common degree. At length, a relation dying, and leaving me a farther small income, I left the university, and came to reside in London.
Now, in my third year at college, there came to St. Boniface a young gentleman, who was one of the few gentlemen-pensioners of our society. His popularity speedily was great. A kindly and simple youth, he would have been liked, I daresay, even though he had been no richer than the rest of us; but this is certain, that flattery, worldliness, mammon-worship, are vices as well known to young as to old boys; and a rich lad at school or college has his followers, tuft-hunters, led-captains, little courts, just as much as any elderly millionary of Pall-Mall, who gazes round his club to see whom he shall take home to dinner, while humble trencher-men wait anxiously, thinking—Ah! will he take me this time? or will he ask that abominable sneak and toady Henchman again? Well—well! this is an old story about parasites and flatterers. My dear good sir, I am not for a moment going to say that you ever were one; and I daresay it was very base and mean of us to like a man chiefly on account of his money. "I know"—Tom Lovel used to say—"I know fellows come to my rooms because I have a large allowance, and plenty of my poor old governor's wine, and give good dinners: I am not deceived; but, at least, it is pleasanter to come to me and have good dinners, and good wine, than to go to Jack Highson's dreary tea and turnout, or to Ned Roper's abominable Oxbridge port." And so I admit at once that Lovel's parties were more agreeable than most men's in the college. Perhaps the goodness of the fare, by pleasing the guests, made them more pleasant. A dinner in hall, and a pewter-plate is all very well, and I can say grace before it with all my heart; but a dinner with fish from London, game, and two or three nice little entrées, is better—and there was no better cook in the university than ours at St. Boniface, and ah, me! there were appetites then, and digestions which rendered the good dinner doubly good.
Between me and young Lovel a friendship sprang up, which, I trust, even the publication of this story will not diminish. There is a period, immediately after the taking of his bachelor's degree, when many a university-man finds himself embarrassed. The tradesmen rather rudely press for a settlement of their accounts. Those prints we ordered calidi juventâ; those shirt-studs and pins which the jewellers would persist in thrusting into our artless bosoms; those fine coats we would insist on having for our books, as well as ourselves; all these have to be paid for by the graduate. And my father, who was then alive, refusing to meet these demands, under the—I own—just plea, that my allowance had been ample, and that my half-sisters ought not to be mulcted of their slender portions, in consequence of my extravagance, I should have been subject to very serious inconvenience—nay, possibly, to personal incarceration, had not Lovel, at the risk of rustication, rushed up to London to his mother (who then had especial reasons for being very gracious with her son), obtained a supply of money from her, and brought it to me at Mr. Shackell's horrible hotel, where I was lodged. He had tears in his kind eyes;
