ON UNIVERSITY SNOBS
I should like to fill several volumes with accounts of various University Snobs; so fond are my reminiscences of them, and so numerous are they.I should like to speak, above all, of the wives and daughters of some of the Professor-Snobs; their amusements, habits, jealousies;their innocent artifices to entrap young men; their picnics, concerts, and evening-parties.I wonder what has become of Emily Blades, daughter of Blades, the Professor of the Mandingo language? I remember her shoulders to this day, as she sat in the midst of a crowd of about seventy young gentlemen, from Corpus and Catherine Hall, entertaining them with ogles and French songs on the guitar.Are you married, fair Emily of the shoulders? What beautiful ringlets those were that used to dribble over them!--what a waist!--what a killing sea-green shot-silk gown!--what a cameo, the size of a muffin! There were thirty-six young men of the University in love at one time with Emily Blades: and no words are sufficient to describe the pity, the sorrow, the deep, deep commiseration--the rage, fury, and uncharitableness, in other words--with which the Miss Trumps (daughter of Trumps, the Professor of Phlebotomy)regarded her, because she DIDN'T squint, and because she WASN'T marked with the small-pox.
As for the young University Snobs, I am getting too old, now, to speak of such very familiarly.My recollections of them lie in the far, far past--almost as far back as Pelham's time.
We THEN used to consider Snobs raw-looking lads, who never missed chapel; who wore highlows and no straps; who walked two hours on the Trumpington road every day of their lives; who carried off the college scholarships, and who overrated themselves in hall.We were premature in pronouncing our verdict of youthful Snobbishness The man without straps fulfilled his destiny and duty.He eased his old governor, the curate in Westmoreland, or helped his sisters to set up the Ladies' School.He wrote a 'Dictionary,' or a 'Treatise on Conic Sections,'
as his nature and genius prompted.He got a fellowship:
and then took to himself a wife, and a living.He presides over a parish now, and thinks it rather a dashing thing to belong to the 'Oxford and Cambridge Club;' and his parishioners love him, and snore under his sermons.No, no, HE is not a Snob.It is not straps that make the gentleman, or highlows that unmake him, be they ever so thick.My son, it is you who are the Snob if you lightly despise a man for doing his duty, and refuse to shake an honest man's hand because it wears a Berlin glove.
We then used to consider it not the least vulgar for a parcel of lads who had been whipped three months previous, and were not allowed more than three glasses of port at home, to sit down to pineapples and ices at each other's rooms, and fuddle themselves with champagne and claret.
