ABSTRACT
In this place I feel inclined to relate one of those stories of ingenious intellectual victory, as they considered them, of dull and unfeeling brutality, as they really were, in which too many of my college contemporaries prided themselves. A young man, during my residence at the university, entered himself of our college, who was judged by the gayer Oxonians singularly well formed to be the butt of their ridicule. The dress in which he made his appearance among us was ungainly and ludicrous: the flaps of his waistcoat extended to his knees, and those of his coat almost to his heels: his black, coarse, shining hair, parted on the forehead, was every where of equal length, and entirely buried his ears beneath its impervious canopy. He had hitherto been brought up in solitude under the sole direction of his father, a country clergyman; but he was an excellent classic scholar and a mathematician, and his manners were the most innocent and unsuspecting that it is possible to imagine. In addition to these qualities, he had an exalted opinion of his own intellectual accomplishments; and he had brought with him, among his other treasures, the offspring of his stripling meditations, a tragedy founded on the story of the Fifth Labour of Hercules. a /
