free and irregular in their habits, owing to the lax discipline which prevailed. De Quincey had great contempt for the general acquirements of the Examiners, for the sort of examinations to be gone through, and especially for the trickery of the Examiners in their trying the students in some particular passages and points in which they, the students, could easily make themselves perfectly at home. So, at the end of the first day of the examinations, although he felt satisfied that he would pass, he walked quietly out of the town never to return to it, according to Hogg, except for one short stay of half an hour. This was nearly a century ago; and things at Oxford in that line have greatly changed, it is hoped, for the better.
No man, Graduate, Undergraduate, or Visitor, who leaves Oxford, voluntarily or involuntarily, in these days, ever feels that he does not want to go back to it, in the spirit, if not in the flesh.
No one knows whether Henry Kingsley was precocious or dull at Oxford. Nobody seems to know anything about Henry Kingsley, at Oxford or anywhere else. In "The Memoir of Charles Kingsley," by Mrs. Kingsley, she does not even mention the name of Henry Kingsley, her famous husband's equally famous brother. The Encyclopædias, the Dictionaries of Authors, ignore
