“Having come to this place with no anticipations, I am quite taken by surprise and overcome with delight. This, doubtless, you will think premature in me, inasmuch as I have seen yet scarcely anything, and have been writing letters of business to Mr. Rose and Rivingtons. But really, when I saw at the distance of four miles, on an extended plain, wider than Oxford, amid thicker and greener groves, the Alma Mater Cantabrigiensis lying before me, I thought I should not be able to contain myself, and in spite of my regret at her present defects and past history, and all that is wrong about her,[18] I seemed about to cry _Floreat in eternum_. Surely there is a _genius loci_ here, as in my own dear home; and the nearer I came to it, the more I felt its power. I do really think the place finer than Oxford, though I suppose it isn’t, for everyone says so. I like the narrow streets; they have a character, and they make the University buildings look larger by contrast. I cannot believe that King’s College is not far grander than anything with us; the stone, too, is richer, and the foliage more thick and encompassing. I found my way from the town to Trinity College like old Œdipus, without guide, by instinct; how, I know not. I never studied the plan of Cambridge.” Ill paved, ill drained as was the town, narrow as were the streets, it must have been picturesque to the eye, and the colleges, unspoiled by modern additions, are very attractive, to judge by the old prints. On the whole, however, I think our verdict would have been that old Cambridge was a pleasanter place for us to explore than for its inhabitants to live in. Let us now exercise our imagination a little more and try to fancy what a day spent in Cambridge would have been like to a stranger towards the close of the eighteenth century. One thing, I think, may be assumed to be unaltered. Had he come to visit a friend, he would have been hospitably received. Let us suppose that he also arrived at midday in summer when it was full term and that, to quote Wordsworth, he-- “At the Hoop alighted ... famous inn.”