I did not comprehend either the logic or morality of this toast--yet I drank it through common civility; and from my desire to be considered as a youth of spirit, I soon reeled in the full grossness of intoxication. The lights were now extinguished, and we sallied forth, fired with the ambition of "putting the town to rights." At the door I met Scipio, who gazing on me for a moment, averted his face and burst into tears. I passed rapidly by him, and with difficulty smothered a curse which my pride aimed at his weakness. Unnoticed by my companions he silently followed me; and it was his hand which raised me from the earth where I had fallen, and his arm which bore me to my room. I arose the next morning with a shattered frame and an aching heart, nor could my crazed philosophy destroy the blush with which memory every moment bitterly suffused my cheek. But was not drunkenness the attribute of genius! the unerring characteristic of intellect!--for while tradition sighed over the memory of the victims of intemperance, the lustre of genius awoke the pity of sympathy, the pardon of virtue, and the emulation of folly. All the promising young men who have sunk into a drunkard's grave, were full of high and lofty intelligence, and would have realized the proudest hope of fame but for this fatal excess of genius. Strange fatuity! and stranger that its rottenness should excite either our pity or forgiveness! College life is a little dream of human passion and human infirmity. It is the same eternal track of disappointment, over which folly vaults and ambition staggers--a record of youthful happiness written on a summer's leaf, it glitters for the moment, and fades away beneath the spirit which freshens it into beauty. 'Tis the miniature arena in which human life first disports its vices, its hopes, and its imaginings--and if no other knowledge be acquired, the collegian can look with pride on his acquaintance with the world, its follies and its pleasures, and hug to his bosom that kernel of truth which has been wrested from the hard husk of disappointment. We had numerous debating societies, where the elements of government, the subtleties of law, and the vagaries of taste were nightly discussed. We were either orators or philosophers--the former declaiming in all the pomp of verbosity, the latter deciding in all the solemnity of silence. Newspapers were eagerly read, and many a maiden pen first fleshed itself in these shambles of faction. All write in Virginia for these greedy receptacles of morbid ire and political venom--and he who can sketch the hundredth-told tale, in improved bombast, or provincial dialect, becomes the little great man of the cross-roads, or struts the swelling Junius of the courtyard. Write in jagged orthography--the dictionary is at hand; scuffle through the rules of grammar--the printer has a happy talent of correcting by his own grammar; violate the sense of language and the chastity of style, for this is a trait