V
I was entered at Christ’s, one of the so called “small” colleges. It was then larger than most of the Oxford colleges, and stood about fifth on the list at Cambridge in point of numbers. All the colleges, however, in 1855 were much smaller than they are in 1900. Thus, our undergraduates were under a hundred in number; there are now at the same college two hundred.
I am strongly of opinion that a very large college, such as Trinity, Cambridge, does not offer anything like the social and educational advantages of a small college. Trinity, for instance, has about seven hundred undergraduates; Christ’s, about two hundred. Now the chief advantage of a university course is the intercourse of the students among each other; the meeting of young men from all parts of the country and the Empire; the widening of views by free discussion. When there are only some fifty or sixty men of each year, they are drawn together by studies, by sports, by pursuits of all kinds; every man may make his mark upon his year; every man may get all that there is to be got by the society of other men of his own time. There are “sets,” of course; a reading set; an athletic set; a musical set; a loafing set; a fast set. At Trinity, however, a man may be simply swamped. As it is, there is a tendency for the Eton men to keep together and make a set of their own; if a man does not belong to any of the great public schools, he will find it difficult to get into certain sets which may be intellectually the best; if he does not distinguish himself in any branch of learning, if he does not do well in athletics, if he shows no marked ability in any direction, it is quite possible for him to pass through Trinity as much neglected and alone as a solitary lodger in London. In a smaller college the sets overlap: it is realised that one may be a reading man and also an athlete. A freshman of ability is at once received into the best reading set; he gains the inestimable advantage for a young fellow of nineteen of knowing, and being influenced by, the third-year man who is about to distinguish himself in the Tripos, or even the Bachelor who has already distinguished himself. In the college of a hundred and fifty to two hundred men there is room for the development of character; no one need be lost in the crowd; the dullest of dull men may in some way or other make his mark and impress upon his contemporaries a sense of his individuality.
At other times and in other places I have advanced the theory that the eighteenth century did not really come to an end with December 31st, 1800, but that it lingered on until well into the nineteenth century, even to the beginning of Queen Victoria’s eventful reign. In no place did it linger so long as at Cambridge. When I went up, the fellowships and the scholarships had been thrown open, but only recently, so that the Society was mainly composed of those who held close fellowships. These men, whose attainments had never been more than respectable, generally marked by a place somewhere among the wranglers, had for the most part come up from some small country town; they had a very faint tincture of culture; they were quite ignorant of modern literature; they knew absolutely nothing of art. As regards science, their contempt was as colossal as their ignorance. They vegetated at Cambridge; their lectures were elementary and contemptible; they lectured to freshmen on euclid, algebra or Greek Testament—the last for choice, because to fit them for the task they only had to read Bengel’s Gnomon and other works of the kind, now perhaps—I don’t know—forgotten; they divided the posts and offices of the college among themselves; they solemnly sat in the Combination Room for two hours everyday over their port; they sometimes played whist with each other; they hardly ever went outside the college except for an afternoon walk; and they waited patiently for a fat college living to fall in. When a vacancy happened, the next on the list took the place, went down, and was no more heard of.
The dulness, the incapacity, the stupidity of the dons brought the small colleges into a certain contempt. The decay of Cambridge as a place of learning threatened to overwhelm the university. I believe that for the first half of the century the scholarship and science of Cambridge were a laughing stock on the Continent. Naturally, the dulness of the fellows was in some sort reflected among the undergraduates. There were certain colleges which seemed never to show any intellectual life at all. I need not mention names, because everything is now changed. The close fellowship has now vanished; the close scholarship has been largely abolished; the entrance scholarships attract good men to the small as well as the large colleges; the fellows and lecturers of the former do not yield in intellectual attainments to those of the latter.
If the dons were different in the first half of the last century, how different were the undergraduates! In the fifties, the now universal habit of travel was unknown; the lads who came up to Cambridge had seen no other place than the small country town or country village from which they came. They were the sons of country gentlemen, but infinitely more rustic than their grandsons of the present day; they were the sons of the country clergy, well and gently bred, many of them, but profoundly ignorant of the world; they were the sons of manufacturers; they were the sons of professional men; they came from the country grammar school, which had not yet been converted into a public school after the one pattern now enforced; they had gone through the classical mill; they had learned a little mathematics; they played cricket with zeal; they were wholly ignorant of the world, of society, of literature, of everything. They mostly intended to take holy orders, and some of them had family livings waiting for them. It is difficult, in these days, to understand the depth, and the extent, and the intensity of the ignorance of these lads.
It happened, by great good luck for Christ’s, that there had arisen a man in the college who had eyes to see and a head to understand. The man’s name was Gunson; he was a Cumberland man, and prouder of being a “statesman” than of being tutor of his college. However, this man resolved upon converting his charge into a living and active seat of learning. First, he made his own lectures—classical lectures—worth attending; then, as there was no mathematician in the college, he got one of the ablest of the younger mathematicians in the university, Wolstenholme of St. John’s, elected to a fellowship and lectureship at Christ’s. Then he began to make things uncomfortable for the men who could read to good purpose and were idle. For the first time in the annals of the college there was seen a tutor who actually concerned himself about the men individually; who stormed and bullied the indolent and encouraged those who worked. The result was that, during the whole time that Gunson was tutor of Christ’s, that is to say, for a quarter of a century, the college turned out a succession of men with whom no other college except Trinity could compare.
Let me enumerate some of the men who were members of the college during that quarter of a century when Gunson was tutor. It will be seen that some of them—the seniors—cannot be claimed as the results of Gunson’s activity; but the great majority were undoubtedly his children.
To put the Church first, there were Frederick Gell, Bishop of Madras from 1861 to 1899; Sheepshanks, Bishop of Norwich; Sweatman, Bishop of Toronto; Henry Cheetham, Bishop of Sierra Leone; and Samuel Cheetham, Archdeacon of Rochester, and editor, with the late Sir William Smith, of the Dictionary of Christian Antiquities.—Among scholars, men of science, and men of other distinction, there were Sir John Robert Seeley, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, author of the Expansion of England, and Ecce Homo; Charles Stuart Calverley, poet and scholar; Walter Skeat, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Cambridge; John Peile, afterwards Master of Christ’s College; J.W. Hales, Professor of English Literature at King’s College, London; James Smith Reid, Professor of Ancient History; Walter Wren, the well-known coach; the Rev. C. Middleton-Wake, a writer on artistic topics; Dr. Robert Liveing, dermatologist; Sir Henry B. Buckley, Judge of the High Court; Sir Walter Joseph Sendall, G.C.M.G., Governor in turn of the Windward Islands, Barbados, Cyprus, and British Guiana; Sir John Jardine, K.C.I.E., Judge of the High Court of Bombay, and author of Notes on Buddhist Law; Richard Ebden, C.M.G., Chief Clerk at the Colonial Office; Sir Winfield Bonser, Chief Justice of Ceylon; S.H. Vynes, Professor of Botany at Oxford; H. Marshall Ward, Professor of Botany at Cambridge; George Henslow, also a famous botanist; A.E. Shipley, Lecturer on Morphology at Cambridge; Dr. Wallis Budge, the great Cuneiform scholar and keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities at the British Museum; and many others. I do not think that any other college except Trinity can show so goodly a list. To these may be added those who came to the college after taking their degree—Wolstenholme, third wrangler in 1850, my eldest brother’s year, and late Professor of Mathematics at Cooper’s Hill Engineering College; John Fletcher Moulton, K.C., Senior Wrangler and First Smith’s Prizeman; Francis Darwin, author of Practical Physiology of Plants, and biographer of his distinguished father; and Robertson Smith, the man of colossal learning, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, and joint editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
The greater number of these names belong to the late fifties and the early sixties. For my own part, I had the great good fortune of entering when Calverley had just taken his degree, when Seeley was a third year man; Skeat, Hales, Sendall, Peile belonged either to my own year or to that above or below. Seeley, as an undergraduate, was what he remained in after life, a leader and a teacher of men; he was always somewhat grave, even austere; always a student; always serious in his discourse and in his thoughts. To talk daily with him was an education. He was most helpful to younger men in whom he took an interest; for my own part, I have to thank him for opening up a new world to me. My opportunities of conversation with scholars had been few. At school there had been none; my head-master never talked to the boys; at King’s College there had been none, the professors and lecturers paid no attention to the students. I had read voraciously, but not always wisely. Seeley introduced me to Carlyle, Maurice and Coleridge. Without intending it, he made it impossible for me to carry out my original purpose of taking holy orders. That is to say, the teaching of Maurice, acting on a mind very little attracted by the prevalent orthodoxy, which was still Calvinist and Evangelical, caused a gradual revolt, which was quite unconscious until the time came when I was forced to contemplate the situation seriously. This, however, came afterwards.
Among these men—I mean of my own time—incomparably the most brilliant, the finest scholar, the most remarkable man from every point of view, was Calverley. He was the hero of a hundred tales; all the audacious things, all the witty things, all the clever things, were fathered upon him. It is forty years since his time, and no doubt the same audacities, repartees, and things of unexpectedness which never die have been fathered upon others, his successors in brilliant talk and scholarship. But consider, to a lad like myself, the delight of knowing a man who was not only the finest scholar of his year—writing Latin verses which even to eyes like mine were charming—but a man who could play and sing with a grace and sweetness quite divine, as it seemed to me; who could make parodies the most ridiculous and burlesques the most absurd; who kept a kind of open house for his intimates, with abundance of port and claret—he was the only man in college who kept claret; whose English verses were as delightful as his Latin; who was always sympathetic, always helpful, always considerate. In my first year I saw very little of him. That was to be expected, considering that he was already a bachelor. But a fortunate accident caused him to become then and thenceforward one of my best and kindest friends. The occasion was this. The college offered, every year, a gold medal for an English Essay; the prize was provided by Bishop Porteous, one of the Christ’s worthies. I sent in an essay, and to my surprise, I obtained the prize. More than this, I was bracketed with Calverley. For a freshman of nineteen to be bracketed equal in an English essay with the most brilliant scholar of his time was too much to be expected. I have never since experienced half the joy at any success which I felt on that occasion. Needless to say that I have kept the medal ever since in remembrance of that bracket.
My university career was creditable but not greatly distinguished. I read for double honours, but only went out in the Mathematical Tripos. My classical reading, however, was not wasted, because you cannot well waste time in reading Latin and Greek. I was a scholar, an exhibitioner and a prizeman of my college; I obtained a place tolerably high among the wranglers of my year. My friends groaned, and said I ought to have done much better. Perhaps, but then I had done very much better than they imagined in the broadening of my views, and in general knowledge and culture. I completed my course at Christ’s, as I had begun it, by taking a special prize—this time the Bachelor’s Theological Prize.
The undergraduate’s life in the fifties differed in many respects from that of his successor in the nineties. To begin with, there was a far more generous consumption of beer. Many reading men began the day with beer after breakfast; every Sunday morning breakfast was concluded with beer; there was more beer for lunch; nothing but beer was taken with dinner; and there was beer with the evening pipe. Every college had its own brewer. Four kinds of beer were brewed: the “Audit” ale, old and strong, the “Strong” ale, the “Bitter,” and the “Small” beer, or “Swipes”; the common dinner drink was “Bitter and Swipes.” We dined at four—a most ungodly hour, maintained in the belief that it would leave a long evening for work; it left a long evening, it is true, but not much of it was spent in work. Everyday after hall the men divided themselves into little parties of four or six, and took wine in each other’s rooms; with the reading men there was not much taken, one bottle of port generally sufficing for the whole of the little company. Chapel broke up the party at six. Tea was generally taken at seven or thereabouts, when work was supposed to be resumed and carried on as long as each man chose; mostly at about ten books were laid aside, pipes were produced, and with a quart of bitter for the two or three gathered together, the day was ended before midnight.
Lectures went on from nine to eleven; there was the private coach every other day from eleven to one or two; a hasty lunch of bread and cheese and beer, or of bread and butter with a glass of sherry, followed; then the river, or racquets, or fives, or a walk till four. This was our life. My own form of exercise was either boating or fives. I went down to the river almost every afternoon, rowing bow in our first boat, which was not very high—ninth, I think. In the long vacation, when the narrow river was clearer, I went sculling a good deal. I also played fives, the only game of ball which I could play, because it was the only game in which I could see the ball.
A few men belonged to the Union, but not many. There was no amalgamated club subscription; the cricket club and the boating club were the only two which asked for subscriptions. There were no athletics to speak of; the university sports were held on Fenner’s Ground, but not many men took part in them, or even went to look on. There was no football club for the college; there were no musical societies; there was no choir in the Chapel; there were no associations among the undergraduates at all except two whist clubs. The “muckle” pewter belonging to one of these clubs still adorns my study. In some colleges they had supper clubs, which meant spending a great deal more than the men could afford, and drinking a great deal more than was good for them. I do not think that any supper club existed at Christ’s in my time.
On Sunday after Chapel, i.e. about half-past ten, there was always a breakfast of some half-dozen men; the breakfast consisted of a solid cold pie and the usual “trimmings,” with beer afterwards. After breakfast we went for a long walk. Cambridge is surrounded by villages with venerable churches. They are separated, it is true, by three or four miles of flat and treeless country, but, in the course of a morning between eleven and four, one could cover a good stretch of ground. In those days the rustics still wore embroidered smocks on Sunday and the women wore scarlet flannel shawls. Those of the undergraduates who were religiously disposed indulged in a sort of gluttonous banquet of services. One man, I remember, would take a Sunday school at eight A.M., go to chapel at half-past nine; to a morning service at eleven; to the university sermon at two; to King’s College Chapel at three; to the college chapel at six; to evening service in some church of the town at seven, and end with a prayer meeting and hymn singing in somebody’s rooms. But such men were rare. For my own part, though still proposing to take orders, I was so little moved by the responsibilities before me that though it was necessary, in order to obtain the proper college testimonials, to attend three celebrations of Holy Communion in the three years of residence, I forgot this requirement, and, on discovering the omission, attended all three in the last two terms. This was thought somewhat scandalous, and I nearly lost my college certificate in consequence.
As for the literary tastes of my times, Tennyson, Kingsley and Carlyle were in everybody’s hands, with Dickens of course as the first favourite. It is wonderful that no one seems to have heard of Robert Browning, but I am quite certain that I read nothing of Browning until after going down. Yet we knew, and read, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Scott—in a word, all the poets. Another omission is Thackeray. I cannot remember when I first read Vanity Fair and the smaller things; but I fear that they did not impress me, as they should have done, with anything like the true sense of the writer’s greatness. It must be remembered that literary circles were then very few and very limited. We were most of us country lads, who were still reading the literature of the past. To us, it was more important to study Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Fielding and the other great writers who were gone, than to be inquiring about Thackeray’s last work. We knew nothing and cared nothing about the literary gossip of the time; we made no inquiries about the literary men of the day; some of the men read Evangelical books; most read nothing at all; a few, as I have said, tried to get some mastery over English literature as a continuous development—but they were very few. The ignorance and the apathy of the great mass of men at Cambridge as regards literature was amazing. The best scholars in Greek and Latin only regarded English poetry as a medium to be rendered into Greek Iambics or Latin Lyrics; the mathematicians, as a rule, knew and cared for nothing outside their mathematics.
As for the profession of letters, that, in any shape, was regarded with pity and contempt. The late Tom Taylor, sometime Fellow of Trinity and afterwards dramatist, man of letters, and editor of Punch, was always spoken of by his old friend, the tutor of Christ’s, as “poor Tom Taylor!” Yet “poor Tom” did very well; made a little noise in his own day; lived in plenty and comfort; and among literary folk was well regarded. The literary life, however, was still languishing in contempt. Writers by profession were many of them hacks, dependents, Bohemians, and disreputable in their manners. So, at least, they were regarded; and, if one reads about the writers of the forties and the fifties, not without some reason.
The only journalism that was accounted worthy of a gentleman and a scholar was the writing of leaders for the Times. When the penny newspapers began, great was the derision heaped upon the “young lions” by their contemporaries who started the Saturday Review. The university, in fact, considered only two professions: the Church, which included lectureships, professorships, and fellowships at the colleges; and the Bar. Nothing else was thought worthy of a scholar. Schoolmastering was a refuge, not a profession; art was an unknown calling—to the university; the other professions, as architecture, the work of the actuary, engineering, science of all kinds, were not recognised. They belonged, perhaps, to University College, London, and the current and kindly name for that institution was “Stinkomalee.”
I have mentioned the Saturday Review. That paper first appeared in my undergraduate days, and did more to create journalism as a profession than would be believed at the present moment, when journalists are recruited from all classes. It was understood, at the outset, that it was wholly written by university men, and mostly by Cambridge men; their names were whispered—the names of dons. The paper assumed the manner of authority; such authority as a scholar has a right to exercise; that is to say, a superior manner, as of deeper and wider knowledge. It heaped derision on the shams of the time; and especially on the shams which had gathered round the Evangelical party; the pietistic sermons; the snuffling hypocrisies; the half-concealed, self-seeking, the narrowness, and the tyranny of it; the scamped services and the wretched buildings and villainous singing. Never was a party more handsomely banged and beaten week after week; never was derision more piled up with every number than over the cant and the unreality of this party. On Sunday the paper became part of the breakfast; it was read with a savage joy. I think, looking back, that the slating and the bludgeoning were quite too savage; yet the fearlessness with which the bludgeon or the rapier was handled impressed the world. None of the Evangelical lights were spared. Lord Shaftesbury heard, to his disgust, that his deity was an old man of an uncertain temper sitting on a cloud; a great light in the Evangelical party was shown by his own recorded prayers before going into the Senate House to have treated the Almighty as a judicious coach; the early extravagances of Charles Spurgeon, then regarded in certain circles as another Wesley, were exposed; the missionaries of the narrow school were handled with a dexterity which Sydney Smith might have envied. The excuse for this savagery was that the time wanted it. I do not think that a paper conducted on the same lines would now do any good at all; but we want now, and want it badly, a paper written wholly by scholars who will speak with the authority of scholars. The Saturday Review began to fall off when it began to lose its old authority.
There was no ladies’ society, or very little, at Cambridge. I myself was so fortunate as to be invited to one or two houses where there were daughters. Most of the men had no chance of speaking to a lady during the whole of the university course. Many of our men came from country farms, or were drawn from the “statesmen” of Cumberland; you may imagine, therefore, that they were tolerably rough. The three years of Cambridge did something for them, but there were no compensations for the loss of ladies’ society. None of the dons were married; the heads of houses and the professors alone were married. As for the town, I do not think that there was any kind of intercourse between the town of Cambridge and the colleges.
The university, in fact, was still a collection of monastic establishments. It was the end of a sleepy time, but change was rapidly approaching. I saw the place, I repeat, as it had been all through the eighteenth century. With the men of my time I felt the coming change. Close fellowships were thrown open; close scholarships fell into the common treasury of endowment; science was beginning to demand recognition; scholars were looking across to Germany with envy; the rule of the Evangelicals was relaxing. Dissenters and Jews were beginning to be admitted to the university. They had to go to chapel and to pass the “little go,” with its examination upon Paley’s Evidences of Christianity; and they could hold neither fellowship nor scholarship. They were allowed, however, to go in for the Tripos examinations.
I have omitted to allude to one little distinction that I gained. In my second year, Calverley announced an examination for a prize in the study of the Pickwick Papers. The examination was held in the evening in his own rooms. If I remember aright there were about ten candidates, most of whom had no chance whatever. The paper, a copy of which is appended, is one of the cleverest things that Calverley ever did. We were allowed, I think, two hours, or perhaps three. When the papers were handed in, we refreshed ourselves after our labours with a supper of oysters, beer, and milk-punch. The result gave me the first prize, and Skeat the second. There was a good deal of talk about the examination; copies of the paper were in great request all over the university; and for a whole day Skeat and I were famous.
Another little episode. One day Calverley, then a fellow, stopped me in the court and invited me to his rooms after hall. “I ’ve got a young Frenchman,” he said. “He’s clever. Come and be amused.” I went. The young Frenchman spoke English as well as anybody; he told quantities of stories in a quiet, irresponsible way, as if he was an outsider looking on at the world. No one went to chapel that evening. After the port, which went round with briskness for two or three hours, the young Frenchman went to the piano and began to sing in a sweet, flexible, high baritone or tenor. Presently somebody else took his place at the instrument, and he, with Calverley, and two or three dummies, performed a Royal Italian Opera in very fine style. The young Frenchman’s name was George Du Maurier. Years afterwards, when I came to know him, I reminded him of this blissful evening—which he remembered perfectly. One of the songs he sang in French had a very sweet and touching air. Calverley remembered it, and Sendall wrote some verses for it. They are preserved as a footnote to some reminiscences of mine in Sendall’s memoir of Calverley, his brother-in-law.
And so my time came to an end. What did Cambridge do for me? Well, it seems as if it did everything for me. For a time, at least, it knocked on the head all my literary aspirations. As regards literature, indeed, I understood that I had to study the poets of my own speech seriously, and I began to do so. Writing had to wait. It made holy orders impossible for me, though, as yet, I did not understand this important fact. It widened the whole of my mind in every imaginable way. It seems to me now, looking back, that except for my three early years with H. A——, my education only began when I entered college; imperfect as it was when I left, I had, at least, acquired standards and models. I was reputed, I believe, to have failed in my degree. Well, there are so many other useful things besides mathematics, and I was quite high enough for any mathematical powers that I possessed. I had obtained, in addition, much Latin and Greek, and a certain insight into Divinity, with a good solid foundation of English, French, and German literature, read by myself. There is another point. Much more in those days than at present, when everything is levelled, was Cambridge a school of manners. Consider: we were all thrown together in a small college, on terms of intimacy. There was, as I have said, the son of the country gentleman of good family; the son of the country clergyman; the son of the London merchant; the son of the London physician, barrister, or solicitor; the lad from the country town; the lad from the farm; the lad from the manufacturing centre; the son of the tradesman: all these lads lived together in amity. But there were leaders among us, and manners were softened—things were learned which had not been guessed before. New habits of thought, new points of refinement, a wider mind, came out of this intimacy of so many different youths from different homes. If I may judge from myself, the effect of Cambridge upon the youth of the time was wholly and unreservedly beneficial.
AN EXAMINATION PAPER.
“THE POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF THE PICKWICK CLUB.”
CAMBRIDGE (1857)
1. Mention any occasions on which it is specified that the Fat Boy was not asleep; and that (1) Mr. Pickwick and (2) Mr. Weller, senior, ran. Deduce from expressions used on one occasion Mr. Pickwick’s maximum of speed.
2. Translate into coherent English, adding a note wherever a word, a construction, or an allusion, requires it:—
“Go on, Jemmy—like black-eyed Susan—all in the Downs”—“Smart chap that cabman—handled his fives well—but if I’d been your friend in the green jemmy—punch his head—pig’s whisper—pieman, too.”
Elucidate the expression, “the Spanish Traveller,” and the “narcotic bedstead.”
3. Who were Mr. Staple, Goodwin, Mr. Brooks, Villam, Mrs. Bunkin, “Old Nobs,” “cast-iron head,” “young Bantam?”
4. What operation was performed on Tom Smart’s chair? Who little thinks that in which pocket, of what garment, in where, he has left what, entreating him to return to whom, with how many what, and all how big?
5. Give, approximately, the height of Mr. Dubbley; and, accurately, the Christian names of Mr. Grummer, Mrs. Raddle, and the Fat Boy; also the surname of the Zephyr.
6. “Mr. Weller’s knowledge of London was extensive and peculiar.” Illustrate this by a reference to the facts.
7. Describe the Rebellion which had irritated Mr. Nupkins on the day of Mr. Pickwick’s arrest?
8. Give in full Samuel Weller’s first compliment to Mary, and his father’s critique upon the same young lady. What church was on the valentine that first attracted Mr. Samuel’s eye in the shop?
9. Describe the common Profeel-machine.
10. State the component parts of dog’s nose; and simplify the expression “taking a grinder.”
11. On finding his principal in the pound, Mr. Weller and the town-beadle varied directly. Show that the latter was ultimately eliminated, and state the number of rounds in the square which is not described.
12. “Any think for air and exercise; as the wery old donkey observed ven they voke him up from his deathbed to carry ten gen’lmen to Greenwich in a tax-cart.” Illustrate this by stating any remark recorded in the Pickwick Papers to have been made by a (previously) dumb animal, with the circumstances under which he made it.
13. What kind of cigars did Mr. Ben Allen chiefly smoke, and where did he knock and take naps alternately, under the impression that it was his home?
14. What was the ordinary occupation of Mr. Sawyer’s boy? whence did Mr. Allen derive the idea that there was a special destiny between Mr. S. and Arabella?
15. Describe Weller’s Method of “gently indicating his presence” to the young lady in the garden; and the form of salutation usual among the coachmen of the period.
16. State any incidents you know in the career of Tom Martin, butcher, previous to his incarceration.
17. Give Weller’s Theories for the extraction of Mr. Pickwick from the Fleet. Where was his wife’s will found?
18. How did the old lady make a memorandum, and of what, at whist? Show that there were at least three times as many fiddles as harps in Muggleton at the time of the ball at Manor Farm.
19. What is a red-faced Nixon?
20. Write down the chorus to each verse of Mr. S. Weller’s song, and a sketch of the mottle-faced man’s excursus on it. Is there any ground for conjecturing that he (Sam) had more brothers than one?
21. How many lumps of sugar went into the Shepherd’s liquor as a rule? and is any exception recorded?
22. What seal was on Mr. Winkle’s letter to his father? What penitential attitude did he assume before Mr. Pickwick?
23. “She’s a-swelling visibly.” When did the same phenomenon occur again, and what fluid caused the pressure on the body in the latter case?
24. How did Mr. Weller, senior, define the Funds, and what view did he take of Reduced Consols? in what terms is his elastic force described, when he assaulted Mr. Stiggins at the meeting? Write down the name of the meeting?
25. Πρoβaτoγνώμων : a good judge of cattle; hence, a good judge of character. Note on Æsch. Ag.—Illustrate the theory involved by a remark of the parent Weller.
26. Give some account of the word “fanteeg,” and hazard any conjecture explanatory of the expression “My Prooshan Blue,” applied by Mr. Samuel to Mr. Tony Weller.
27. In developing to P.M. his views of a proposition, what assumption did Mr. Pickwick feel justified in making?
28. Deduce from a remark of Mr. Weller, junior, the price per mile of cabs at the period.
29. What do you know of the hotel next the Bull at Rochester?
30. Who, besides Mr. Pickwick, is recorded to have worn gaiters?