ifficult portion of our task. _Mr. Tatler_, for
all that we care, may have been as virulent as he liked about the
students of a former day; but for the iron to touch our sacred selves,
for a brother of the Guild to betray its most privy infirmities, let
such a Judas look to himself as he passes on his way to the Scots Law or
the Diagnostic, below the solitary lamp at the corner of the dark
quadrangle. We confess that this idea alarms us. We enter a protest. We
bind ourselves over verbally to keep the peace. We hope, moreover, that
having thus made you secret to our misgivings, you will excuse us if we
be dull, and set that down to caution which you might before have
charged to the account of stupidity.

The natural tendency of civilisation is to obliterate those distinctions
which are the best salt of life. All the fine old professional flavour
in language has evaporated. Your very gravedigger has forgotten his
avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over
Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration
of bodies under ground. From this tendency, from this gradual attrition
of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed
down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth
undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not
attempt to join _Mr. Tatler_ in his simple division of students into
_Law_, _Divinity_, and _Medical_. Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands
over their follies; and, like Mrs. Frail and Mrs. Foresight (in _Love
for Love_) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying:
"Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!" A few restrictions, indeed, remain to
influence the followers of individual branches of study. The _Divinity_,
for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present
day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is
fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox
bolus. Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a
credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher,
although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority.
Others again (and this we think the worst method), finding German
grammar a somewhat dry morsel, run their own little heresy as a proof of
independence; and deny one of the cardinal doctrines that they may hold
the others without being laughed at.

Besides