and I remember well that on the morning I went into the Senate House for my degree, I knelt down to pray for success, and I thought at the time how much higher gifted I would be if the Lord would make me wise to win souls. University Letters. Although the autobiography contains but a brief reference to his career at Cambridge, it seems a pity to pass too hastily over this most important time of a young man’s life. A great many of his letters to his mother were written at this period, and, like his boyish letters, they are all carefully stitched up into a series of sets, as if his parent foresaw that one day they would be valued by others. They form delightful reading, and it is unfortunate that want of space forbids more than a summarising of their contents and a few extracts. The first of these, written to his mother, October 22nd, 1830, two days after he had taken up his residence at Trinity College, describes the purchase of cap and gown, the first dinner in Hall, the rooms in which he was settled, the prospects of College life, which he greatly relished, and the determination to keep clear of “harum-scarum fellows.” A characteristic sentence is worth quoting: “There is only one point I really dislike, which is the profane manner in which the Lessons are gabbled over at chapel, so that you can only hear a hurried mumble, and not one word of the sense.” Various incidents enliven the letters at this time: descriptions of his friends, a very nice set; allusions to some “glorious sermons” of Mr. Simeon, who was then the great power at Cambridge; his resolution to join a boat; and the excitement caused “by an attack on the Anatomy Schools, when the Vice-Chancellor sent round to the Colleges to call the men out to fight, which summons we obeyed with great alacrity, though little necessity.” Surely the last item must make Cambridge men of this generation envy their predecessors of sixty years ago! On his nineteenth birthday young Hoare thus writes to his mother:— “I don’t know whether you recollect that I shall never again see nineteen years. So I am now entering a new year—oh how earnestly I do hope that, through His grace who alone can keep me, it may be a year of profit and advancement in holiness! I have thought a good deal about it, though not so much as I could wish. How many blessings I have to be thankful for that I have received during the past year, when sorrow and affliction have been scattered all around me! How wonderfully all of us have been preserved in perfect health and enjoyment!” A few months after this, in a letter from Hampstead, he mentions walking across the fields one Sunday morning to St. John’s and hearing a sermon from Mr. Noel that greatly impressed him; the subject was “The necessity and efficacy of diligence in religion.”