A Balloon, With Which He Amused the University
In the third year of his residence, when not more than eighteen, probably the only instance of a member of either university constructing one. It “was magnificent in size, and splendid in its decorations, and was constructed and manœuvred, from first to last, entirely by himself. It was the contrivance of many anxious thoughts, and the labour of many weeks, to bring it to what he wished; and when, at last, it was completed to his satisfaction, and had been suspended for some days in the college hall, of which it occupied the whole height, he announced a time for its ascension. There was nothing at that period very new in balloons, or very curious in the species he had adopted; but by some means he had contrived to disseminate, not only within his own college, but throughout the whole university, a prodigious curiosity respecting the fate of this experiment; and a vast concourse of persons assembled, both within and without the college walls; and the balloon having been brought to its station, the grass-plot within the cloisters of Jesus’ College, was happily launched by himself, amidst the applause of all ranks and degrees of gownsmen, the whole scene succeeding to his wish; nor is it very easy to forget the delight which flashed from his eye, and the triumphant wave of his cap, when the machine, with its little freight (a kitten,) having cleared the college battlements, was seen floating in full security over the towers of the great gate, followed in its course by several persons on horseback, who had undertaken to recover it; and all went home delighted with an exhibition upon which nobody would have ventured, in such a place, but himself. But to gratify and amuse others was ever the source of the greatest satisfaction to him.” This was one of those early displays of that spirit of enterprise which was so gloriously developed in his subsequent wanderings through the dreary regions of the north, over the classic shores of mouldering Greece, of Egypt, and of Palestine, the scenes of which, and their effects upon his vivid imagination and sanguine spirit, he has so admirably depicted in his writings. This eminent traveller used to say, that the old proverb,
“WITH TOO MANY IRONS IN THE FIRE SOME MUST BURN,”
“Was a lie.” Use poker, tongs, shovel, and all,—only keep them all stirring, was his creed. Few had the capacity of keeping them so effectually stirring as he had. Nature seemed to have moulded him, head and heart, to be in a degree a contradiction to the wise saws of experience.
THREE BLUE BEANS IN A BLADDER
Dr. Bentley said of our celebrated Cambridge Professor, Joshua Barnes, that “he knew about as much Greek as an Athenian blacksmith,” but he was certainly no ordinary scholar, and few have excelled him in his tact at throwing of “trifles light as air” in that language, of which his following version of three blue beans in a bladder is a sample:
Τρεις κυαμοι ενι κυστιδι κυανεηφι.
THE THREE UNIVERSITY BEDELS,
Equal to this is the following spondaic on By Kit Smart, who well deserved, though Dr. Johnson denied him, a place in his British Poets. He possessed great wit and sprightliness of conversation, which would readily flow off in extemporaneous verse, says Dyer, and the three university bedels all happening to be fat men, he thus immortalized them:
“Pinguia tergeminorum abdomina Bedellorum.”
(Three bedels sound, with paunches fat and round.)