A LITTLE TOUR IN IRELAND. CHAPTER I. PREFATORY. THERE are two species of Undergraduates, the Fast and the Slow. I am now of the former persuasion. Originally, having promised my relations that I would take a Double First-Class and most of the principal prizes, I was associated with the latter brotherhood, but was soon compelled to secede, and to sue for a separation, a mensá et thóro, their tea-table and early rising, on the plea of incompatibility of temper. One young gentleman, who described himself as being very elect indeed, candidly told me that, unless my sentiments with reference to bitter beer and tobacco underwent a material change, he could give me no hope of final happiness; and another impeccable party, with a black satin stock and the bandiest legs in Oxford, felt himself solemnly constrained to mention, that he could not regard horse-exercise as at all consistent with a saving faith. I spoke of St. George (though I dared not say that I had met him at Astley's), of St. Denis, and St. Louis, of the Crusaders, and the Red Cross Knight; but he only replied that I was far gone in idolatry, and he lent me the biography of the Reverend T. P. Snorker, which, after describing that gentleman's conversion at a cock-fight, with the sweet experiences of his immaculate life, and instituting a comparison between his preaching and that of St. Paul (a trifle in favour of Snorker), finally declared him to be an angel, and bade all mankind adore, and reverence, and buy his sermons at seven-and-six. When I returned the publication, and told him that, though I had been highly entertained, I liked the Life of George Herbert better, he called me a hagiologist (a term which struck me as being all the more offensive, inasmuch as I had no idea of its meaning),* and murmured something about "the mark of the beast," whereupon, I regret to confess, that I so far lost my temper as to address him with the unclassical epithet of "a young Skunk," suggesting the expediency of his immediate * "Egan, in addressing a jury, having exhausted every ordinary epithet of abuse, stopt for a word, and then added, this naufrageous ruffian.' When afterwards asked the meaning of the word, he confessed he did not know, but said he thought it sounded well."-Sketches of the Irish Bar, vol. i. p. 83. presence at Jericho, and warning him, that, if he were not civil, "the beast" might leave a "mark" upon him. That very day, I wrote to the butler at home, to send up my pink and tops, and "went over to roam" in happier pastures. I find them more healthful also. I find that so far from my perception of right and wrong being destroyed, as the disciples of Snorker prophesied, by a gallop after the Heythrop hounds, and my appreciation of Thucydides being expelled by my morning pipe, I have, mentally and bodily, a better tone; and though my former condiscipuli groan when they meet me coming in from the chase, as though I were the scarlet lady herself, I still venture to appear at chapel, and will back myself to construe the funeral oration of Pericles against the ugliest of the lot. Oh, that fox-hunting were the worst enemy to me, a student, for I might be a class man still! But I have contracted a habit desperately antagonistic to literature,-I am always falling in love. The moment I see a pretty face, I feel that sort of emotion which Sydney Smith used to say the late Bishop of London rejoiced to contemplate in his clergy, "a kind of drop-down-deadness." I cannot walk out, or drive out, or ride, or row out, but I am sure to have an attack. I have had as many, indeed, as two in one day. With the daughters of Deans and Presidents, with visitors, with ladies come in from the country to shop, I am perpetually |