ite recognition of
professorial wit. The stains of ink are chronic on their meagre fingers.
They walk like Saul among the asses.

The dandies are not less subdued. In 1824 there was a noisy dapper
dandyism abroad. Vulgar, as we should now think, but yet genial--a
matter of white greatcoats and loud voices--strangely different from the
stately frippery that is rife at present. These men are out of their
element in the quadrangle. Even the small remains of boisterous humour,
which still clings to any collection of young men, jars painfully on
their morbid sensibilities; and they beat a hasty retreat to resume
their perfunctory march along Princes Street. Flirtation is to them a
great social duty, a painful obligation, which they perform on every
occasion in the same chill official manner, and with the same
commonplace advances, the same dogged observance of traditional
behaviour. The shape of their raiment is a burden almost greater than
they can bear, and they halt in their walk to preserve the due
adjustment of their trouser-knees, till one would fancy he had mixed in
a procession of Jacobs. We speak, of course, for ourselves; but we would
as soon associate with a herd of sprightly apes as with these gloomy
modern beaux. Alas, that our Mirabels, our Valentines, even our
Brummels, should have left their mantles upon nothing more amusing!

Nor are the fast men less constrained. Solemnity, even in dissipation,
is the order of the day; and they go to the devil with a perverse
seriousness, a systematic rationalism of wickedness that would have
surprised the simpler sinners of old. Some of these men whom we see
gravely conversing on the steps have but a slender acquaintance with
each other. Their intercourse consists principally of mutual bulletins
of depravity; and, week after week, as they meet they reckon up their
items of transgression, and give an abstract of their downward progress
for approval and encouragement. These folk form a freemasonry of their
own. An oath is the shibboleth of their sinister fellowship. Once they
hear a man swear, it is wonderful how their tongues loosen and their
bashful spirits take enlargement under the consciousness of brotherhood.
There is no folly, no pardoning warmth of temper about them; they are as
steady-going and systematic in their own way as the studious in theirs.

Not that we are without merry men. No. We shall not be ungrateful to
those, whose grimaces, whose ironical laughter,