Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1Darwin, Charles
History
Life and Letters of Charles Darwin — Volume 1
Darwin, Charles
Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Naturalists -- Great Britain -- Correspondence
My father seems to have found no difficulty in living at peace with
all men in and out of office at Lady Margaret's other foundation. The
impression of a contemporary of my father's is that Christ's in their
day was a pleasant, fairly quiet college, with some tendency towards
"horsiness"; many of the men made a custom of going to Newmarket during
the races, though betting was not a regular practice. In this they were
by no means discouraged by the Senior Tutor, Mr. Shaw, who was himself
generally to be seen on the Heath on these occasions. There was a
somewhat high proportion of Fellow-Commoners,--eight or nine, to sixty
or seventy Pensioners, and this would indicate that it was not an
unpleasant college for men with money to spend and with no great love of
strict discipline.
The way in which the service was conducted in chapel shows that the
Dean, at least, was not over zealous. I have heard my father tell how
at evening chapel the Dean used to read alternate verses of the Psalms,
without making even a pretence of waiting for the congregation to take
their share. And when the Lesson was a lengthy one, he would rise and
go on with the Canticles after the scholar had read fifteen or twenty
verses.
It is curious that my father often spoke of his Cambridge life as if it
had been so much time wasted, forgetting that, although the set studies
of the place were barren enough for him, he yet gained in the highest
degree the best advantages of a University life--the contact with men
and an opportunity for his mind to grow vigorously. It is true that he
valued at its highest the advantages which he gained from associating
with Professor Henslow and some others, but he seemed to consider this
as a chance outcome of his life at Cambridge, not an advantage for which
Alma Mater could claim any credit. One of my father's Cambridge friends
was the late Mr. J.M. Herbert, County Court Judge for South Wales, from
whom I was fortunate enough to obtain some notes which help us to gain
an idea of how my father impressed his contemporaries. Mr. Herbert
writes: "I think it was in the spring of 1828 that I first met Darwin,
either at my cousin Whitley's rooms in St. John's, or at the rooms of
some other of his old Shrewsbury schoolfellows, with many of whom I was
on terms of great intimacy. But it certainly was in the summer of that
year that our acquaintance ripened into intimacy, when we happened to
be together at Barmouth, for the Long Vacation, reading with private
tutors,--he with Batterton of St. John's, his Classical and Mathematical
Tutor, and I with Yate of St. John's."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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