194 PRÆTERITA-I

parting, or with what comfort I met the inquiries of my father and mother as to the extent to which I was, in college opinion, carrying all before me.

221. As time went on, the aspect of my college hall to me meant little more than the fear and shame of those examination days; but even in the first surprise and sublimity of finding myself dining there, were many reasons for the qualification of my pleasure. The change from our front parlour at Herne Hill, some fifteen feet by eighteen, and meat and pudding with my mother and Mary, to a hall about as big as the nave of Canterbury Cathedral, with its extremity lost in mist, its roof in darkness, and its company, an innumerable, immeasurable vision in vanishing perspective, was in itself more appalling to me than appetizing; but also, from first to last, I had the clownish feeling of having no business there.

In the cathedral, however born or bred, I felt myself present by as good a right as its bishop,-nay, that in some of its lessons and uses, the building was less his than mine. But at table, with this learned and lordly perspective of guests, and state of worldly service, I had nothing to do; my own proper style of dining was for ever, I felt, divided from this-impassably. With baked potatoes under the mutton, just out of the oven, into the little parlour off the shop in Market Street, or beside a gipsy’s kettle on Addington Hill (not that I had ever been beside a gipsy’s kettle, but often wanted to be); or with an oat-cake and butter-for I was always a gourmand- in a Scotch shepherd’s cottage, to be divided with his collie, I was myself, and in my place: but at the gentlemen-commoners’ table, in Cardinal Wolsey’s diningroom,¹ I was, in all sorts of ways at once, less than myself, and in all sorts of wrong places at once, out of my place.

222. I may as well here record a somewhat comic

¹ [The Hall was built by Wolsey, 1529.]

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