The _Cambridge Undergraduates’ Journal_ (I am now speaking of the year 1873 and thereabouts) was a fortnightly paper--edited at one time by G. C. Macaulay, at another by Hallam (now Lord) Tennyson--in which some of us used to try our hands at the higher journalism, and write satirical essays on the various anomalies of Cambridge life. Compulsory chapels; compulsory Latin and Greek; “cribbing” in examinations; antiquated college customs; the exactions of college servants; the social functions known as “stand-ups”--these were but a few of the topics on which we held forth with all the confidence of youth. It was the _Adventurer_ over again, but on a more comprehensive scale; for the undergraduate could express his feelings more openly than the schoolboy; else the writer of an article on compulsory chapels could hardly have inveighed, as he did, against the ordinance of full choral service, where “the man without an ear” was doomed, for two long hours, “to sit, stand, and kneel in wearisome succession.” The annual competition for the English Prize Poem afforded another opportunity for nascent ambition. The subject one year was the recovery of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) from a serious illness; and it was this rather snobbish theme that drew from one of the competitors a couplet which went the round of a delighted University: Flashed o’er the land the electric message came: “He is not better, but he’s much the same.”[10] Then there were the “Sir William Browne’s Medals,” offered annually for Greek and Latin odes and epigrams. These prizes were usually the perquisite of a few select scholars (my friend E. C. Selwyn had a way of carrying them off); but as the poems were sent in anonymously, the envelope containing the competitor’s name not being opened except when he won the medal, it was a safe and rather good sport to try one’s luck in the contest. One of the surprises of my life was when old Shilleto (the coughing grammarian) walked into my room one evening, and told me that the examiners had awarded me the medal for Greek epigram. There being a defect in one of the lines, he sat down and corrected it, there and then, by an emendation which was doubtless better Greek and certainly worse poetry.