186 PRÆTERITA-I

father a hint, that as far as my reading had already gone, it was not altogether certain I could pass the entrance examination which had to be sustained by commoners. This last suggestion was conclusive. It was not to be endured that the boy who had been expected to carry all before him, should get himself jammed in the first turnstile. I was entered as a Gentleman-Commoner without farther debate, and remember still, as if it were yesterday, the pride of first walking out of the Angel Hotel, and past University College, holding my father’s arm, in my velvet cap and silk gown.

214. Yes, good reader, the velvet and silk made a difference, not to my mother only, but to me! Quite one of the telling and weighty points in the home debates concerning this choice of Hercules, had been that the commoner’s gown was not only of ugly stuff, but had no flowing lines in it, and was virtually only a black rag tied to one’s shoulders. One was thrice a gownsman in a flowing gown.

So little, indeed, am I disposed now in maturer years to deride these unphilosophical feelings, that instead of effacing distinction of dress at the University (except for the boating clubs), I would fain have seen them extended into the entire social order of the country. I think that nobody but duchesses should be allowed to wear diamonds; that lords should be known from common people by their stars, a quarter of a mile off; that every peasant girl should boast her county by some dainty ratification of cap or bodice; and that in the towns a vintner should be known from a fishmonger by the cut of his jerkin.

That walk to the Schools, and the waiting, outside the Divinity School, in comforting admiration of its door, my turn for matriculation, continue still for me, at pleasure. But I remember nothing more that year; nor anything of the first days of the next, until early in January we drove down to Oxford, only my mother and I, by the beautiful Henley road, weary a little as we changed horses for the

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