that I should derive from having been Senior Wrangler.  But I often regret, and even acutely, my want of a Senior Wrangler’s knowledge of physics and mathematics; and I regret still more some habits of mind which a Senior Wrangler is pretty certain to possess.”  Like all men who know what the world is, he regarded the triumph of a college career as of less value than its disappointments.  Those are most to be envied who soonest learn to expect nothing for which they have not worked hard, and who never acquire the habit, (a habit which an unbroken course of University successes too surely breeds,) of pitying themselves overmuch if ever in after life they happen to work in vain.

Cambridge:  Wednesday. 
(Post-mark, 1818)

My dear Mother,—­King, I am absolutely certain, would take no more pupils on any account.  And, even if he would, he has numerous applicants with prior claims.  He has already six, who occupy him six hours in the day, and is likewise lecturer to the college.  It would, however, be very easy to obtain an excellent tutor.  Lefevre and Malkin are men of first-rate mathematical abilities, and both of our college.  I can scarcely bear to write on Mathematics or Mathematicians.  Oh for words to express my abomination of that science, if a name sacred to the useful and embellishing arts may be applied to the perception and recollection of certain properties in numbers and figures!  Oh that I had to learn astrology, or demonology, or school divinity!  Oh that I were to pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation of Entity with the two Predicaments, so that I were exempted from this miserable study!  “Discipline” of the mind!  Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation!  But it must be.  I feel myself becoming a personification of Algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of Logarithms.  All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going.  By the end of the term my brain will be “as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage.”  Oh to change Cam for Isis!  But such is my destiny; and, since it is so, be the pursuit contemptible, below contempt, or disgusting beyond abhorrence, I shall aim at no second place.  But three years!  I cannot endure the thought.  I cannot bear to contemplate what I must have to undergo.  Farewell then Homer and Sophocles and Cicero.

 Farewell happy fields
 Where joy for ever reigns
 Hail, horrors, hail, Infernal world!

How does it proceed?  Milton’s descriptions have been driven out of my head by such elegant expressions as the following

[Long mathematical formula]

My classics must be Woodhouse, and my amusements summing an infinite series.  Farewell, and tell Selina and Jane to be thankful that it is not a necessary part of female education to get a headache daily without acquiring one practical truth or beautiful image in return.  Again, and with affectionate love to my Father, farewell wishes your most miserable and mathematical son