The Union Society forms another distraction well calculated to turn out the English ideal of a university man--a man, _id est_, ready for public affairs. It was founded in 1815 by the _union_ of three already existing debating societies, the present building was erected in 1866 and fitted up as a club. Stratford Canning (Lord Stratford de Redcliffe) and Blomfield, afterwards Bishop of London, belonged to one of these earlier “spouting clubs” in 1806, where Palmerston and Ellenborough both “laid the foundation” of their parliamentary fame. The college ball and the college concert are also crowded into the student’s seven weeks of residence in the May term, taking the place of the plays which formed the staple entertainment in the xvi and xvii centuries. The modern “A.D.C.” has been rendered famous by the “Greek Plays” which were inaugurated twenty-five years ago with a performance of “Ajax.” [Sidenote: Sunday at Cambridge.] But the round of work and play comes to an end with Sunday, and the university has preserved the festival aspect of this day, the day when continental beadles and _gens d’armes_ don their fine plumes and when what is bright and gay rather than what is dull and grave is mated to the idea of a day of rest. The college courts--the outdoor centre and rallying point of college life--are thronged with men gay in surplice or gown[372] as they were thronged on that Sunday 370 years ago when Stephen Gardiner Bishop of Winchester found two hundred dons assembled “as is their wont” and buttonholed the men who were likely to pleasure his grace in the matter of the divorce. That fine day in the xvi century was no doubt a repetition of many fine days in the centuries preceding it, for it is always fine in Cambridge on Sunday. And Sunday after Sunday the undergraduate has received a lesson in dignities, as he circled becapped and begowned on the cobbled paths round the greater luminaries becapped and begowned tranquilly stepping on the college grass. The modern undergraduate does not remember a time when a pathway ran across the turf from corner to corner of the college courts, as it did in Clare Hall, in the old court of Corpus, and in William of Wykeham’s foundation at Oxford. On “scarlet days” the courts are still more gay, for the doctors then appear in their scarlet.[373]