There was also a good deal of ceremonial at other times; and the barbaric was occasionally mingled with the magnificent, as, for example, at the opening of Stourbridge Fair. This Fair, now a poor and insignificant gathering, was once the most famous in England and had ranked among the great fairs of Europe. In Gunning’s early days much of its splendour remained. At its opening the Vice-Chancellor with his Bedels and Commissary, the Registrary, the Proctors, and the Taxors, met in the Senate House at eleven, where everybody drank sherry and ate cakes. After this all drove to the Common, and the Vice-Chancellor proclaimed the Fair to be open, the Yeomen Bedels on horseback repeating his words at different parts of the assembly. Then followed a devouring of oysters in what was known as the Tiled Booth, after which the University magnates strolled about the Fair till dinner was ready. It was no easy task to get into the dining-room, because the people outside would not budge to allow the procession to pass, the University being very unpopular because they supplied the mugs in which the beer was sold and these held notoriously short measure. This was the only effort in the direction of temperance we meet with at this period, and that was dishonest. The dinner consisted of boiled pork, herrings, goose, apple-pie, and beef. The wine was bad, but everyone enjoyed himself, despite the heat and discomfort of the Tiled Booth. At half-past six they all went to the theatre. How they got home is not recorded! Of intellectual pursuits Gunning has little to record. The disputations for degrees continued from the Middle Ages, in which he took part frequently as disputant and, knowing the rules of logic, he was often able to overthrow men of admittedly more learning than himself. There were good scholars and learned men at Cambridge; but we hear more of their schemes, their quarrels, and their amours than of their achievements in the schools. Porson, the most famous Grecian since Bentley, is hardly if ever mentioned! It is a strange record of the days of old, and the Cambridge therein described seems to have been in another world than this. Yet some of us were alive when Henry Gunning died, and I can myself remember characters almost as strange as he depicts. But in all the book there is no one so strange as the writer himself. In it we have the record, not of a diarist, but of an old, old man in his last illness, a man by his own account not devoid of piety or good feeling, yet recollecting every slight, every injury, he had sustained nearly sixty years before, the dislikes of his youth for men long gone to their account being as green and vigorous as they were when he first formed them. One cannot even like him, but nevertheless it is impossible to deny that he can not only amuse but instruct, and that much would have been forgotten but for his dictated notes about the Cambridge of his youth.