1837-38. COLLEGE PHILOSOPHERS. 125 



" ' 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view ;' so saith our 

 poet, and so seem to think the sight-seers, who value places the 

 more, the nearer they are to our antipodes. We read daily of a 

 ' Visit to the Slave-Market at Cairo/ of a ' Day spent with the 

 King of Timbuctoo/ or 'Among the Inhabitants of Pitcairn 

 Island/ or ' With their Majesties of Otaheite.' We hear of 

 stolen journeys to the mosques and harems of Constantinople, 

 of visits to Jewish synagogues, Greek convents, and Catholic 

 monasteries, with sundry other notices of peeps into salt-mines, 

 coal-pits, madhouses, and all sorts of charitable institutions ; yet 

 we never chance to find among the multifarious tomes of those 

 vagabonds who wander to and fro over the face of the earth, in 

 search of choice specimens of ' men and manners/ any record of 

 a visit to the Consulting Eoom of our University Library. We 

 have in vain searched through all our Voyages and Travels, 

 from the folios of Humboldt down to the octavos of Sir Francis 

 Head, Mrs. Trollope, or N". P. Willis, but hitherto hopelessly, 

 unless a reference, in the late work of Eich on Koordistan, to 

 the site of the ancient Babel, has an implicit allusion to the 

 confusion of tongues characteristic of the Student's Den. And 

 we have equally mourned to see the many strangers who enter 

 its precincts, attracted by our unique Museum, our magnificent 

 Library, and our choice collection of pictures, pass by the ' open 

 Sesame' door of our Beading-Boom, except at rare times when 

 some illustrious stranger, with one of our august Professors for 

 a cicerone, thrusts his hand inside the door (thereby exhibiting 

 men and manners), and listening for a while to the 'sounds 

 within like music flowing/ draws it back, and marches off to 

 some more noble Academic Lion. 



"To prevent a continuance of this mournful inattention to 

 one of our most noble institutions, we now crave our reader's 

 attention to the short notice our limits permit us to give of it. 



" After the first hum of many voices has become familiarized 

 to an entrant into the Consulting-Boom, he begins, like a tea 

 dealer or a pearl-fisher, to arrange the busy crew into three sorts 

 good, bad, and indifferent; which, of course, he afterwards 

 subdivides into various genera, species, and varieties. We shall 

 rather treat the subject in a popular way than in a strictly dia- 



