out, formed a silent
circle round the two Cantabs, and, with a short break for lunch, never
stirred till the bell warned them that it was time to dress for dinner.

It has all irrevocably perished. With life before them, and each intent
on his own future, none among that troop of friends had the mind to play
Boswell to the others. One repartee survives, thrown off in the heat
of discussion, but exquisitely perfect in all its parts. Acknowledged
without dissent to be the best applied quotation that ever was made
within five miles of the Fitzwilliam Museum, it is unfortunately too
strictly classical for reproduction in these pages.

We are more easily consoled for the loss of the eloquence which then
flowed so full and free in the debates of the Cambridge Union. In 1820
that Society was emerging from a period of tribulation and repression.
The authorities of the university, who, as old constituents of Mr. Pitt
and warm supporters of Lord Liverpool, had never been very much
inclined to countenance the practice of political discussion among the
undergraduates, set their faces against it more than ever at an epoch
when the temper of the time increased the tendency of young men to run
into extremes of partisanship. At length a compromise was extorted from
the reluctant hands of the Vice-Chancellor, and the Club was allowed
to take into consideration public affairs of a date anterior to the
century. It required less ingenuity than the leaders of the Union had at
their command to hit upon a method of dealing with the present under the
guise of the past. Motions were framed that reflected upon the existing
Government under cover of a censure on the Cabinets of the previous
generation. Resolutions which called upon the meeting to declare that
the boon of Catholic Emancipation should have been granted in the year
1795, or that our Commercial Policy previous to 1800 should have been
founded on the basis of Free Trade, were clearly susceptible of great
latitude of treatment. And, again, in its character of a reading club,
the Society, when assembled for the conduct of private business, was
at liberty to review the political creed of the journals of the day in
order to decide which of them it should take in, and which it should
discontinue. The Examiner newspaper was the flag of many a hard-fought
battle; the Morning Chronicle was voted in and out of the rooms
half-a-dozen times within a single twelvemonth; while a series of
impassi