The Classical Tripos and the Wooden Wedge
A PREVIOUS EXAMINATION
This class of Cambridge honours, for which none can become candidates but those who have attained mathematical distinction, was instituted by a Grace of the Senate, in 1822. As its title implies, it is divided into three classes. The first examination took place in 1824, when the Cantabs were saved the labour of gestation, by the last man in the third class being named Wedgewood, which was transposed by some wag to wooden wedge—and by that soubriquet, equivalent to the wooden spoon, all men so circumstanced are now designated in the colloquial phraseology of the University. It is but justice to Mr. W. to add, however, that he also attained the high mathematical distinction of eighth wrangler of his year. By the same decree of the Senate Was established at Cambridge (answering to the Oxford “Little-go,”) by which all students are required to undergo an examination in Classics and Divinity, in the Lent term of the second year of their residence. The successful candidates are divided into two classes only: but there is always a select few who are allowed to pass, after an extra trial of skill: these are lumped at the end, and have been designated “Elegant Extracts.” Some wag furnished Jackson’s Oxford Journal with this
SYLLOGISTIC EXERCISE FOR THE LITTLE-GO MEN
No cat has two tails.
A cat has one tail more than no cat.
Ergo—A cat has three tails.
The following song (in the true spirit of a non-reading man) is from the pen of a learned seceding Cantab, the late Dr. John Disney, who, after graduating at Peter-House, Cambridge, LL.B., and for some time officiating as a minister of the Established Church, resigned a living “for conscience sake,” and closed his career as Minister of the Unitarian Chapel, in Essex-street, Strand:—
Come, my good College lads! and attend to my lays,
I’ll show you the folly of poring o’er books;
For all you get by it is mere empty praise,
Or a poor meagre fellowship, and sour looks.
Chorus.
Then lay by your books, lads, and never repine;
And cram not your attics,
With dry mathematics,
But moisten your clay with a bumper of wine.
The first of mechanics was old Archimedes,
Who play’d with Rome’s ships as we’d play cup and ball,
To play the same game I can’t see where the need is,
Or why we should fag mathematics at all.
Then lay by your books, lads, &c.
Great Newton found out the binomial law,
To raise X -|- Y to the power of B;
Found the distance of planets that he never saw,
And we most probably never shall see.
Then lay by your books, lads, &c.
Let Whiston and Ditton star-gazing enjoy,
And taste all the sweets mathematics can give;
Let us for our time find a better employ,
And knowing life’s sweets, let us learn how to live.
Then lay by your books, lads, &c.
These men ex absurdo, conclusions may draw,
Perpetual motion they never could find;
Not one of the set, lads, can balance a straw,
And longitude seeking is hunting the wind.
Then lay by your books, lads, &c.
If we study at all, let us study the means
To make ourselves friends, and to keep them when made;
Learn to value the blessings kind heaven ordains,
To make others happy, let that be our trade.
Finale.
Let each day be better than each day before,
Without pain or sorrow,
To-day or to-morrow,
May we live, my good lads, to see many days more.
A DREADFUL FIT OF RHEUMATISM
Two Cantabs, brothers, named Whiter, one the learned author of Etymologicum Magnum, the other an amiable divine; both were remarkable, the one for being six, the other about five feet in height. The taller was eccentric and often absent in his habits, the other a wag. Both were invited to the same party, and the taller being first ready, slipped on the coat of the shorter, and wended his way into a crowded room of fashionables, to whom his eccentricities being familiar, they were not much surprised at seeing him encased in a coat, the tail of which scarcely reached his hips, whilst the sleeves ran short of his elbows; in fact, it was a perfect strait jacket, and he had not been long seated before he began to complain to every body that he was suffering from a dreadful fit of rheumatism. One or two suggested the tightness of his coat as the cause of his pain; but he remained rheumatic in spite of them, till his brother’s approach threw the whole party into a fit of convulsive laughter, as he came sailing into the room, his coat-tails sweeping the room, en traine, and his arms performing the like service on either side, as he exclaimed, to his astonished brother, “Why, Bob, you have got my coat on!” Bob then discovered that his friends’ hints bordered on the truth, and the two exchanged garments forthwith, to the amusement of all present.
DR. PARR AN INGRATE
The Doctor was once staying with the late great and good Mr. Roscoe, when many of the most distinguished Whigs were his guests also, out of compliment to whom the Doctor forbore to indulge in his customary after-dinner pipe. At length, when wine and words had circulated briskly, and twilight began to set in, he insisted upon mounting to his own room to have a whiff solus. Having groped his way up stairs, somewhat exhausted with the effort, he threw himself into what he took to be an arm-chair. Suddenly the ears of the party were assailed with awful moans and groans, as of some one in tribulation. Mr. Roscoe hastened to learn the cause, and no sooner reached the stairs’ foot, than he heard the Doctor calling lustily for his man John, adding, in more supplicatory accents, “Will nobody help a Christian man in distress! Will nobody help a Christian man in distress!” Mr. Roscoe mounted to the rescue, but could not forbear a hearty laugh, as he beheld Dr. P. locked in the close embrace of a large old-fashioned grate, which he had mistaken for an arm-chair, and from which he was in vain struggling to relieve himself.
MON DIEU—LE DIABLE
When Robert the Devil was first produced at Paris, and the opera going folk were on the qui vive for the promised appearance of the Prince of Darkness, a certain Cantab, the facial line of whose countenance bordered on the demoniacal, went to see him make his bow to a Parisian audience, and happened to enter the same loge from whence a Parisian belle was anxiously watching the entrée of Monsieur Le Robert. Attracted by the creaking of the loge door, on suddenly turning her head in its direction, she caught a glimpse of our Cambridge friend, and was so forcibly struck with the expression of his countenance, that she went into hysterics, exclaiming, “Mon Dieu! Le Diable!”
SOME CRITICAL CIVILITIES
BENTLEY SAID OF JOSHUA BARNES,
The famous editor of Demosthenes, John Taylor, D. D. being accused of saying Bishop Warburton was no scholar, denied it, but owned he always thought so. Upon this Warburton called him “The Learned Dunce.” When Parr, in the British Critic for 1795, called Porson “a giant in literature,” and “a prodigy in intellect,” the Professor took it in dudgeon, and said, “What right has any one to tell the height of a man he cannot measure?” A Dutch commentator having called Bentley “Egregius” and “Ὁ πάνυ,” “What right, (said the Doctor) has that fellow to quote me; “does he think that I will set my pearls in his dunghill?” Baxter, in the second edition of his Horace, said the great Bentley seemed to him “rather to have buried Horace under a heap of rubbish than to have illustrated him.” And Who, to please his religious wife, composed a Greek ode to prove King Solomon wrote Homer’s Iliad, that he was
“Ὅνος πρὸς λύραν—Asinus ad Lyram:”
Joshua replied, that they who said this of him had not understanding enough to be poets, or wanted the Ὁ νοῦς πρὸς λύραν.