toward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not much short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved the monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigence at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victim supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which I mean in the _haute ville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked joint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to an education as we had elsewhere known the College exhibited, with whatever reserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of the administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a _cour d'honneur_, the court disconnecting the scene, by intention at least, from the basely bourgeois and giving value to the whole effect of opposed and windowed wall and important, or balanced and "placed," _perron_. These are many words for the dull precinct, as then presented, I admit, and they are perhaps half prompted by a special association, too ghostly now quite to catch again--the sense of certain Sundays, distinct from the grim, that is the flatly instructional, body of the week, when I seem to myself to have successfully flouted the whole constituted field by passing across it and from it to some quite ideally old-world little annexed _musee de province_, as inviolate in its way as the grey rampart and bare citadel, and very like them in unrelieved tone, where I repeatedly, and without another presence to hinder, looked about me at goodness knows what weird ancientries of stale academic art. Not one of these treasures, in its habit as it lived, do I recall; yet the sense and the "note" of them was at the time, none the less, not so elusive that I didn't somehow draw straight from them intimations of the interesting, that is revelations of the aesthetic, the historic, the critical mystery and charm of things (of such things taken altogether), that added to my small loose handful of the seed of culture.