ngst these,
his gentlemanly manners and kindness of heart made him beloved, while
his talents gave him a kind of influence; and, though he must have felt
occasionally that he was not altogether in his right place, and that,
besides his popular qualities, he had higher tastes and endowments with
which the majority of his companions could hardly sympathise, he was too
light-hearted to philosophise much on the subject, and contented himself
with enjoying his popularity, occasionally falling back upon his own
resources, and keeping up, in a desultory kind of way, his acquaintance
with scholarship and literature. The reading men of course looked upon
him as a lost sheep; the tutors shook their heads about him; if he did
well, it was set down as the result of accident; while all his misdoings
were labouring in his vocation. For, agreeably to the grand division
aforesaid, Horace was now set down as a "rowing-man;" and he soon made
the discovery, and did more thereupon to deserve the character than he
ever would have done otherwise. He was very willing to go on in his own
way, if all parties would but let him alone; he was not going to be made
a proselyte to long walks, and toast and water, nor had he any
conscientious abhorrence of supper-parties; and, as his prospects in
life were in no way dependent upon a class or a scholarship, and he
seemed to be tacitly repudiated by the _literati_ of his college, young
and old, on account of some of his aforesaid heterodox notions on the
subject of study, he accustomed himself gradually to set their opinions
at defiance; while the moderate reading, which encouragement and
emulation had made easy at school, became every day more and more
distasteful.

Horace's tottering reputation was at last completely overset in the eyes
of the authorities by a little affair which was absurd enough, but in
which he himself was as innocent as they were. It happened that a
youthful cousin of his, whose sole occupation for the last twelve months
of his life had been the not over-profitable one of waiting for a
commission, had come up to Oxford for two or three days, pursuant to
invitation, to see a little of the manners and customs of the
inhabitants. I think he had some slight acquaintance with our then
vice-principal--a good-natured, easy man--and Horace had got leave for
him to occupy a set of very small, dark rooms, which, as the college was
not very full, had been suffered to remain vacant for the la