Eton, then, was the school where ignorance was bliss, but the bliss was very dear while it lasted, and it would have been dearer still if we had more fully realized the nature of the change that was to follow--the difference between University and School. As the end of the last summer term drew near, we felt more and more the pang of the parting that was to come; and when it was time to write our _Vale_--that last copy of the weekly verses, in which we were allowed, for once, to substitute English for Latin--we naturally likened ourselves to some prophetic dreamer of sad dreams, or to some despairing convict who sees his approaching fate. So I, who write, feel ever on my heart Such dim presentiment, such dull despair: Me, too, a doom awaits; I, too, must part, And change a careless life for toil and care. Doubtless many such elegies periodically found their way, as mine did, into Dr. Hornby’s waste-paper basket. III LITERÆ INHUMANIORES Next Camus, reverend sire, went footing slow. MILTON. Certainly, after the liveliness of Thames, old Camus seemed to foot it very slowly. Heavy was the fall from the exaltation of the sixth form to the lowliness of the freshman. A needed experience it may have been, as correcting the natural priggishness of boyhood; but it was a change that we little relished while we underwent it. King’s College, Cambridge, in the early ’seventies, was in a phase of transition from the old-fashioned system, under which it was a mere appanage of Eton, to a new order of things which was gradually throwing its gates open to all comers; much, however, of the ancient pettiness of spirit still remained; the College was small in numbers and small in tone, dominated by a code of unwritten yet vexatious ordinances, which it was waste of time to observe, yet “bad form” to neglect. “King’s always had a tyrant,” was a remark made to me by F. W. Cornish, himself a Kingsman. The Provost was Dr. Okes, a short, rather crabbed-looking old man, whose enormous self-complacency was the theme of many tales. Once, when he was walking through the court, his pompous gait caused some ill-mannered undergraduates, who were watching him from a window, to give vent to audible laughter; whereupon he sent for them and explained that such merriment must not be indulged in while _he_ was passing by. That he himself could have been the cause of the merriment was a possibility which had not entered his mind.