Gregson did so with a grin, for Cradockʼs face proved that the principal had not been altogether wrong. Is this prejudice, or, rather, perhaps, I should say, this aversion, disappearing now–a–days, or is it upon the increase? At any rate, one cause of it is being removed most rapidly; for the buckram etiquette of Oxford will soon become a tradition. We will only hope she may not run too far into the free and easy. Cradockʼs other discovery was that 50_l._ is no large capital to commence in life with, especially when the owner does not find his start prepared for him; fails to prepare it for himself; and has never been used to economy. He would not apply to any of his fatherʼs friends, or of the people whom he had known in London, to help him in this emergency. He would rather starve than do that; for he had dropped all name and claim of Nowell, and cut his life in twain at manhood; and the parts should never join again. Only one feeling should be common to the two existences, to the happy and the wretched life; that one feeling was the love of Amy, and, what now seemed part of it, his gratitude to her father. John Rosedew had given him a letter to a clergyman in London, a man of high standing and extensive influence, whom John had known at college. But the youth had not undertaken to deliver that credential, and he never did so. It would have kept him to his identity, which (so far as the world was concerned) he wished to change entirely, immediately, and irrevocably. So he called himself “Nowell” no longer—although the name is common enough in one form or another: the Nowells of Nowelhurst, however, are proud of the double _l_, and think a good deal of the _w_—and Cradock Nowell became “Charles Newman,” without license of Her Majesty. Even before his vain attempts to enter the stronghold of commerce, and before he had learned that Oxford men are not thought “_prima virorum_,” he had lifted the latch of literature, but the door would not swing back for him. The _mare magnum_—to mix metaphors, although bars are added to the Lucrine—the _mare magnum_ of letters was more like his native element; and, if he once could have gotten—bare–footed as we must be—over the jagged rocks which hedge that sea, I believe he might have swum there. In one respect he was fortunate. The publishers upon whom he called were gentlemen, and told him the truth. “Oh, poetry!” exclaimed one and all, as their eyes fell upon his manuscript, “we cannot take it on our own account; and, if we published it at your expense, we should only be robbing you.” “Indeed!” replied Cradock, in the first surprise; “is there no chance, then, of a sale for it?”