he cue, while his physical appearance afforded him unusual facilities
for carrying his prospects into effect. I quaintly termed the domination
of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, ever rightly entered into the mystery
which overshadowed his character. I truly think that no person at the
university, with the exception of myself, ever suspected him to be
capable of a joke, verbal or practical:--the old bull-dog at
the garden-gate would sooner have been accused,--the ghost of
Heraclitus,--or the wig of the Emeritus Professor of Theology. This,
too, when it was evident that the most egregious and unpardonable of all
conceivable tricks, whimsicalities and buffooneries were brought about,
if not directly by him, at least plainly through his intermediate agency
or connivance. The beauty, if I may so call it, of his art mystifique,
lay in that consummate ability (resulting from an almost intuitive
knowledge of human nature, and a most wonderful self-possession,) by
means of which he never failed to make it appear that the drolleries he
was occupied in bringing to a point, arose partly in spite, and
partly in consequence of the laudable efforts he was making for their
prevention, and for the preservation of the good order and dignity of
Alma Mater. The deep, the poignant, the overwhelming mortification,
which upon each such failure of his praise worthy endeavors, would
suffuse every lineament of his countenance, left not the slightest room
for doubt of his sincerity in the bosoms of even his most skeptical
companions. The adroitness, too, was no less worthy of observation by
which he contrived to shift the sense of the grotesque from the creator
to the created--from his own person to the absurdities to which he had
given rise. In no instance before that of which I speak, have I
known the habitual mystific escape the natural consequence of his
manoevres--an attachment of the ludicrous to his own character and
person. Continually enveloped in an atmosphere of whim, my friend
appeared to live only for the severities of society; and not even his
own household have for a moment associated other ideas than those of
the rigid and august with the memory of the Baron Ritzner von Jung, the
demon of the dolce far niente lay like an incubus upon the university.
Nothing, at least, was done beyond eating and drinking and making merry.
The apartments of the students were converted into so many pot-houses,
and there was no pot-house of them all more fa