contempt for any such practices; of all idiots
the sentimental idiot being to me the most
abhorrent.

I am accustomed to drink vast quantities
of bitter beer during composition, and my
favourite supper is toasted cheese with
onions. I think Shakespeare was the greatest
stunner who ever breathed, and I am happy
to believe that when he met the late
Mr. Bowdler in Hades, he punched the head of
him for presuming to meddle with his
original text; that he gave him one for his
nob for each impertinent and unnecessary
elimination. I think it would have done
Mr. Wordsworth all the good in the world to
have got what Burns calls fou at least once
in every three weeks of his poetic
career. I go in for Nature and high spirits.
The thoughts which I think I am used to
express as well as I am able, instead of
employing every artifice to conceal them,
and if he had chanced to tbe born an
actor instesd of a lord, we should never have
heard the last of that smell of the footlights
which pervades him. I go in for sunshine
and fresh air. However, in spite of his bad
grammar, one does discover easily enough
what Byron means. This is also the case with
the poetry of Herbert Brown, or I am much
mistaken. I go in for Saxon and sense, and
clearness of thought, and that is why I lost
the Chancellor's Medal for English Verse at
the university; or rather, Jones is obscure,
with all his glittering verbiage, and afflicts
the reader with vertigo, and that—as you
shall hear—is why he gained it.

There is always a great competition for
the English verse–prize. The classical men
write for it, after the same style in which
they do their Greek and Latin verses, with
pretty good metre, but with a great
insufficiency of ideas. The mathematical
men, too, are excited, in no small numbers,
by the unnatural ambition, but most of them
are stopped by the first couplet, and subside
into blank verse, which is looked upon by
the examiners with great disfavour. All the
idle literary and fast intellectual men are
very few; scarecely any;where all must
fail save one, will own to writing it; and
many are downright ashamed of the imputation
of making poems (although they secretly
pride themselves upon the fancied gift beyond
measure) and so deny the soft impeachment,
as being too soft to be confessed. I never
denied it. As soon as the subject—The
Aurora Borealis—was given out, I
immediately announced my intention of becoming
a candidate; and my friends (I say it to their
credit), who believed in me almost as much
as I believed in myself, disseminated the
information. Jones, too, to do him justice,
was not wanting in self–confidence, although
he pusillauimously declined to take my five
dozen of bottled porter to two, which I had
offered upon my chance against his.

It was curious to remark how the Aurora
Borealis pervaded university talk during
that term; how the north pole thrust itself
into general conversation, and the Esquimaux
obtained a social footing in undergraduate
circles. Tangent of John's, a man who was
spoken of fts an embryo Smith's prizeman,
but who was not a good hand at rhyming,
went about complaining to his friends that
he could not get anything to chime with
walrus; his poem, he said, was perfect,
except in this one particular, which was,
however, of the greatest importance, because
he had caused his hero to be attacked by
that Arctic monster. I supplied him with
this couplet:

     Storm and iceberg, bear and walrus,
     Combined to make his prospects dol'rous;

for which he thanked me heartily, and stuck
it amongst his heroic verses, just as it was.

Now, the examiners for the English verse
prize were three.

One. The Vice–Chancellor for that year,
who was not thought very highly of as an
intellectual person, but who made up in
obstinacy for what he wanted in wits, and
was therefore highly respected and seldom
opposed.

Two. A mathematical professor, who was
accustomed to amuse himself in leisure
moments with making artificial suns, as
good, and almost as large, as the real one;
and whose modesty was such as to have once
caused him to observe, that he was not a
conceited man by any means, but still that
he knew everything (if he were not mistaken),
except how to play on the violin.

Three. A classical professor, who had passed
five and thirty years of his life in the study
of the Greek particles, and who maintained
with pride, that he had not mastered their
astonishing subtlety of meaning even yet.

The Vice was not only incompetent to
write what was worth reading (although he
had written a good deal in his time), but
also what could be read at all. His
handwriting was the wanderings of a
centipede who had just escaped from the ink–pot,
and had crawled and sprawled over the paper.
It was therefore arranged that he, who had