st master at
Grey Friars, wear it. And he inspected the entire costume with a great
deal of satisfaction in one of the great gilt mirrors which ornamented
Mr. Buck's lecture-room: for some of these college divines are no more
above looking--glasses than a lady is, and look to the set of their
gowns and caps quite as anxiously as folks do of the lovelier sex. The
Major smiled as he saw the boy dandifying himself in the glass: the old
gentleman was not displeased with the appearance of the comely lad.

Then Davis, the skip or attendant, led the way, keys in hand, across the
quadrangle, the Major and Pen following him, the latter blushing, and
pleased with his new academical habiliments, across the quadrangle to
the rooms which were destined for the freshman; and which were vacated
by the retreat of the gentleman-pensioner, Mr. Spicer. The rooms were
very comfortable, with large cross beams, high wainscots, and small
windows in deep embrasures. Mr. Spicer's furniture was there, and to be
sold at a valuation, and Major Pendennis agreed on his nephew's behalf
to take the available part of it, laughingly however declining (as,
indeed, Pen did for his own part) six sporting prints, and four groups
of opera-dancers with gauze draperies, which formed the late occupant's
pictorial collection.

Then they went to hall, where Pen sate down and ate his commons with his
brother freshmen, and the Major took his place at the high-table along
with the college dignitaries and other fathers or guardians of youth,
who had come up with their sons to Oxbridge; and after hall they went to
Mr. Buck's to take wine; and after wine to chapel, where the Major sate
with great gravity in the upper place, having a fine view of the
Master in his carved throne or stall under the organ-loft, where that
gentleman, the learned Doctor Donne, sate magnificent, with his great
prayer-book before him, an image of statuesque piety and rigid devotion.
All the young freshmen behaved with gravity and decorum, but Pen was
shocked to see that atrocious little Foker, who came in very late,
and half a dozen of his comrades in the gentlemen-pensioners' seats,
giggling and talking as if they had been in so many stalls at the Opera.
But these circumstances, it must be remembered, took place some years
back, when William the Fourth was king. Young men are much better
behaved now, and besides, Saint Boniface was rather a fast college.

Pen could hardly sleep at night in h