istered at Cambridge, particularly his
_Downing_ one, which was hotly and highly contested, and yet easily
_won_. Hobhouse was his most intimate friend, and can tell you more of
him than any man. William Bankes also a great deal. I myself recollect
more of his oddities than of his academical qualities, for we lived
most together at a very idle period of _my_ life. When I went up
to Trinity, in 1805, at the age of seventeen and a half, I was
miserable and untoward to a degree. I was wretched at leaving Harrow,
to which I had become attached during the two last years of my stay
there; wretched at going to Cambridge instead of Oxford (there were no
rooms Vacant at Christ-church); wretched from some private domestic
circumstances of different kinds, and consequently about as unsocial
as a wolf taken from the troop. So that, although I knew Matthews, and
met him often _then_ at Bankes's, (who was my collegiate pastor,
and master, and patron,) and at Rhode's, Milnes's, Price's, Dick's,
Macnamara's, Farrell's, Galley Knight's, and others of that _set_
of contemporaries, yet I was neither intimate with him nor with any
one else, except my old schoolfellow Edward Long (with whom I used to
pass the day in riding and swimming), and William Bankes, who was
good-naturedly tolerant of my ferocities.

"It was not till 1807, after I had been upwards of a year away from
Cambridge, to which I had returned again to _reside_ for my
degree, that I became one of Matthews's familiars, by means of H----,
who, after hating me for two years, because I wore a _white hat_, and
a _grey_ coat, and rode a _grey_ horse (as he says himself), took me
into his good graces because I had written some poetry. I had always
lived a good deal, and got drunk occasionally, in their company--but
now we became really friends in a morning. Matthews, however, was not
at this period resident in College. I met _him_ chiefly in
London, and at uncertain periods at Cambridge. H----, in the mean
time, did great things: he founded the Cambridge 'Whig Club' (which he
seems to have forgotten), and the 'Amicable Society,' which was
dissolved in consequence of the members constantly quarrelling, and
made himself very popular with 'us youth,' and no less formidable to
all tutors, professors, and beads of Colleges. William B---- was gone;
while he stayed, he ruled the roast--or rather the _roasting_--and was
father of all mischiefs.

"Matthews and I, meeting in London, and els