and the repeated definition of a personage by the same attributes.  Thus, Lindsay is “the Piper, the Dialectician,” Arthur Audley “the glory of headers,” and the tutor “the grave man nicknamed Adam,” from beginning to end; and so also of the others.

Omitting the after-dinner speeches, with their “Long constructions strange and plusquam-Thucydidean,” that only of “Sir Hector, the Chief and the Chairman;” in honor of the Oxonians, than which nothing could be more unpoetically truthful, is preserved, with the acknowledgment, ending in a sarcasm at the game laws, by Hewson, who, as he is leaving the room, is accosted by “a thin man, clad as the Saxon:” 

  “‘Young man, if ye pass thro’ the Braes o’Lochaber,
  See by the Loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.’”—­p. 9.