mistake--up jumped the senior man of the party, and declaring that he
had an engagement to walk with a friend at seven politely took his
leave. This was the signal for a general dispersion; in vain did Horace
assure them they should have some coffee in the course of an hour, and
entreat some one or two to return. Off they all went with sundry smiles
and shakes of the head, and left their unfortunate host sitting alone in
his glory over the first glass of a newly opened bottle of claret.

I happened to be crossing the quadrangle from chapel in company with
Savile, at the moment when Leicester put his head out of his window as
if to enquire of the world in general what on earth he was to do with
himself for the next hour or two. Savile he hailed at once, and begged
him to come up; and though I knew but little of him, and had never been
in his rooms before, still, as I was one or two terms his senior, there
was nothing contrary even to Oxford etiquette in my accompanying Savile.
We laughed heartily when he explained his disappointment. Savile tried
to comfort him by the assurance that, as he had an hour to spare, he
would sit down and help him to finish a bottle or two of claret with a
great deal of pleasure; and was inclined to attribute the failure of the
evening, in a great measure, to his name not having been included in the
list of invitations--an omission by which he declared all parties had
been the losers; Horace's reading friends standing very much in need of
some one to put a little life into them, and himself as a candidate for
a degree, having missed a fair opportunity of meeting, among so many
choice fellows, some one to "put him up to the examiners' dodges." But
Leicester was irrecoverably disgusted. Nothing, he declared, would ever
induce him to ask a party of reading men to his rooms again; and from
that hour he seemed to eschew fellowship with the whole fraternity. Not
that he became idle all at once; on the contrary, I believe, for some
time he worked on steadily, or at least tried to work; but he was
naturally fond of society, and having failed to find what he wanted, was
reduced to make the best of such as he could find. So he gradually
became acquainted with a set of men who, whatever their good qualities
might be, had certainly no claim whatever to be considered hard readers,
and who would have considered a symposium which broke up at seven
o'clock as unsatisfactory as a tale without a conclusion. Amo