fidgeting from the commencement of the hour, rises up to give a quotation from Bishop Berkeley, illustrating a passage in one of Sir William's lectures. The sly fellow fancies that he has detected the professor in a plagiarism, but quotes the passage ostensibly as confirming the lecture. When he has sat down, Sir W. Hamilton, who sees distinctly through the youngster's game, directs his attention to a dozen passages in a dozen different authors, where he will find statements to the same effect, which he might equally have quoted. So the hour passes, each letter of the alphabet being presented in turn, and all the students who desire it, having a chance of speaking. Sometimes the exercise was varied by essays being read, or by Sir William Hamilton suddenly propounding a difficult question as to the use of a term—say the term dialectic, among the Platonists,—or as to some definition of Aristotle's in the Posterior Analytics. Anybody might answer that knew. No written account was taken of these answers and other displays, but gradually a public opinion was formed as to the best man in the class, and at the end of the sessions the honours went by vote, the professor voting in perfect equality with his students, and almost always finding that the general voice coincided with his own opinions as to the order in which the ten best men should stand. The system perfectly succeeded. Never was there a class in which so much enthusiasm manifested itself. An immense interest was excited in the lectures, but the chief thing to be observed here is, that by turning his class two days a week into a sort of authoritative debating club, he established a public life, which, if it is not society, is at least the scaffolding of society. So it is more or less in all the classes that are conducted with spirit. It was not so much felt in the class-room of Professor Wilson, who kept all the talk to himself; and surely it was quite enough to hear such a man discourse on human life in his own way. What Christopher North knew of human nature he told to his pupils in the most glowing terms; but literally the students sat down before him day after day without knowing each other's names, and without having an idea as to the amount of work performed by each in prospect of a place in the class list. He was a splendid lecturer—but he was only a lecturer; and lecturing is little more than half the work of a professorship. To succeed in that work requires peculiar tact and knowledge of men who are in what Mr. Disraeli has described as the "curly" period of life. Very soon "the curled darlings of our nation" find out the weak places of the professor. He may implore silence, but the more noise prevails. If he threatens, revenge follows the next day, for suddenly and unaccountably half the students in the class turn lame, and hobble into the lecture-room leaning on bludgeons, with which, knocked against the seats, they interrupt the speaker until his voice is drowned in the uproar. One poor old professor (who, by the way, lived in continual terror of a very painful disease) had so completely lost the control of his students, that he had to sit before them in mute despair, and had the pleasure of hearing one of them invite him by his
