debating
society as he was loud in the streets. He was reckless and imprudent:
yesterday he insisted on your sharing a bottle of claret with him (and
claret was claret then, before the cheap-and-nasty treaty), and
to-morrow he asks you for the loan of a penny to buy the last number of
the _Lapsus_.

The student of _Law_, again, was a learned man. "He had turned over the
leaves of Justinian's 'Institutes,' and knew that they were written in
Latin. He was well acquainted with the title-page of 'Blackstone's
Commentaries,' and _argal_ (as the gravedigger in _Hamlet_ says) he was
not a person to be laughed at." He attended the Parliament House in the
character of a critic, and could give you stale sneers at all the
celebrated speakers. He was the terror of essayists at the Speculative
or the Forensic. In social qualities he seems to have stood unrivalled.
Even in the police-office we find him shining with undiminished lustre.
"If a _Charlie_ should find him rather noisy at an untimely hour, and
venture to take him into custody, he appears next morning like a Daniel
come to judgment. He opens his mouth to speak, and the divine precepts
of unchanging justice and Scots law flow from his tongue. The magistrate
listens in amazement, and fines him only a couple of guineas."

Such then were our predecessors and their College Magazine. Barclay,
Ambrose, Young Amos, and Fergusson were to them what the Cafe, the
Rainbow, and Rutherford's are to us. An hour's reading in these old
pages absolutely confuses us, there is so much that is similar and so
much that is different; the follies and amusements are so like our own,
and the manner of frolicking and enjoying are so changed, that one
pauses and looks about him in philosophic judgment. The muddy quadrangle
is thick with living students; but in our eyes it swarms also with the
phantasmal white greatcoats and tilted hats of 1824. Two races meet:
races alike and diverse. Two performances are played before our eyes;
but the change seems merely of impersonators, of scenery, of costume.
Plot and passion are the same. It is the fall of the spun shilling
whether seventy-one or twenty-four has the best of it.

In a future number we hope to give a glance at the individualities of
the present, and see whether the cast shall be head or tail--whether we
or the readers of the _Lapsus_ stand higher in the balance.

II

THE MODERN STUDENT CONSIDERED GENERALLY

We have now reached the d