Ode to the Unambitious and Undistinguished Bachelors
“Post Tot Naufragia Tutus.” — Virg
Thrice happy ye, through toil and dangers past,
Who rest upon that peaceful shore,
Where all your fagging is no more,
And gain the long-expected port at last.
Yours are the sweets, the ravishing delights,
To doze and snore upon your noontide beds;
No chapel-bell your peaceful sleep affrights,
No problems trouble now your empty heads.
Yet, if the heavenly muse is not mistaken,
And poets say the muse can rightly guess,
I fear, full many of you must confess
That you have barely saved your bacon.
Amidst th’ appalling problematic war,
Where dire equations frown’d in dread array,
Ye never strove to find the arduous way,
To where proud Granta’s honours shine afar.
Within that dreadful mansion have ye stood,
When moderators glared with looks uncivil,
How often have ye d—d their souls, their blood,
And wished all mathematics at the devil!
But ah! what terrors on that fatal day
Your souls appall’d, when, to your stupid gaze,
Appear’d the biquadratic’s darken’d maze,
And problems ranged in horrible array!
Hard was the task, I ween, the labour great,
To the wish’d port to find your uncouth way—
How did ye toil, and fag, and fume, and fret,
And—what the bashful muse would blush to say.
But now your painful terrors all are o’er—
Cloth’d in the glories of a full-sleev’d gown,
Ye strut majestically up and down,
And now ye fag, and now ye fear no more.
But although many men of this class are not gifted with that species of perception suited to mathematical studies, however desirable it may be that the mind should be subject to that best of all correctives, the abstruse sciences, they are often possessed of what may be justly denominated “great talents.” A remarkable instance of this fact was manifested in the person of a late fellow of Trinity (now no longer so—“for conscience-sake,”) who wrote a tragedy whilst still a boy of sixteen or seventeen, that was produced at Covent Garden with success, obtained the only vacant Craven scholarship in his freshman’s year (always considered a high test of classical ability,) and carried off other classical university prizes. Yet he, when he came to be examined for his degree, though he sat and wrote out whole books of Homer from memory, he was unable to go through the first problem of Euclid: for when told that he must do something in mathematics, he wrote down, after a fashion, the A’s and B’s, but without describing the figure, a necessary accompaniment. Of the omission he was reminded by the examiner—“Oh! the picture, you mean,” was his reply, and, drawing a triangle of a true isosceles cut, instead of an equilateral one, he added thereto, a la heraldique, by way of supporters, two ovals of equal height, which completed his only mathematical effort. His learning and talents, however, procured him his degree and a fellowship. To others, mathematics are an inexhaustible source of delight, and such a mind it was that penned The Address to Mathematics, in “The Cambridge Tart,” beginning—
“With thee, divine Mathesis, let me live!
Effuse source of evidence and truth!”
Porson gave a singular proof of his “fondness for Algebra,” says the Sexagenarian, by composing an equation in Greek, the original being comprised in one line. When resident in college, he would frequently amuse himself by sending to his friends scraps of Greek of a like character, for solution. The purport of one was, “Find the value of nothing.” The next time he met his friend, he addressed him with, “Well, have you succeeded in finding the value of nothing?” “Yes,” replied his friend. “What is it?” “Sixpence I gave the gyp for bringing your note,” was the rejoinder.
A RARE MATHEMATICAL WIND.”
The late Professor Vince meeting a fellow of St. John’s College, Cambridge, the next morning after a high wind had blown down several of the fine old trees in the walks, some of three centuries’ standing, he was addressed with, “a terrible storm last night, Mr. Professor.” “Yes,” he replied, “it was “Mathematical wind!” exclaimed the other, “how so, Doctor?” “Why you see it has extracted a great many roots!” A Johnian one day eating apple-pie by the side of a Johnian fellow, an inveterate punster, he facetiously observed,
“HE WAS RAISING APPLE-PIE TO THE Tth POWER:”
Another fellow walking down the hall, after dinner, and slipping some distance on smooth flags, looked over his shoulder and observed to one following him—”An inclined plane.”
Another Cantab, when a student of Bene’t, now rector of H——, Suffolk, sung his song of “divine Mathesis:”—
Let mathematicians and geometricians
Talk of circles’ and triangles’ charms,
The figure I prize is a girl with bright eyes,
And the circle that’s formed by her arms.