There are very many
varieties of undergraduates, who have very various ways of occupying
and amusing themselves. A steady man that reads his five or six
hours a day, and takes his pastime chiefly on the river, finds that
his path scarcely ever crosses that of him who belongs to the
Bullingdon Club, hunts thrice a week, and rarely dines in hall. Then
the "pale student," who is hard at work in his rooms or in the
Bodleian all day, and who has only two friends, out-college men, with
whom he takes walks and tea,--he sees existence in a very different
aspect. The Union politician, who is for ever hanging about his
club, dividing the house on questions of blotting-paper and quill
pens, discussing its affairs at breakfast, intriguing for the place
of Librarian, writing rubbish in the suggestion-book, to him Oxford
is only a soil carefully prepared for the growth of that fine flower,
the Union. He never encounters the undergraduate who haunts
billiard-rooms and shy taverns, who buys jewelry for barmaids, and
who is admired for the audacity with which he smuggled a fox-terrier
into college in a brown-paper parcel. There are many other species
of undergraduate, scarcely more closely resembling each other in
manners and modes of thought than the little Japanese student
resembles the metaphysical Scotch exhibitioner, or than the
hereditary war minister of Siam (whose career, though brief, was
vivacious) resembled the Exeter Sioux, a half-reclaimed savage, who
disappeared on the warpath after failing to scalp the Junior Proctor.
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