of Latin and labour.

Slowly the hours went, and yet the dreaded, hoped-for day came quickly.
The quadrangle of the stone-crowned college grew more awful in its
silence and emptiness every time Robert passed it; and the professors'
houses looked like the sentry-boxes of the angels of learning, soon to
come forth and judge the feeble mortals who dared present a claim
to their recognition. October faded softly by, with its keen fresh
mornings, and cold memorial green-horizoned evenings, whose stars fell
like the stray blossoms of a more heavenly world, from some ghostly wind
of space that had caught them up on its awful shoreless sweep. November
came, 'chill and drear,' with its heartless, hopeless nothingness; but
as if to mock the poor competitors, rose, after three days of Scotch
mist, in a lovely 'halcyon day' of 'St. Martin's summer,' through whose
long shadows anxious young faces gathered in the quadrangle, or under
the arcade, each with his Ainsworth's Dictionary, the sole book allowed,
under his arm. But when the sacrist appeared and unlocked the public
school, and the black-gowned professors walked into the room, and the
door was left open for the candidates to follow, then indeed a great awe
fell upon the assembly, and the lads crept into their seats as if to
a trial for life before a bench of the incorruptible. They took their
places; a portion of Robertson's History of Scotland was given them to
turn into Latin; and soon there was nothing to be heard in the assembly
but the turning of the leaves of dictionaries, and the scratching of
pens constructing the first rough copy of the Latinized theme.

It was done. Four weary hours, nearly five, one or two of which passed
like minutes, the others as if each minute had been an hour, went by,
and Robert, in a kind of desperation, after a final reading of the
Latin, gave in his paper, and left the room. When he got home, he asked
his landlady to get him some tea. Till it was ready he would take his
violin. But even the violin had grown dull, and would not speak freely.
He returned to the torture--took out his first copy, and went over it
once more. Horror of horrors! a maxie!--that is a maximus error. Mary
Queen of Scots had been left so far behind in the beginning of the
paper, that she forgot the rights of her sex in the middle of it, and
in the accusative of a future participle passive--I do not know if more
modern grammarians have a different name for the growth--