mournful) by youthful hands, that
shall never write more. Fate has interposed darkly, and the young voices
are silent, and the eager brains have ceased to work. This one had
genius and a great descent, and seemed to be destined for honours which
now are of little worth to him: that had virtue, learning, genius--every
faculty and endowment which might secure love, admiration, and worldly
fame: an obscure and solitary churchyard contains the grave of many fond
hopes, and the pathetic stone which bids them farewell--I saw the sun
shining on it in the fall of last year, and heard the sweet village
choir raising anthems round about. What boots whether it be Westminster
or a little country spire which covers your ashes, or if, a few days
sooner or later, the world forgets you?

Amidst these friends, then, and a host more, Pen passed more than two
brilliant and happy years of his life. He had his fill of pleasure and
popularity. No dinner- or supper-party was complete without him; and
Pen's jovial wit, and Pen's songs, and dashing courage and frank and
manly bearing, charmed all the undergraduates, and even disarmed the
tutors who cried out at his idleness, and murmured about his extravagant
way of life. Though he became the favourite and leader of young men who
were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was much too generous
to endeavour to propitiate them by any meanness or cringing on his own
part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his acquaintance in
order to curry favour with the richest young grandee in the university.
His name is still remembered at the Union Debating Club, as one of the
brilliant orators of his day. By the way, from having been an ardent
Tory in his freshman's year, his principles took a sudden turn
afterwards, and he became a liberal of the most violent order. He avowed
himself a Dantonist, and asserted that Louis the Sixteenth was served
right. And as for Charles the First, he vowed that he would chop off
that monarch's head with his own right hand were he then in the room at
the Union Debating Club, and had Cromwell no other executioner for the
traitor. He and Lord Magnus Charters, the Marquis of Runnymede's son,
before-mentioned, were the most truculent republicans of their day.

There are reputations of this sort made, quite independent of the
collegiate hierarchy, in the republic of gownsmen. A man may be famous
in the Honour-lists and entirely unknown to the undergraduates: who
e