Many humorous stories are told of the absurd height to which the observance of _etiquette_ has been carried at both Oxford and Cambridge. In my time, you might meet _a good fellow_ at a _wine party_, crack your joke with him, hob-nob, &c., but, unless introduced, you would have been stared at with the most vacant wonderment if you attempted to recognise him next day. It is told of men of both universities, that a scholar walking on the banks of the Isis, or Cam, fell into the river, and was in the act of drowning, when another son of _Alma-Mater_ came up, and observing his perilous situation, exclaimed, "What a pity it is I have not the honour of knowing the gentleman, that I might save him!" One version of the story runs, that the said scholars met by accident on the banks of the Nile or Ganges, I forget which, when the catastrophe took place; we may, therefore, very easily imagine the presence of either a crocodile or an alligator to complete the group. Wood, in his Annals of Oxford, has the following anecdote of THE VALUE OF A SYLLABLE. "The masters of olden time at Athens, and afterwards at Oxford, were called _Sophi_, and the scholars _Sophistæ_; but the _masters_ taking it in scorn that the _scholars_ should have a larger name than they, called themselves _Philosophi_,--that is, lovers of science, and so got the advantage of the scholars by _one syllable_." Every body has heard of Foote's celebrated motto for a tailor friend of his, about to sport his coat of arms,---"_List, list, O list!_" But every body has not heard, probably, though it is noticed in his memoir, extant in Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, that the learned Cambridge divine and antiquary, Dr. _Cocks Macro_, having applied to a Cambridge acquaintance for an appropriate motto to his coat of arms, was pithily answered with "COCKS MAY CROW." Every Cantab remembers and regrets the early death of the accomplished scholar, Charles Skinner Matthews, M.A., late Fellow of Downing College, who was "the familiar" of the present Sir J. C. Hobhouse, and of the late Lord Byron. He was not more accomplished than facetious, nor, according to one of Lord Byron's letters, more facetious than "beloved." Speaking of his university _freaks_, his lordship says, "when Sir Henry Smith was expelled from Cambridge, for a row with a tradesman named "_Hiron_," Matthews solaced himself with shouting under Hiron's window every evening-- "Ah me! what perils do environ The man who meddles with _hot Hiron_!" He was also of that BAND OF PROFANE SCOFFERS