The student of law, again, was a learned man.  ’He had turned over the leaves of Justinian’s Institutes, and knew that they were written in Latin.  He was well acquainted with the title-page of Blackstone’s Commentaries, and argal (as the gravedigger in Hamlet says) he was not a person to be laughed at.’  He attended the Parliament House in the character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the celebrated speakers.  He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative or the Forensic.  In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.  Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.  ’If a Charlie should find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel come to judgment.  He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue.  The magistrate listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of guineas.’

Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine.  Barclay, Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Cafe, the Rainbow, and Rutherford’s are to us.  An hour’s reading in these old pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is similar and so much that is different; the follies and amusements are so like our own, and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment.  The muddy quadrangle is thick with living students; but in our eyes it swarms also with the phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats of 1824.  Two races meet:  races alike and diverse.  Two performances are played before our eyes; but the change seems merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.  Plot and passion are the same.  It is the fall of the spun shilling whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.

In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail—­ whether we or the readers of the Lapsus stand higher in the balance.

CHAPTER II—­THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

We have now reached the difficult portion of our task.  Mr. Tatler, for all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about the students of a former; but for the iron to touch our sacred selves, for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities, let such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark quadrangle.  We confess that this idea alarms us.  We enter a protest.  We bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace.  We hope, moreover, that having thus made you secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we be dull, and set that down to caution which you might before have charged to the account of stupidity.