98 NOTKS OF THE MONTH. 



A. M.s, in their own opinion, were more than half bishops already ; 

 the A. B.s had each censed to be ASS ; while the small fry erudi- 

 tion, the embryo fathers in God, succeeded in persuading themselves 

 into the belief that they were at length somebodies. Certain diffi- 

 culties would stare ordinary individuals in the face as to the propriety 

 of all this exultation, considering that his Grace was not exactly a 

 walking library, and did not carry a cyclopaedia on his tongue's end. 

 The Duke was never particularly remarkable for any extraordinary 

 proficiency in the English language, from whence it might be reason- 

 ably inferred that he could not be quite at home in the pompous 

 phraseology of Quintillian or Tully. But what of that ? surely a 

 man who could carry a French redoubt, or an Indian outpost, would 

 not be impeded by the cheveux-de-frise of Latin rhetoricians and ad- 

 vocates. Nor was he. The Prince of Waterloo disdained to speak 

 the Latin of old Rome, when it was far more convenient to speak the 

 Latin of Apsley house. He evinced a very judicious taste in regard- 

 ing with proper contempt the quantity of the blarney he had to utter ; 

 and being a straight-forward man he did not see the utility of having 

 short feet and long feet in his discourse, when all the feet could be 

 made of equal length. The undergraduates and the pedagogues 

 were absolutely beside themselves, so charmed were they at the good 

 sense of their erudite chancellor. They gave innumerable groans and 

 countless hisses for such despicable creatures as dissenters and Lon- 

 don University men, who are absurd enough to follow the old path 

 in the attainment of the classics. What an overwhelming enthusiasm 

 must all the actors in this glorious exhibition have experienced ! 

 There was the Duke of Wellington, whose name is associated inde- 

 libly with events that new modeled the destinies of millions, whose 

 fame is as vast and indestructible as the ocean, the thunders of whose, 

 career will reverberate in the ears of succeeding generations till time 

 shall cease; there was the conqueror of the conqueror of Europe, the 

 ex-premier of England, a man whom kings have contended to honour ; 

 there was this personage (as if in very mockery of himself and his in- 

 sane adulators), in the character of the chancellor of an university, 

 who had to be prompted by the vice-chancellor in the reading of a 

 school-boy's theme ; there stood the victor of Napoleon, uttering a 

 horrid jargon that neither he nor his auditors could make out whether 

 it was a language or not; there was the hero whom the fire of a 

 thousand battles could not move, intoxicated with the clamour of a 

 few over-grown underlashed amateurs in literature, and the discordant 

 yellings of a couple of dozen of shovel-hatted old women, in unmen- 

 tionables and cauliflower wigs. The great captain of the age in be- 

 lieving that Oxford is England has outgeneralled himself. 'Tis true 

 the brother of his sovereign, sundry magnates among the aristocracy, 

 various potentials of the church, Sir Charles Wetheral, a gentleman 

 equally distinguished by the length of his harangues and the brevity 

 of his breeches ; and many others took a portion of the ridicule of 

 the exhibition on themselves, and in this respect may have contri- 

 buted to induce a belief in the mind of the Duke, that popularity is 

 synonymous with the vociferations of bigoted zealots and unshaven 

 intolerants. The delusion is a splendid one, no doubt ; but we opine 



