30 LIFE AND EXPERIENCES CHAP. 



resigned, and a man of a totally different stamp my 

 friend George Carey Foster, who afterwards became 

 the principal of the College reigned in his stead with 

 conspicuous success. 



In June 1849 I went up for matriculation. The ex- 

 aminations were held in Somerset House. I was 

 pretty safe in all my subjects except Latin, in which 

 I felt somewhat shaky, especially in the grammar ; but, 

 as up to that time the translation of the set book was 

 all that was needed, I hoped to scrape through. I 

 remember well being placed first at the top of a 

 long table, at the end of which sat the Latin 

 examiner. When we were all very busy translating 

 the passages from the ./Eneid, which I fortunately 

 happened to know well, the examiner rose from 

 his seat and said : " Gentlemen, the examiners 

 have decided to ask each candidate a few simple 

 questions in grammar, and I shall begin now in the 

 order in which you are sitting." "The deuce you 

 will ! " thought I " it's all up with me "; and so I stood 

 up and was the first to be cross-examined as to the 

 gender of a noun or the mood and tense of a verb. I 

 am afraid I made rather a hash of it, for the examiner 

 smiled, as some of them do, grimly, and then he said, 

 " Pray, sir, are you any connection of William Roscoe 

 the historian ? " " Yes, sir, I am ; he was my grand- 

 father." " That'll do, sir." Upon which I said to my- 

 self, " Thank goodness, that's the first time my grand- 

 father has been of any use to me personally, though of 

 course I partly owe to him my existence." And I 

 passed in the first division. 



My uncle " the doctor," with whom I resided when 

 I first came up to town, was an amusing companion 

 full of old-world stories. One day when he was 

 going his rounds for in his early days he was 



