NOTES OF THE MONTH. 



LEARNED ABSURDITIES. THE leading feature of the last month 

 has been the installation of his Grace of Wellington as Chancellor of 

 the University of Oxford. The duke is certainly a singularly for- 

 tunate personage, and had he not already obtained a very conspicuous 

 niche in the temple of fame, the doings on the present occasion would 

 have been sufficient to immortalize him. Malvolio speaks of people 

 being born great, acquiring greatness, and having greatness thrust 

 upon them j but here is a man great in every sense of the word 

 here is the proper Bottom of our time, who can play Pyramus, 

 Thisbe, Lion, Moonshine, Wall, and every thing else, from a drum- 

 mer to an LL.D., one who can slaughter spondees and dactyls with 

 as much ease as he could rout the woolly-headed warriors of Seringa- 

 patam, and can bid defiance to all the rules of prosody with as much 

 coolness as if he were ensconced behind the bullet-proof windows of 

 Apsley-house during a reform shower of rotten apples and cabbage- 

 stalks. The admirable Crichton was nothing to his Grace ; the 

 former, to be sure, was an adept at the subtleties of schoolmen, could 

 indite an ode, gallant a mistress, chastise the insolence of a rival, and 

 do almost any thing short of jumping down his own throat. But the 

 Duke, not content with being the " foremost man in all the world/' 

 must needs excel hi'mself ; it was not sufficient to be accounted the 

 greatest tormentor of his species, except Napoleon, since the days of 

 Tamerlane, and such worthies as a disturber of mankind he had no 

 equal, and it is to be hoped never will ; no man could play chess on 

 a field with him, and as for ridding England of superfluous poor, why 

 one of his demands on the disinterested cabinet, of which his brother 

 was a leading member, did more in that respect than all the twaddle 

 of Malthusians, emigration-speechifiers, preventitive-check prosers, 

 and redundant population-mongers, that ever sent their readers or 

 hearers asleep. Notwithstanding the multitudinous coruscations that 

 flamed from his many-gemmed brow, still did this self-diffident per- 

 sonage thirst for some object worthy of being grappled by his Bria- 

 rean-handed genius. His prototype in arms, " Philip's warlike son," 

 had the consolation of imagining new worlds after exhausting the 

 old ; but unfortunately steamers and air-balloons have rendered El 

 Dorados not very plentiful commodities in the Duke's days; and so, 

 having intimated his entire dissent from the opinions of the present 

 time, he has taken to Oxford and the ancients. Don Giovanni's arrival 

 on the confines of the Erebus is reported to have considerably dis- 

 turbed the equanimity of Pluto, and the subordinate demons ; but 

 the classical Arcadians who recline on the banks of the Isis, and 

 imagine that every one dwelling beyond its waters is nobody, not 

 only received that portentous personage, the Duke of Wellington, 

 without any manifestations of fear, but have hailed his arrival as the 

 advent of events redounding wondrously to the honour of Alma 

 Mater. The big ones of the college distended into giants ; the 



M.M. No. 103, O 



