the national organ for publishing these mighty events,
became itself a spiritualized and glorified object to an impassioned heart;
and naturally, in the Oxford of that day, all hearts were awakened. There
were, perhaps, of us gownsmen, two thousand _resident_[3] in Oxford, and
dispersed through five-and-twenty colleges. In some of these the custom
permitted the student to keep what are called "short terms;" that is, the
four terms of Michaelmas, Lent, Easter, and Act, were kept severally by a
residence, in the aggregate, of ninety-one days, or thirteen weeks. Under
this interrupted residence, accordingly, it was possible that a student
might have a reason for going down to his home four times in the year. This
made eight journeys to and fro. And as these homes lay dispersed through
all the shires of the island, and most of us disdained all coaches except
his majesty's mail, no city out of London could pretend to so extensive a
connection with Mr. Palmer's establishment as Oxford. Naturally, therefore,
it became a point of some interest with us, whose journeys revolved every
six weeks on an average, to look a little into the executive details of
the system. With some of these Mr. Palmer had no concern; they rested upon
bye-laws not unreasonable, enacted by posting-houses for their own benefit,
and upon others equally stern, enacted by the inside passengers for the
illustration of their own exclusiveness. These last were of a nature to
rouse our scorn, from which the transition was not _very long_ to mutiny.
Up to this time, it had been the fixed assumption of the four inside
people, (as an old tradition of all public carriages from the reign
of Charles II.,) that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted
a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been
compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable
delf ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to
attaint the foot concerned in that operation; so that, perhaps, it would
have required an act of parliament to restore its purity of blood. What
words, then, could express the horror, and the sense of treason, in that
case, which _had_ happened, where all three outsides, the trinity of
Pariahs, made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast table or
dinner table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt;
and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavored to soothe his
thre