nto something like method and order--Charley White was
now rector of a poor and populous parish in Yorkshire, busily engaged in
building a new church and schools, opening Provident Societies, and
shutting up beer-shops, and instructing the rising generation of his
parishioners in catechism and cricket alternately. While the steadiest
(I was very near saying the only steady man) among our mutual
acquaintance, who looked at every sixpence before he spent it, checked
his own washing-lists, went to bed at ten o'clock, and was in short an
exemplary character, (he was held out to me; on my first entrance, as a
valuable acquaintance for any young man, but I soon despaired of
successfully imitating so bright a model)--well, this gentleman having
been taken into partnership, somewhat prematurely perhaps on the
strength of the aforesaid reputation, by his father's firm--they were
Liverpool merchants of high standing--had thought proper, disgusted
probably with the dissipations and immoralities of trade, to retire to
America in search of purity and independence, without going through the
form of closing his accounts with the house. The Liverpudleians, indeed,
according to Horace's account, gave a somewhat ugly name to the
transaction; he had been cashier to the firm, they said, who were minus
some tens of thousands thereby; but as the senior partner was known to
have smoked cigars at a preparatory school (thereby showing what he
_would_ have done had he been sent to Oxford,) whereas our friend was
always "a steady man," I leave the reader to judge which party is
entitled to the most credit.

It was after we had separated that a friend of mine, not an Oxford man,
who had dined with us and appeared much amused by some of Horace's
reminiscences, asked me the very puzzling question, "Was your friend
Leicester what they call a 'rowing man' at College?" Now, I protest
altogether against the division of under-graduates into reading men and
rowing men, as arbitrary and most illogical; there being a great many
who have no claim to be reckoned either in one class or the other, and a
great many who hover between both. And this imaginary distinction,
existing as it notoriously does at Oxford, and fostered and impressed
upon men by the tutors, (often unintentionally, or with the very best
intentions,) is productive in many cases of a great deal of harm. A man
(or _boy_ if you please) is taught to believe, upon his very first
entrance, that one