“COCKS MAY CROW.”
Every Cantab remembers and regrets the early death of the accomplished scholar, Charles Skinner Matthews, M. A., late Fellow of Downing College, who was “the familiar” of the present Sir J. C. Hobhouse, and of the late Lord Byron. He was not more accomplished than facetious, nor, according to one of Lord Byron’s letters, more facetious than “beloved.” Speaking of his university freaks, his lordship says, “when Sir Henry Smith was expelled from Cambridge, for a row with a tradesman named “Hiron,” Matthews solaced himself with shouting under Hiron’s window every evening—
“Ah me! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with hot Hiron!”
He was also of that
BAND OF PROFANE SCOFFERS
who, under the auspices of ——, used to rouse Lord Mansel (late Bishop of Bristol) from his slumbers in the Lodge of Trinity (College;) and when he appeared at the window, foaming with wrath, and crying out, “I know you, gentlemen; I know you!” were wont to reply, “We beseech thee to hear us, good Lort!—Good Lort deliver us!” (Lort was his Christian name.) And his lordship might have added, the pun was the more poignant, as the Bishop was either a Welshman himself, or had a Welsh sponsor, in the person of the late Greek Professor, Dr. Lort. Punning upon sacred subjects, however, is decidedly in bad taste; yet, in the reign of the Stuarts, neither king nor nobles were above it. Our illustrious Cantab, Bacon, writing to Prince, afterwards Charles the First, in the midst of his disastrous poverty, says, he hopes, “as the father was his Creator, the son will be his Redeemer.” Yet this great man
DID NOT THE LESS REVERENCE RELIGION,
But said, towards the close of his chequered life, that “a little smattering in philosophy would lead a man to Atheism, but a thorough insight into it will lead a man back to a First Cause; and that the first principle of religion is right reason; and seriously professed, all his studies and inquisitions, he durst not die with any other thoughts than those religion taught, as it is professed among the Christians.” These incidents remind me that
THE MEMORY OF JEMMY GORDON,
“Who, to save from rustication,
Crammed the dunce with declamation,”