verb advisedly; for, like many other freshmen who start with a burst in learning's race, he soon got winded, and fell back among the ruck. But the course of lectures, like the course of true love, will not always run smooth, even to those who undertake it with the same courage as Mr. Verdant Green. The dryness of the daily routine of lectures, which varied about as much as the steak-and-chop, chop-and-steak dinners of ancient taverns, was occasionally relieved by episodes, which, though not witty in themselves, were yet the cause of wit in others; for it takes but little to cause amusement in a lecture-room, where a bad construe; or the imaginative excuses of late-comers; or the confusion of some young gentleman who has to turn over the leaf of his Greek play and finds it uncut; or the pounding of the same gentleman in the middle of the first chorus; or his offensive extrication therefrom through the medium of some Cumberland barbarian; or the officiousness of the same barbarian to pursue the lecture when every one else has, with singular unanimity, "read no further;" - all these circumstances, although perhaps dull enough in themselves, are nevertheless productive of some mirth in a lecture-room. But if there were often late-comers to the lectures, there were occasionally early-goers from them. Had Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke an engagement to ride his horse ~Tearaway~ in the amateur steeple-chase, and was he constrained, by circumstances over which (as he protested) he had no control, to put [84 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN] in a regular appearance at Mr. Slowcoach's lectures, what was it necessary for him to do more than to come to lecture in a long greatcoat, put his handkerchief to his face as though his nose were bleeding, look appealingly at Mr. Slowcoach, and, as he made his exit, pull aside the long greatcoat, and display to his admiring colleagues the snowy cords and tops that would soon be pressing against ~Tearaway's~ sides, that gallant animal being then in waiting, with its trusty groom, in the alley at the back of Brazenface? And if little Mr. Bouncer, for astute reasons of his own, wished Mr. Slowcoach to believe that he (Mr. B.) was particularly struck with his (Mr. S.'s) remarks on the force of {kata} in composition, what was to prevent Mr. Bouncer from feigning to make a note of these remarks by the aid of a cigar instead of an ordinary pencil? But besides the regular lectures of Mr. Slowcoach, our hero had also the privilege of attending those of the Rev. Richard Harmony. Much learning, though it had not made Mr. Harmony mad, had, at least in conjunction with his natural tendencies, contributed to make him extremely eccentric; while to much perusal of Greek and Hebrew MSS., he probably owed his defective vision. These infirmities, instead of