aulted as never before in so concentrated a way by
local and social character? Such was the fashion after which the
Boulogne of long ago--I have known next to nothing of it since--could
come forth, come more than half-way, as we say, to meet the imagination
open to such advances. It was, taking one thing with another, so verily
drenched in character that I see myself catching this fine flagrancy
almost equally in everything; unless indeed I may have felt it rather
smothered than presented on the comparatively sordid scene of the
College Communal, not long afterwards to expand, I believe, into the
local Lycee, to which the inimitable process of our education promptly
introduced us. I was to have less of the College than my elder and my
younger brother, thanks to the interrupting illness that placed me so
long, with its trail of after-effects, half complacently, half ruefully
apart; but I suffered for a few early weeks the mainly malodorous sense
of the braver life, produced as this was by a deeply democratic
institution from which no small son even of the most soapless home could
possibly know exclusion. Odd, I recognise, that I should inhale the air
of the place so particularly, so almost only, to that dismal effect;
since character was there too, for whom it should concern, and my view
of some of the material conditions, of the general collegiate presence
toward the top of the steepish Grand' Rue, on the right and not much
short, as it comes back to me, of the then closely clustered and
inviolate haute ville, the more or less surviving old town, the idle
grey rampart, the moated and towered citadel, the tree-shaded bastion
for strolling and sitting "immortalised" by Thackeray, achieved the
monumental, in its degree, after a fashion never yet associated for us
with the pursuit of learning. Didn't the Campaigner, suffering indigence
at the misapplied hands of Colonel Newcome, rage at that hushed victim
supremely and dreadfully just thereabouts--by which I mean in the _haute
ville_--over some question of a sacrificed sweetbread or a cold hacked
joint that somebody had been "at"? Beside such builded approaches to an
education as we had elsewhere known the College exhibited, with whatever
reserves, the measure of style which almost any French accident of the
administratively architectural order more easily rises to than fails
of; even if the matter be but a question of the shyest similitude of a
_cour d'honneur_, the court di