g. (This exercise consists in preparing a
controversial essay, learning it by heart, and speaking it in Chapel
after the Thursday evening's service.) On October 6th we agreed on
the subject, "Is natural difference to be ascribed to moral or to
physical causes?" I taking the latter side. I spoke the declamation
(reciting it without missing a word) on October 25th. On October 26th
I received notice of Latin declamation with Myers: subject agreed on,
"Utrum civitati plus utilitatis an incommodi afferant leges quae ad
vitas privatorum hominum ordinandas pertinent"; I took the former. The
declamation was recited on November 11, when a curious circumstance
occurred. My declamation was rather long: it was the first Saturday of
the term on which a declamation had been spoken: and it was the day on
which arrived the news of the withdrawal of the Bill of Pains and
Penalties against Queen Caroline. (This trial had been going on
through the summer, but I knew little about it.) In consequence the
impatience of the undergraduates was very great, and there was such an
uproar of coughing &c. in the Chapel as probably was never known. The
Master (Dr Wordsworth, appointed in the beginning of the summer on the
death of Dr Mansell, and to whom I had been indirectly introduced by
Mrs Clarkson) and Tutors and Deans tried in vain to stop the
hubbub. However I went on steadily to the end, not at all
frightened. On the Monday the Master sent for me to make a sort of
apology in the name of the authorities, and letters to the Tutors were
read at the Lectures, and on the whole the transaction was nowise
disagreeable to me.

"On the Commemoration Day, December 15th, I received my Prize
(Mitford's Greece) as First-Class man, after dinner in the College
Hall. After a short vacation spent at Bury and Playford I returned to
Cambridge, walking from Bury on Jan. 22nd, 1821. During the next term
I find in Mathematics Partial Differential Equations, Tides, Sound,
Calculus of Variations, Composition of rotary motions, Motion in
resisting medium, Lhuillier's theorem, Brightness of an object as seen
through a medium with any possible law of refraction (a good
investigation), star-reductions, numerical calculations connected with
them, equilibrium of chain under centripetal force (geometrically
treated, as an improvement upon Whewell's algebraical method),
investigation of the magnitude of attractive forces of glass, &c.,
required to produce refraction. I fo