“The youth, whose heart pants for the honour of a Bachelor of Arts degree, must wait patiently till near four years have revolved. But this time is not to be spent idly. No; he is obliged, during this period, once to oppose, and once to respond, in disputations held in the public schools--a formidable sound and a dreadful idea; but, on closer attention, the fear will vanish, and contempt supply its place. 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 formation or the signification of which the respondent and opponent seldom know more than an infant in swaddling clothes. 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, with walls and wainscot decorated with the names of former disputants, who to divert the tedious hours cut out their names with their penknives, or wrote verses with a pencil. 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 one 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 this 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 by one of the regent-masters.... This work done, a great progress is made towards the wished-for honour of a Bachelor’s degree. 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_. The examination is to be held in one of the public schools, and to continue from nine o’clock till eleven. The masters take a most solemn oath, that they will examine properly and impartially. Dreadful as all this appears, there is always found to be more of appearance in it than reality, for the greatest dunce usually gets his _testimonium_ signed with as much ease and credit as the finest genius. The manner of proceeding is as follows: The poor young man to be examined in the sciences often knows no more of them than his bedmaker, and the masters who examine are sometimes equally