wise saws, was full of advice, offered with a kind of humility and yet indifference, because you were so small a factor in his self-satisfaction. High on your summit, Wisdom’s mimick’d Air Sits thron’d, with Pedantry her solemn sire. In every glance and motion you display, Sage Ignorance her gloom scholastic throws And stamps o’er all your visage, once so gay, Unmeaning Gravity’s serene repose. And so he goes through life, with all the pomp of learning--of the reality, none--complacent, imposing, and yet hardly a man. II Of the college cook it is easy to say too much. He is a potentate against whom there is no appeal on earth. “Much knavery,” says Ben Jonson, “may be vented in a pudding.” In the days of the _Shotover Papers_ he could offer in exchange for a recipe “an introduction to some country families.” At the monastic door of his kitchen, as he meditates his mysteries, something of the Middle Ages clings to him yet, and he is half an abbot, contemptuous of a generation that makes small demand upon his subtlety and wealth. It is said that he comes of brilliant ancestry and has fallen. What heights there may be in the world from which a man could be said to fall in becoming a college cook, I do not know. For years he made clear the distinction between fancy and imagination. By fancy he lived, and on his fancies generations fed. He could disguise the meanest materials, and make them illustrious, subtle, or exquisitely sweet. He was _animal propter convivia natum_. In his grey kitchen, with chestnut beams aloft, a visitor seemed to assist at the inauguration of a perpetual spring. On the one hand was the earth--the raw material--the mere flesh or fish; and out of this, with upturned sleeves, like artist or conjuror, he made the flowers flourish and the leaves abound. By the perfume, it was a mysterious indoor Mayday. And so he lived, and was feared and respected. But it was admitted that he had rivals. Something in a grander style was yet to be done....