ad from the Vinerian
Chair should actually be written by the Professor, although they were
delivered by deputy. Scott, therefore, as the Professor's mouth-piece,
on a salary of L60 a year, with free quarters in the Principal's house,
was merely required to read a series of treatises sent to him by the
absent teacher. "The law-professor," the ex-Chancellor used to relate
with true Eldonian humor and _fancy_--"sent me the first lecture, which
I had to read immediately to the students, and which I began without
knowing a single word that was in it. It was upon the statute (4 and 5
P. and M. c. 8), 'of young men running away with maidens.' Fancy me
reading, with about 140 boys and young men all giggling at the
Professor! Such a tittering audience no one ever had." If this incident
really occurred on the occasion of his 'first reading,' the laughter
must have been inextinguishable; for, of course, Jack Scott's run-away
marriage had made much gossip in Oxford Common Rooms, and the singular
loveliness of his girlish wife (described by an eye-witness as being "so
very young as to give the impression of childhood,") stirred the heart
of every undergraduate who met her in High Street.

There is no harm done by laughter at the old Chancellor's romantic
fictions about the poverty which he and his Bessie encountered, hand in
hand, at the outset of life; for the laughter blinds no one to the
genuine affection and wholesome honesty of the young husband and wife.
One has reason to wish that marriages such as theirs were more frequent
amongst lawyers in these ostentatious days. At present the young
barrister, who marries before he has a clear fifteen hundred a year, is
charged with reckless imprudence; and unless his wife is a woman of
fortune, or he is able to settle a heavy sum of money upon her, his
anxious friends terrify him with pictures of want and sorrow stored up
for him in the future. Society will not let him live after the fashion
of 'juniors' eighty or a hundred years since. He must maintain two
establishments--his chambers for business, his house in the west-end of
town for his wife. Moreover, the lady must have a brougham and liberal
pin money, or four or five domestic servants and a drawing-room well
furnished with works of art and costly decorations. They must give state
dinners and three or four routs every season; and in all other matters
their mode of life must be, or seem to be, that of the upper ten
thousand. Either