onate friend Thompson or Jackson, the author. How
strange the epigraphs look in those half-boyish hands, and what a thrill
the sight of the documents gives one after the lapse of a few lustres!
How fate, since that time, has removed some, estranged others, dealt
awfully with all! Many a hand is cold that wrote those kindly memorials,
and that we pressed in the confident and generous grasp of youthful
friendship. What passions our friendships were in those old days, how
artless and void of doubt! How the arm you were never tired of having
linked in yours under the fair college avenues or by the river side,
where it washes Magdalen Gardens, or Christ Church Meadows, or winds
by Trinity and King's, was withdrawn of necessity, when you entered
presently the world, and each parted to push and struggle for himself
through the great mob on the way through life! Are we the same men now
that wrote those inscriptions--that read those poems? that delivered or
heard those essays and speeches so simple, so pompous, so ludicrously
solemn; parodied so artlessly from books, and spoken with smug chubby
faces, and such an admirable aping of wisdom and gravity? Here is the
book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years old. Here is Jack moaning
with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the university
was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom's daring Essay in defence of
suicide and of republicanism in general, apropos of the death of
Roland and the Girondins--Tom's, who wears the starchest tie in all the
diocese, and would go to Smithfield rather than eat a beefsteak on a
Friday in Lent. Here is Bob of the ---- Circuit, who has made a fortune
in Railroad Committees, and whose dinners are so good--bellowing out
with Tancred and Godfrey, "On to the breach, ye soldiers of the cross,
Scale the red wall and swim the choking foss. Ye dauntless archers,
twang your cross-bows well; On, bill and battle-axe and mangonel! Ply
battering-ram and hurtling catapult, Jerusalem is ours--id Deus vult."
After which comes a mellifluous description of the gardens of Sharon
and the maids of Salem, and a prophecy that roses shall deck the entire
country of Syria, and a speedy reign of peace be established--all in
undeniably decasyllabic lines, and the queerest aping of sense and
sentiment and poetry. And there are Essays and Poems along with these
grave parodies, and boyish exercises (which are at once so frank and
false and mirthful, yet, somehow, so