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uld not hold up against the popular prejudice. The reading men eyed his top-boots with suspicion; the rowing men complained he was growing a regular _sap_, always sporting oak when they wanted him. Then his wine-parties were a source of endless tribulation to him. First of all, he asked all those with whom he was most intimate among his old schoolfellows to meet each other, adding one or two of his new acquaintances: and a pretty mess he made of it. Men who had sat on the same form with him and with each other at Harrow, and had betrayed no such marked differences in their tastes as to prevent their associating very pleasantly there, at Oxford, he found, had been separated wide as the poles by this invisible, but impassable, line of demarcation: to such a degree indeed, that although all had called upon Horace, as they had upon each other, before it seemed decided on which side they were to settle, yet when they now met at his rooms, they had become strangers beyond a mere civil recognition, and had not a single subject to converse upon in common. In fact, they were rather surprised than pleased to meet at all; and it was in vain their host tried to get them to amalgamate. Many seemed to take a pleasure in showing how decidedly they belonged to one set or the other. One would talk of nothing on earth besides hunting, and sat silent and sulky when Horace turned the conversation; another affected an utter ignorance of all that was going on in the university that was not connected with class-lists, scholarships, &c. What provoked him most was, that some of those who gave themselves the most pedantic airs, and would have been double-first class men undeniably, if talking could have done it, were those whose heads he well knew were as empty as the last bottle, and which made him think that some men must take to reading at Oxford, simply because they had faculties for nothing else. At all events, Horace found the mixed system would not answer for entertaining his friends. So the next time he asked a few of the reading men, some of whom he knew used to be good fellows, together; and as he really had a kindred taste with them on many subjects, he found an hour or so pass away very pleasantly: when just as he was passing the wine about the third round, and his own brilliancy and good-humour were beginning to infect some of his guests--so that one grave genius of twenty had actually so far forgotten himself as to fill a bumper by
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