Is recorded of the celebrated Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the Rev. James Scott, M. A., better known as Anti-Sejanus, who acquired extraordinary eminence as a pulpit orator, both in and out of the University. He frequently preached at St. Mary’s, where crowds of the University attended him. On one occasion he offended the Undergraduates, by the delivery of a severe philippic against gaming; which they deeming a work of supererogation, evinced their displeasure by scraping the floor with their feet (an old custom now scarcely resorted to twice in a century.) He, however, severely censured them for this act of indecorum, shortly afterwards, in another discourse, for which he selected the appropriate text, “Keep thy feet when thou goest to the House of God.”
THE SIMPLICITY OF GREAT MINDS.
It is not surprising that our distinguished philosophers and mathematicians have rarely evinced much knowledge of men and manners, or of the ordinary circumstances of life, since they are so much occupied in telling “the number of the stars,” in tracing the wonders of creation, or in balancing the mental and physical powers of man. Our illustrious Cantab, Bacon, says his biographer, was cheated by his servants at the bottom, whilst he sat in abstraction at the top of his table; and he of whom Dr. Johnson said (the great and good Newton,) that had he lived in the days of ancient Greece, he would have been worshipped as a deity; of whom, too, the poet wrote—
“Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said, ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light,”
Caused a smaller hole to be perforated in his room door, when his favourite cat had a kitten, not remembering that it would follow puss through the larger one. Another more modern and less distinguished but not less amiable Cantab, who was Senior Wrangler in his year, one day inquired—
“OF WHAT COUNTRY MARINES WERE?”
Another distinguished Senior Wrangler, Professor and divine, occasionally amuses his friends by rehearsing the fact, that once, having, to preach in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, he hired a blind horse to ride the distance on, and his path laying cross a common, where the road was but indistinctly marked, he became so absorbed in abstract calculations, that, forgetting to guide his steed aright, he and the horse wandered so far awry, that they tumbled “head over heels,” as the folks say, upon a cow slumbering by the way side. On dit, the same Cantab was one morning caught over his breakfast-fire with an egg in his hand, to minute the time by, and his—
WATCH DOING TO A TURN IN THE SAUCEPAN.
When he went in for A.B. his natural diffidence prevented his doing much in the first four days of the Senate House examination, and he was consequently bracketted low: but rallying his confidence, he challenged all the men of his years, and was Senior Wrangler. This incident caused him to be received with rapturous applause, upon his being presented to the Vice-Chancellor for his degree, on the following Saturday. A few days after he is said to have been in London, and entered one of the larger theatres at the same instant with Royalty itself:—the audience rose with one accord, and thunders of applause followed! “This is too much,” said our Cantab to his friend, modestly hiding his face in his hat, having, in the simplicity of his heart, taken the huzzas and claps to be an improved edition of the Senate House. Another Cantab, who was also a Senior Wrangler, and guilty of many singularities, as well as some follies, one who has unjustly heaped reproach on the head of his Alma Mater (see his “Progress of a Senior Wrangler at Cambridge,” in the numbers of the defunct London Magazine,) had the following quaternion posted on his room door in Trinity:—