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for the refectory daily, the reception of guests, the delivery of speeches on state occasions, and the like,-the hall, like the cathedral, would have had an entirely salutary and beneficently solemnizing effect on me, hallowing to me my daily bread, or, if our Dean Abbot had condescended sometimes to dine with us, our incidental venison. But with the extremely bad taste (which, to my mind, is our cardinal modern sin, the staple to the hinge of our taste for money, and distaste for money’s worth, and every other worthiness) -in that bad taste, I say, the Abbot allowed our Hall to be used for “collections.” The word is wholly abominable to my mind, whether as expressing extorted charities in church, or extracted knowledge in examination. “Collections,” in scholastic sense, meant the college examination at the end of every term, at which the Abbot had always the worse than bad taste to be present as our inquisitor, though he had never once presided at our table as our host. Of course the collective quantity of Greek possessed by all the undergraduate heads in hall was, to him, infinitesimal. Scornful at once, and vindictive, thunderous always, more sullen and threatening as the day went on, he stalked with baleful emanation of Gorgonian cold from dais to door, and door to dais, of the majestic torture chamber,-vast as the great council hall of Venice, but degraded now by the mean terrors, swallow-like under its eaves, of doleful creatures who had no counsel in them, except how to hide their crib in time, at each fateful Abbot’s transit. Of course I never used a crib, but I believe the Dean would rather I had used fifty, than borne the puzzled and hopeless aspect which I presented towards the afternoon, over whatever I had to do. And as my Latin writing was, I suppose, the worst in the university,-as I never by any chance knew a first from a second future, or, even to the end of my Oxford career, could get into my head where the Pelasgi lived, or where the Heraclidæ returned from,- it may be imagined with what sort of countenance the Dean gave me his first and second fingers to shake at our

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