He also attended the Debates, which were then held in the long room behind Wyatt's; and he was particularly charmed with the manner in which vital questions, that (as he learned from the newspapers) had proved stumbling-blocks to the greatest statesmen of the land, were rapidly solved by the embryo statesmen of the Oxford Union. It was quite a sight, in that long picture-room, to see the rows of light iron seats densely crowded with young men - some of whom would perhaps rise to be Cannings, or Peels, or Gladstones - and to hear how one beardless gentleman would call another beardless gentleman his "honourable friend," and appeal "to the sense of the House," and address himself to "Mr. Speaker;" and how they would all juggle the same tricks of rhetoric as their fathers were doing in certain other debates in a certain other House. And it was curious, too, to mark the points of resemblance between the two Houses; and how the smaller one had, on its smaller scale, its Hume, and its Lord John, and its "Dizzy;" and how they went through the same traditional forms, and preserved the same time-honoured ideas, and debated in the fullest houses, with the greatest spirit and the greatest length, on such points as, "What course is it advisable for this country to take in regard to the government of its Indian possessions, and the imprisonment of Mr. Jones by the Rajah of Humbugpoopoonah?"
Indeed, Mr. Verdant Green was so excited by this interesting debate, that on the third night of its adjournment he rose to address the House; but being "no orator as Brutus is," his few broken words were received with laughter, and the honourable gentleman was coughed down.
Our hero had, as an Oxford freshman, to go through that cheerful form called "sitting in the schools," - a form which consisted in the following ceremony. Through a door in the right-hand corner of the Schools Quadrangle, - (Oh, that door! does it not bring a pang into your heart only to think of it? to remember the day when you went in there as pale as the little pair of bands in which you were dressed for your sacrifice; and came out all in a glow and a chill when your examination was over; and posted your bosom-friend there to receive from Purdue the little slip of paper, and bring you the thrilling intelligence that you had passed; or to come empty-handed, and say that you had been plucked!
Oh that door! well might be inscribed there the line which, on Dante's authority, is assigned to the door of another place, -
"ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE!")
- entering through this door in company with several other unfortunates, our hero passed between two galleries through a passage, by which, if the place had been a circus, the horses would have entered, and found himself in a tolerably large room lighted on either side by windows, and panelled half-way up the walls. Down the centre of this room ran a large green-baize-covered table, on the one side of which were some eight or ten miserable beings who were then undergoing examination, and were supplied with pens, ink, blotting-pad, and large sheets of thin "scribble-paper," on which they were struggling to impress their ideas; or else had a book set before them, out of which they were construing, or being racked with questions that touched now on one subject and now on another, like a bee among flowers. The large table was liberally supplied with all the apparatus and instruments of torture; and on the other side of it sat the three examiners, as dreadful and formidable as the terrible three of Venice.
At the upper end of the room was a chair of state for the Vice-Chancellor, whenever he deigned to personally superintend the torture; to the right and left of which accommodation was provided for other victims.