CHAPTER V 



LEURJAHRE AND WANDERJAHRE 



PART II. MATHEMATICAL STUDIES AND CAMBRIDGE PLEASURES 



IN October, 1840, we find Francis Galton established in Trinity 

 College, Cambridge. It was, he says, a notable day in his life when, 

 escorted by his father, Tertius, he arrived on the top of a stage coach 

 in the town of Cambridge. No man was ever a more loyal son of 

 Alma Mater than Galton, and nothing gave him greater joy in later 

 life than the honours conferred 011 him by his College and University. 

 That the portrait of him a mere pollman should hang with those of 

 great heroes in the dining-hall, that he could once again order audit ule 

 and dine by right at the Fellows' table were matters which gave him 

 inexpressible delight. Those who have never left the University have 

 little knowledge of how very tender, and largely unreasoning is the 

 affection of the old Cambridge man to his University. The existing life 

 of the place he feels has nothing to do with him, it is transient, inter- 

 loping. The permanent and substantial is the old environment, peopled 

 with many familiar forms, with the wonted figures crossing the court, 

 the friendly shout from the windows, the tones of voices long silent or 

 now grown unsympathetic, the midnight fireside, the enthusiasms of 

 youth (our youth, of course !), and the seniors with their failings, which 

 have grown to be essential virtues, landmarks of that time, with their 

 indulgent tolerations, and their moulding affectionate sarcasm of our 

 certainties. We own the place, we people it ; the present population 

 are but lessees of our ancestral halls, intrusive, alien, anomalous. The 

 magic fascination of it all is merely thwarted by the reality ; for us 

 "the ideal shall be the real." And when two Cambridge exiles talk 

 together of the place they unconsciously mingle in one same en- 

 vironment, two races of men separated, perhaps, by a generation. We 

 know them all: Harry Hallam 1 , "with his singular sweetness and 

 ' Brother of Tennyson's Arthur Hallam. 



