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