Not that we are without merry men.  No.  We shall not be ungrateful to those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter, whose active feet in the ‘College Anthem’ have beguiled so many weary hours and added a pleasant variety to the strain of close attention.  But even these are too evidently professional in their antics.  They go about cogitating puns and inventing tricks.  It is their vocation, Hal.  They are the gratuitous jesters of the class-room; and, like the clown when he leaves the stage, their merriment too often sinks as the bell rings the hour of liberty, and they pass forth by the Post-Office, grave and sedate, and meditating fresh gambols for the morrow.

This is the impression left on the mind of any observing student by too many of his fellows.  They seem all frigid old men; and one pauses to think how such an unnatural state of matters is produced.  We feel inclined to blame for it the unfortunate absence of University feeling which is so marked a characteristic of our Edinburgh students.  Academical interests are so few and far between—­students, as students, have so little in common, except a peevish rivalry—­there is such an entire want of broad college sympathies and ordinary college friendships, that we fancy that no University in the kingdom is in so poor a plight.  Our system is full of anomalies.  A, who cut B whilst he was a shabby student, curries sedulously up to him and cudgels his memory for anecdotes about him when he becomes the great so-and-so.  Let there be an end of this shy, proud reserve on the one hand, and this shuddering fine ladyism on the other; and we think we shall find both ourselves and the College bettered.  Let it be a sufficient reason for intercourse that two men sit together on the same benches.  Let the great A be held excused for nodding to the shabby B in Princes Street, if he can say, ‘That fellow is a student.’  Once this could be brought about, we think you would find the whole heart of the University beat faster.  We think you would find a fusion among the students, a growth of common feelings, an increasing sympathy between class and class, whose influence (in such a heterogeneous company as ours) might be of incalculable value in all branches of politics and social progress.  It would do more than this.  If we could find some method of making the University a real mother to her sons—­something beyond a building of class-rooms, a Senatus and a lottery of somewhat shabby prizes—­we should strike a death-blow at the constrained and unnatural attitude of our Society.  At present we are not a united body, but a loose gathering of individuals, whose inherent attraction is allowed to condense them into little knots and coteries.  Our last snowball riot read us a plain lesson on our condition.  There was no party spirit—­no unity of interests.  A few, who were mischievously inclined, marched off to the College of Surgeons in a pretentious file; but even before they reached their