portunity of a professional visit to Oxford to call to know how the
hope of the Browns was progressing--"Sir, I consider your son a most
respectable person: I may say a most respectable person;" and as the
principal had taken wine with him once at dinner, and bowed to him at
collections, and read "Mr John Brown" twice upon a card at the end and
beginning of term, and thus had every opportunity of forming an opinion,
and expressed that opinion oracularly, in a Johnsonian fashion, Governor
Brown was satisfied. How did the fellows come not to like John
Brown?--pronounced "most respectable" by the principal--declared by his
scout to be "the quietest gentleman as he ever a knowed;" admitted by
the under-graduates to be "a monstrous good fellow, but rather slow;"
how came John Brown to fail in recommending himself to the favour of his
pastors and masters--the dean and tutors of ----? Why, in the first
place, John Brown, the elder, was a wine-merchant; a well-educated man,
a well-behaved man; but still a wine-merchant. Now the dean's father
was--I beg his pardon, had been--a linen-draper; neither well-educated
nor well behaved; in short, an unmitigated linen-draper. Consequently
the dean's adoration of the aristocracy was excessive. There are few
such thorough tuft-hunters as your genuine Oxford Don; the man who,
without family or station in society, often without any further general
education and knowledge of the world than is to be found at a country
grammar-school, is suddenly, upon the strength of some acquaintance with
Latin and Greek, or quite as often, from having first seen the light in
some fortunately endowed county, elevated to the dignity of a
fellowship, and permitted to take rank with gentlemen. The "high table"
in hall, the Turkey carpet and violet cushioned chair in the common
room, the obsequious attention of college servants, and the more
unwilling "capping" of the under-graduates, to such a man are real
luxuries, and the relish with which he enjoys them is deep and strong.
And if he have but the luck to immortalize himself by holding some
University office, to strut through his year of misrule as proctor, or
even as his humble "pro," then does he at once emerge from the obscurity
of the family annals a being of a higher sphere. And when there comes up
to commemoration a waddling old lady, and two thin sticks of virginity,
who horrify the college butler by calling the vice-principal "Dick," no
wonder that they