give I faith and full credence; And in mine heart
have hem in reverence, So heartily that there is game none, That fro' my
bookes maketh me to gone.--Chaucer.

Christopher Clutterbuck was a common individual of a common order, but
little known in this busy and toiling world. I cannot flatter myself
that I am about to present to your notice that rara avis, a new
character--yet there is something interesting, and even unhacknied, in
the retired and simple class to which he belongs: and before I proceed
to a darker period in my memoirs, I feel a calm and tranquillizing
pleasure in the rest which a brief and imperfect delineation of my
college companion, affords me. My friend came up to the University
with the learning one about to quit the world might, with credit, have
boasted of possessing, and the simplicity one about to enter it would
have been ashamed to confess. Quiet and shy in his habits and his
manners, he was never seen out of the precincts of his apartment, except
in obedience to the stated calls of dinner, lectures, and chapel. Then
his small and stooping form might be marked, crossing the quadrangle
with a hurried step, and cautiously avoiding the smallest blade of the
barren grass-plots, which are forbidden ground to the feet of all the
lower orders of the collegiate oligarchy. Many were the smiles and
the jeers, from the worse natured and better appointed students, who
loitered idly along the court, at the rude garb and saturnine appearance
of the humble under-graduate; and the calm countenance of the grave, but
amiable man, who then bore the honour and onus of mathematical lecturer
at our college, would soften into a glance of mingled approbation and
pity, as he noted the eagerness which spoke from the wan cheek and
emaciated frame of the ablest of his pupils, hurrying--after each
legitimate interruption--to the enjoyment of the crabbed characters
and worm-worn volumes, which contained for him all the seductions of
pleasure, and all the temptations of youth.

It is a melancholy thing, which none but those educated at a college
can understand, to see the debilitated frames of the aspirants for
academical honours; to mark the prime--the verdure--the glory--the
life--of life wasted irrevocably away in a labor ineptiarum, which
brings no harvest either to others or themselves. For the poet, the
philosopher, the man of science, we can appreciate the recompence if we
commiserate the sacrifice; from the darkness