"The youth whose heart pants for the honour of a Bachelor of (p. 150) Arts degree must wait patiently till near four years have revolved.... He is obliged during this period, once to oppose and once to respond.... This opposing and responding is termed, in the cant of the place, _doing generals_. Two boys or men, as they call themselves, agree to _do generals_ together. The first step in this mighty work is to procure arguments. These are always handed down, from generation to generation, on long slips of paper, and consist of foolish syllogisms on foolish subjects, of the foundation or significance of which the respondent and opponent seldom know more than an infant in swaddling cloaths. The next step is to go for a _liceat_ to one of the petty officers, called the Regent-Master of the Schools, who subscribes his name to the questions and receives sixpence as his fee. When the important day arrives, the two doughty disputants go into a large dusty room, full of dirt and cobwebs.... Here they sit in mean desks, opposite to each other from one o'clock till three. Not once in a hundred times does any officer enter; and, if he does, he hears a syllogism or two, and then makes a bow, and departs, as he came and remained, in solemn silence. The disputants then return to the amusement of cutting the desks, carving their names, or reading Sterne's Sentimental Journey, or some other edifying novel. When the exercise is duly performed by both parties, they have a right to the title and insignia of _Sophs_: but not before they have been formally _created_ (p. 151) by one of the regent-masters, before whom they kneel, while he lays a volume of Aristotle's works on their heads, and puts on a hood, a piece of black crape, hanging from their necks, and down to their heels.... There remain only one or two trifling forms, and another disputation almost exactly similar to _doing generals_, but called _answering under bachelor_ previous to the awful examination. Every candidate is obliged to be examined in the whole circle of the sciences by three masters of arts _of his own choice_.... _Schemes_, as they are called, or little books containing forty or fifty questions on each science, are handed down from age to age, from one to another. The candidate employs three or four days in learning these by heart, and the examiners, having done the same before him, know what questions to ask, and so all goes on smoothly. When the candidate has displayed his universal knowledge of the sciences, he is to display his skill in philology. One of the masters therefore asks him to construe a passage in some Greek or Latin classic, which he does with no interruption, just as he pleases, and as well as he can. The