A LAUGH AT "OLD FOGIES." 103 



gossip, fun, and laughter. The " old fogies," with 

 cocked hats, stiff ruffles, and gold-headed staffs, had 

 disappeared, even the last of the Hamiltons — the great 

 obstetrician who styled himself " Junior " James in his 

 seventies. Eelics of the past, if such a term be appli- 

 cable to humanities, were still visible — e.g. the senile 

 professor, whose course, for any good got from it, 

 might have been Sanscrit readings instead of " Cullen's 

 Lines," the hour being filled up with his coughing, and 

 hemming, and the uproarious sounds of his class ; the 

 evergreen tertius professor who unconcernedly at noon 

 ate cranberry tarts in the midst of grinning students at 

 a small pastry-cook's, and with digestion unimpaired 

 the next hour read his grandfather's essays on Hydro- 

 cephalus as part of an anatomical course ; and the 

 quaint botanist and would-be philosopher who gave 

 lectures in a sunless cul-de-sac of an old-fashioned 

 square, and whose stock-in-trade was a beggarly ac- 

 count of unbleached paper-covers, enclosing tattered 

 leaves and stems, and whose " fresh specimens for the 

 class " were taken from the crown of his hat, once a 

 gay and lofty beaver, but after countless years of ser- 

 vice had become shapeless, napless, brown, and greasy, 

 not the less in character, however, with the colour, 

 diit, and decadence of the man, his premises, and his 

 prelections. How John Goodsir used to hold his si. Irs, 

 and Ibiny make the welkin ring with laughter, when 

 more finished pictures than the writer's sketches were 

 presented for their recognition and amusement : word 

 painting hardly sufficing without the imitative man- 



