to the particulars
of Harry Esmond's college career. It was like that of a hundred young
gentlemen of that day. But he had the ill fortune to be older by a
couple of years than most of his fellow-students; and by his previous
solitary mode of bringing up, the circumstances of his life, and the
peculiar thoughtfulness and melancholy that had naturally engendered, he
was, in a great measure, cut off from the society of comrades who were
much younger and higher-spirited than he. His tutor, who had bowed
down to the ground, as he walked my lord over the college grass-plats,
changed his behavior as soon as the nobleman's back was turned, and
was--at least Harry thought so--harsh and overbearing. When the lads
used to assemble in their greges in hall, Harry found himself alone in
the midst of that little flock of boys; they raised a great laugh at
him when he was set on to read Latin, which he did with the foreign
pronunciation taught to him by his old master, the Jesuit, than which
he knew no other. Mr. Bridge, the tutor, made him the object of clumsy
jokes, in which he was fond of indulging. The young man's spirit was
chafed, and his vanity mortified; and he found himself, for some time,
as lonely in this place as ever he had been at Castlewood, whither he
longed to return. His birth was a source of shame to him, and he fancied
a hundred slights and sneers from young and old, who, no doubt, had
treated him better had he met them himself more frankly. And as he looks
back, in calmer days, upon this period of his life, which he thought so
unhappy, he can see that his own pride and vanity caused no small part
of the mortifications which he attributed to other's ill will. The world
deals good-naturedly with good-natured people, and I never knew a sulky
misanthropist who quarrelled with it, but it was he, and not it, that
was in the wrong. Tom Tusher gave Harry plenty of good advice on this
subject, for Tom had both good sense and good humor; but Mr. Harry chose
to treat his senior with a great deal of superfluous disdain and absurd
scorn, and would by no means part from his darling injuries, in which,
very likely, no man believed but himself. As for honest Doctor Bridge,
the tutor found, after a few trials of wit with the pupil, that the
young man was an ugly subject for wit, and that the laugh was often
turned against him. This did not make tutor and pupil any better
friends; but had, so far, an advantage for Esmond, that Mr. Br