The family of the Spintexts have, it appears, very lately put forth a scion, in the person of a learned divine, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, who, being appointed a Select Preacher in 1835, delivered a discourse of the extraordinary duration of an hour and a half! The present Father of the University and Master of Peter-house, Dr. Francis Barnes, upwards of ninety years of age, was one of the heads present. He sat out the first three quarters of an hour, but then began to be fidgetty. Another quarter of an hour expired,—the preacher was still in the midst of his discourse. The Doctor (now become right down impatient,) being seated the lowest (next to the Vice-Chancellor) in Golgotha, or the “Place of Skulls,” as it is called, he moved, first one seat higher (the preacher is still on his legs,) then to a third, then to a fourth, then to a fifth; and before the hour and a half had quite expired, he joined one of the junior esquire bedells at the top, to whom he observed, with that original expression of face for which he is so remarkable, “my beef is burnt to a cinder.”
SHORT HAND WRITING WAS INVENTED BY A CANTAB,
According to the first volume of the Librarian, published by Mr. Savage, of the London Institution; who says, that the first work printed on the subject was by Dr. Timothy Bright, of Cambridge, in 1598, who dedicated it to Queen Elizabeth, under the title of “An art of short, swift, and secret writing, by Character.”
THE HUMBLE PETITION OF THE LADIES.
Before the erection of the Senate-House in the University of Cambridge, the annual grand Commencement was held in St. Mary’s, the University church. “It seems,” says Dyer, in his History of Cambridge, “that on these occasions (the time when gentlemen take their degrees”) that is, the degree of M.A. more particularly, “ladies had been allowed to sit in that part of the church assigned to the doctors, called THE THRONE: it was, however, at length agreed amongst them (the doctors) that ladies should be no longer permitted to sit there; and the place assigned to them was under the throne, in the church.” This invasion of what the fair almost looked upon as the abstraction of a right, led to a partial war of words and inuendos, and the matter was at last taken up by the facetious Roger Long, D.D., Master of Pembroke College, who, he adds, in his Supplement to his History, was celebrated for his Treatise on Astronomy, and for his erection of a sphere in his College eighteen feet in diameter, still shown there. On this humorous occasion, he was a dissentient against the Heads, not a little bustle was excited amongst the Cambridge ladies, a subject for a few jokes was afforded the wags of the University, and he produced his famous music-speech, spoken at the public Commencement of 1714, on the 6th of July, which was afterwards published, but is now very scarce. It was delivered in an assumed character, as “being the Petition of the Ladies of Cambridge,” and is full of whim and humour, in Swift’s best manner, beginning—
“The humble petition of the ladies, who are all ready to be eaten up with the spleen,
To think they are to be cooped up in the Chancel, where they can neither see nor be seen,
But must sit in the dumps by themselves, all stew’d and pent up,
And can only peep through the lattice, like so many chickens in a coop;
Whereas last Commencement the ladies had a gallery provided near enough,
To see the heads sleep, and the fellow-commoners take snuff.”
“How he could have delivered it in so sacred a place as St. Mary’s,” says Dyer, “is matter of surprise (though they say, good fun, like good coin, is current any where.”) It is pleasant to see a grave man descend from his heights, as Pope says, “to guard the fair.” Though nobody could probably be much offended at the time, unless the Vice-Chancellor, whom, if we understand the writer’s meaning, he calls an old woman, when he says—
“Such cross ill-natured doings as these are, even a saint would vex,
To see a Vice-Chancellor so barbarous to one of his own sex.”