e most adapted for holy orders. Their
deportment was perfect, the ladies admired them, and their worst
enemies, it seems, had never accused them of being "unorthodox in their
views." Indeed, Mrs. Burton already pictured them mitred and croziered.
For a few weeks the budding bishops stayed with "Grandmama Baker," who
with "Aunt Sarah" and "Aunt Georgiana," and Aunt Sarah's daughters,
Sarah and Elisa, was summering at Hampstead; and filled up the
time, which hung heavy on their hands, with gambling, drinking and
love-making.

Chapter II. October 1840-April 1842, Oxford

6. Trinity College, October 1840.

Edward was then placed under a clergyman at Cambridge--The Rev. Mr.
Havergal, whose name, to that gentleman's indignation, the brothers
turned into "a peculiar form of ridicule." [44] Richard was to go to
Trinity College, Oxford. Neither, as we have seen, had been suitably
prepared for a University career. Richard, who could speak fluently
French, Italian, and modern Greek, did not know the Apostles' Creed, and
what was even more unusual in a prospective clergyman, had never heard
of the Thirty-nine Articles. He was struck with the architecture of
the colleges, and much surprised at the meanness of the houses that
surrounded them. He heretically calls the Isis 'a mere moat,' the
Cherwell 'a ditch.' The brilliant dare-devil from Italy despised alike
the raw, limitary, reputable, priggish undergraduates and the dull,
snuffling, smug-looking, fussy dons. The torpor of academic dulness,
indeed, was as irksome to Burton at Oxford as it had been to FitzGerald
and Tennyson at Cambridge. After a little coaching from Dr. Ogle and Dr.
William Alexander Greenhill [45], he in October 1840, entered Trinity,
where he has installed in "a couple of frowsy dog-holes" overlooking the
garden of old Dr. Jenkins, the Master of Balliol.

"My reception at College," says Burton, "was not pleasant. I had grown a
splendid moustache, which was the envy of all the boys abroad, and which
all the advice of Drs. Ogle and Greenhill failed to make me remove. I
declined to be shaved until formal orders were issued by the authorities
of the college. For I had already formed strong ideas upon the Shaven
Age of England, when her history, with some brilliant exceptions,
such as Marlborough, Wellington and Nelson, was at its meanest." An
undergraduate who laughed at him he challenged to fight a duel; and when
he was reminded that Oxford "men"