“I’m afraid he’s too much of a scholar for the business,” said the mother, shyly, looking fondly at her tall, overgrown son, pallid with rapid growth and overmuch Greek and Latin. “Of course he is; that boy is too good to sell pots and pans. You must send him to the University, Jim.” Jim, the father, looked despondently at James, the son. The University meant something awful in the crockery merchant’s mind: a vast expenditure of money; dreadful hazards to religion and morals; friendships with dukes and marquises, whose influence would alienate the boy from his parents, and render him scornful of the snug back-parlour, with his grandfather’s portrait over the mantelpiece, painted in oils by a gifted townsman, who had once had a picture very nearly hung in the Royal Academy. “I couldn’t afford to send him to college,” he said. “Oh, but you must afford it. I must help you, if you and Sarah haven’t got enough in an old stocking anywhere—as I dare say you have. My boys are at the University, and they didn’t do half as well at the grammar school as your boy has done. He must go to Cambridge, he must be entered at Trinity Hall, and if he works hard and keeps steady he needn’t cost you a fortune. You would work, eh, James?” “Wouldn’t I just, that’s all,” James replied with emphasis. His heart had sickened at the prospect of the crockery business: the consignments of pots and pans; the returned empties, invoices, quarterly accounts, matchings, rivetings, dust, straw, dirt, and degradation. He could not see the nobility of labour in that dusty shop, below the level of the pavement, amid ewers and basins, teacups and beer jugs, sherries and ports. But to work in the University—hard by that great college where Bacon had worked, and Newton, and a host of the mighty dead, and where Whewell, a self-made man, was still head—to work among the sons of gentlemen, and with a view to the profession of a gentleman,—_that_ would be labour for which to live; for which to die, if need be. “If—if mother and me were to strain a p’int,” mused the crockery man, who was better able to afford the University for his son than many a gentleman of Dorset whose boys had to be sent there, willy nilly, “if mother and me that have worked so hard for our money was willing to spend a goodish bit of it upon sending him to college, what are we to do with him after we’ve made a fine gentleman of him? _That’s_ where it is, you see, Mat.” “You are not going to make a fine gentleman of him. God forbid. If he does well at Cambridge, you can make a lawyer of him. Trinity Hall is the nursery of lawyers. You can article him to me; and look you here, Jim, if I don’t have to help you pay for his education, I’ll give him his articles. There, now, what do you say to that?”