I daresay he put a little intellect into it; he attached some sort of meaning to the stream of gibberish which flowed so glibly from his lips. But about the thousand and first time it must have become tiresome; he must have done it as instinctively as a Prime Minister telling a deputation that her Majesty's Government will give their best consideration to its requests, or a toll-collector giving you change for a penny, or an orthodox parson telling you that Colenso is a shallow copyist.

Now, it is much the same in teaching an intelligent youth the differential calculus, or explaining a corrupt passage in a classical author to him. You know the exact point at which he will begin to look stupid; you foresee the look of partial intelligence with which he will receive your well-worn explanation, and the stupid remark a little further on which will show that he failed to see the point of it. The ancients would not have condemned Sisyphus to roll a stone up a hill if they had been a little wiser; they would have set him to explain Euclid's proof of the forty-seventh proposition to a series of Boeotian students.

I believe, however, that this is not a philosophical view. We always pity the blind horse wearing his everlasting round in the mill. But he is said to be happy, and to cherish the delusion that he is really making progress in some direction. And I must confess than an impartial observation of this most useful and hardworking class proves them to be happy. Either the monotony of the employment acts as a sedative, or a man must have had a constitution superior to all irritability to be able to carry it on at all. I can see the placid and benevolent face

of

my old instructor now, and listen to his invariable exhortation "push on;" just as if I had been, as indeed I was, a wearied and disgusted wayfarer. Every morning he appeared in chapel punctually at 7.30. From 8 to 8.15 breakfast. Pupils from 8.15 to 3. Then a constitutional so regular, that we used to believe that the philosophers at the observatory took their time from the instant at which he passed the gates, instead of remarking the sun's transit, which indeed is apt to be invisible in our misty climate. At 4 dinner. From 5.30 to 10 pupils again, with ten minutes' interval for refreshment.

He lived in a perfect atmosphere of mathematics; his books, all ranged in the neatest order, and covered with uniform brown paper, were mathematical; his talk, to us at any rate, was one round of mathematics: even his chairs and tables, strictly limited to the requirements of pupils, and the pattern on his carpet, seemed to breathe mathematics. By what mysterious process it was that he accumulated stores of miscellaneous information and knew all about the events of the time (for such I afterwards discovered to be the fact), I have never been able to guess. Probably he imbibed them through the pores of his skin. Still less can I imagine how it came to pass that he published a whole series of excellent educational works. He probably wrote them in momentary interstices of time, between one pupil's entering his sanctum and another leaving it. Such, however, is the life of some of our hardworking men, and they seem to enjoy it.

X.

COLLEGE TUTORS.

THE private tutors, of whom I have just spoken, do a considerable part of the work of tuition; but they are, in an official point of view, mere excrescences upon our system. They are rather volunteers than soldiers in the regular organized army. The college esprit de corps, which is the mainspring of an English University, centres round the master, fellows, and scholars of those learned and religious foundations for which, "as in private duty bound,” our preachers weekly entreat our prayers. Without the colleges the University would sink to the level of the institution profanely known (I never could guess why) as Stincomalee. We love the University

as an American loves the Union, with a reflective passion bred rather in the head than in the heart; for our college we feel the warm personal enthusiasm that the Southern planter bears to South Carolina or the "old dominion." Patriotism is sometimes warmer and less intelligent, as its object becomes more limited. A general is said to have bid his troops "remember that they were Portuguese" (not, one would have thought, a very stirring reminiscence); an inhabitant of Jersey considers that the chief jewel in the British crown is represented by the Channel Islands; and, on the same principle, every undergraduate always assumes that the members of his own college are a special breed of men, possessing an amount of pluck, good manners, and good feeling unknown elsewhere. He holds this faith simply, without attempting to account for the mysterious dispensation of Providence, which has directed so much virtue and talent to his little society; and speaks of "out college men" with that pleasant contempt which Englishmen habitually express for foreigners and natives in general.

The maintenance of this spirit, which is at least