A twentieth century undergraduates’ day does not differ from those recorded in his diary by Wordsworth’s brother when he was a freshman at Trinity in 1793.[365] This is how he was employed during the Reign of Terror and within a few days of the execution of Marie Antoinette:--“Chapel. Lectures. Considered of a subject for my essay on Wednesday se’nnight. Drank wine with Coleridge. Present the _Society_. Chapel. Read ‘Morning Chronicle.’ Found in it an ode to Fortune, by Coleridge, which I had seen at Rough’s yesterday. Read _ratios_ and _variable quantities_, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy.” It was indeed rather in its outer than in its inner circumstance that the life even of the xiii and xiv century undergraduate differed from that of the xxth. Then as now he listened to doctors in their faculties and his own college seniors expounding the mysteries of art and science; then, as now, he supplemented these lectures with private reading, then, seated upon a wooden stool in a corner of a crowded room, or in the college library, or best of all in the college meadows; now, in a comfortable arm chair or stretched upon a sofa in his private sitting room.[366] Then, as now, he caroused or discussed “the universe” with his friends, as his nature suggested. Then, as now, he made early acquaintance with the river Granta and knew each yard of the flat roads round the university town. Even the periodical outbreak between “town and gown” belongs as much to the xiii century as to the most recent history in the xxth.[367] Lectures take place in the morning, “coaching” and private study usually in the late afternoon and evening. Two to four is the chosen time for recreation, and the chief recreations of the Cantab used to be the road and the river. The latter runs familiarly past the windows of his college rooms, and invites him as he steps forth from the threshold of his college court. Boating, swimming, or fishing, the student of a bye-gone day found in the Granta a never-failing and an inexpensive resource. Cambridge fish as we have seen has always been famous, and the Merton scholars poached upon the townsmen’s fishing rights long before the xiii century was out.