Alma Mater! Alma Mater! New-fashioned folks, with their large theories of education, may find fault with thee. But a true Spartan mother thou art--hard and stern as the old matron who bricked up her son Pausanias, bringing the first stone to immure him; hard and stern, I say, to the worthless, but full of majestic tenderness to the worthy. For a young man to go up to Cambridge (I say nothing of Oxford, knowing nothing thereof) merely as routine work, to lounge through three years to a degree among the ὁι πολλοι--for such an one, Oxford Street herself, whom the immortal Opium-eater hath so direly apostrophised, is not a more careless and stony-hearted mother. But for him who will read, who will work, who will seize the rare advantages proffered, who will select his friends judiciously--yea, out of that vast ferment of young idea in its lusty vigour, choose the good and reject the bad--there is plenty to make those three years rich with fruit imperishable--three years nobly spent, even though one must pass over the Ass's Bridge to get into the Temple of Honour. Important changes in the Academical system have been recently announced, and honours are henceforth to be accorded to the successful disciples in moral and natural sciences. By the side of the old throne of Mathesis, they have placed two very useful _fauteuils à la Voltaire_. I have no objection; but, in those three years of life, it is not so much the thing learned, as the steady perseverance in learning something that is excellent. It was fortunate, in one respect, for me that I had seen a little of the real world--the metropolitan, before I came to that mimic one--the cloistral. For what were called pleasures in the last, and which might have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me now. Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness and extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the university _sub consule Planco_--when Wordsworth was master of Trinity: it may be altered now. But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the laborious.