Our journey lay over a dull and level country, and there was little to enliven it, except the conversation of a young Oxonian going to see the rival University. A cantab, returning from Oxford, maintained a good-natured debate with him, in favour of his own _alma-mater_. We went through St. Neot’s, where I remembered Cowper again; descried at the distance of some twenty miles the majestic bulk of Ely Cathedral, and finally greeted the fair vision of King’s College, conspicuous among the other academic homes of Granta. It was the fourth of July—and thoughts of the very different scenes through which my friends were passing in America, were continually in my mind. Here it was not thought of, though a day which has left its mark upon Great Britain, and the world. Was it the day of a rebellion? By no means; unless the day that seated William of Orange on the throne of England was such. Our fathers ceased to be Englishmen, because a corrupt and incompetent Ministry were resolved that they should no longer be freemen. I thank God we are no longer at the mercy of such men as Lord John Russell, and Sir William Molesworth. So I mused, even as I stood, for the first time, in venerable Cambridge, where some of my forefathers were educated, and where I felt it a sort of wrong to be disinherited of a filial right to feel at home. I was not disappointed, disagreeably, in Cambridge, but the reverse; and it grew upon me every hour that I was there. One of my first visits was to the truly poetical courts of Caius, where the singular quaintness of its three gates charmed alike my sight and fancy. “Before honour is humility”—and here the proverb is translated into architecture. You must pass through the gate of humility, and the gate of virtue, before emerging through the gate of honour. Strange that the beneficent founder of this college, like Dr. Faust, in Germany, should have left his name to legend-makers and fabulists, and so to comedy, and the “Merry Wives of Windsor.”