minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway;
He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber."--pp. 5, 6.

A peculiar point of style in this poem, and one which gives a certain
classic character to some of its more familiar aspects, is the
frequent recurrence of the same line, and the repeated definition of
a personage by the same attributes. Thus, Lindsay is "the Piper, the
Dialectician," Arthur Audley "the glory of headers," and the tutor
"the grave man nicknamed Adam," from beginning to end; and so also of
the others.

Omitting the after-dinner speeches, with their "Long constructions
strange and plusquam-Thucydidean," that only of "Sir Hector, the
Chief and the Chairman;" in honor of the Oxonians, than which nothing
could be more unpoetically truthful, is preserved, with the
acknowledgment, ending in a sarcasm at the game laws, by Hewson, who,
as he is leaving the room, is accosted by "a thin man, clad as the
Saxon:"

"'Young man, if ye pass thro' the Braes o'Lochaber,
See by the Loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.'"--p. 9.

Throughout this scene, as through the whole book, no opportunity is
overlooked for giving individuality to the persons introduced: Sir
Hector, of whom we lose sight henceforward, the attache, the
Guards-man, are not mere names, but characters: it is not enough to
say that two tables were set apart "for keeper and gillie and
peasant:" there is something to be added yet; and with others
assembled around them were "Pipers five or six; _among them the young
one, the drunkard_."

The morrow's conversation of the reading party turns on "noble ladies
and rustic girls, their partners." And here speaks out Hewson the
chartist:

"'Never (of course you will laugh, but of course all the
same I shall say it,)
Never, believe me, revealed itself to me the sexual glory,
Till, in some village fields, in holidays now getting stupid,
One day sauntering long and listless, as Tennyson has it,
Long and listless strolling, ungainly in hobbydihoyhood,
Chanced it my eye fell aside on a capless bonnetless maiden,
Bending with three-pronged fork in a garden uprooting potatoes.
Was it the air? who can say? or herself? or the charm of the labor?
But a new thing was in me, and longing delicious possessed me,
Longing to take her and lift her, and put her away from her slaving.
Was it to clasp her in lifting, or was it to lift her by clasping,
Was