In Pen's second year, when Miss Fotheringay made her chief hit in London, and scores of prints were published of her, Pen had one of these hung in his bed-room, and confided to the men of his set how awfully, how wildly, how madly, how passionately, he had loved that woman. He showed them in confidence the verses that he had written to her, and his brow would darken, his eyes roll, his chest heave with emotion as he recalled that fatal period of his life, and described the woes and agonies which he had suffered. The verses were copied out, handed about, sneered at, admired, passed from coterie to coterie. There are few things which elevate a lad in the estimation of his brother boys, more than to have a character for a great and romantic passion. Perhaps there is something noble in it at all times—among very young men it is considered heroic.—Pen was pronounced a tremendous fellow. They said he had almost committed suicide: that he had fought a duel with a baronet about her. Freshmen pointed him out to each other. As at the promenade time at two o'clock he swaggered out of college, surrounded by his cronies, he was famous to behold. He was elaborately attired. He would ogle the ladies who came to lionize the University, and passed before him on the arms of happy gownsmen, and give his opinion upon their personal charms, or their toilets, with the gravity of a critic whose experience entitled him to speak with authority. Men used to say that they had been walking with Pendennis, and were as pleased to be seen in his company as some of us would be if we walked with a duke down Pall Mall. He and the proctor capped each other as they met, as if they were rival powers, and the men hardly knew which was the greater.
In fact, in the course of his second year, Arthur Pendennis had become one of the men of fashion in the University. It is curious to watch that facile admiration, and simple fidelity of youth. They hang round a leader: and wonder at him, and love him, and imitate him. No generous boy ever lived, I suppose, that has not had some wonderment of admiration for another boy; and Monsieur Pen at Oxbridge had his school, his faithful band of friends, and his rivals. When the young men heard at the haberdashers' shops that Mr. Pendennis of Boniface had just ordered a crimson satin cravat, you would see a couple of dozen crimson satin cravats in Main-street in the course of the week—and Simon, the jeweler, was known to sell no less than two gross of Pendennis pins, from a pattern which the young gentleman had selected in his shop.
Now if any person with an arithmetical turn of mind will take the trouble to calculate what a sum of money it would cost a young man to indulge freely in all the above propensities which we have said Mr. Pen possessed, it will be seen that a young fellow, with such liberal tastes and amusements, must needs in the course of two or three years spend or owe a very handsome sum of money. We have said our friend Pen had not a calculating turn. No one propensity of his was outrageously extravagant; and it is certain that Paddington's tailor's account; Guttlebury's cook's bill for dinners; Dillon Tandy's bill with Finn, the print-seller, for Raphael-Morghens, and Landseer proofs; and Wormall's dealings with Parkton, the great bookseller, for Aldine editions, black-letter folios, and richly illuminated Missals of the XVI. Century; and Snaffle's or Foker's score with Nile the horse-dealer, were, each and all of them, incomparably greater than any little bills which Mr. Pen might run up with the above-mentioned tradesmen. But Pendennis of Boniface had the advantage over all these young gentleman, his friends and associates, of a universality of taste: and whereas young Lord Paddington did not care twopence for the most beautiful print, or to look into any gilt frame that had not a mirror within it; and Guttlebury did not mind in the least how he was dressed, and had an aversion for horse exercise, nay a terror of it; and Snaffle never read any printed works but the "Racing Calender" or "Bell's Life," or cared for any manuscript except his greasy little scrawl of a betting-book:—our Catholic-minded young friend occupied himself in every one of the branches of science or pleasure above-mentioned, and distinguished himself tolerably in each.
Hence young Pen got a prodigious reputation in the University, and was hailed as a sort of Crichton; and as for the English verse prize, in competition for which we have seen him busily engaged at Fairoaks, Jones of Jesus carried it that year certainly, but the undergraduates thought Pen's a much finer poem, and he had his verses printed at his own expense, and distributed in gilt morocco covers among his acquaintance. I found a copy of it lately in a dusty corner of Mr. Pen's book-cases, and have it before me this minute bound up in a collection of old Oxbridge tracts, University statutes, prize-poems by successful and unsuccessful candidates, declamations recited in the college chapel, speeches delivered at the Union Debating Society, and inscribed by Arthur with his name and college, Pendennis—Boniface; or presented to him by his affectionate friend Thompson or Jackson, the author. How strange the epigraphs look in those half-boyish hands, and what a thrill the sight of the documents gives one after the lapse of a few lusters! How fate, since that time has removed some, estranged others, dealt awfully with all. Many a hand is cold that wrote those kindly memorials, and that we pressed in the confident and generous grasp of youthful friendship. What passions our friendships were in those old days, how artless and void of doubt! How the arm you were never tired of having linked in yours under the fair college avenues or by the river side, where it washes Magdalen Gardens, or Christ Church Meadows, or winds by Trinity and King's, was withdrawn of necessity, when you entered presently the world, and each parted to push and struggle for himself through the great mob on the way through life! Are we the same men now that wrote those inscriptions—that read those poems? that delivered or heard those essays and speeches, so simple, so pompous, so ludicrously solemn; parodied so artlessly from books, and spoken with smug chubby faces, and such an admirable aping of wisdom and gravity? Here is the book before me: it is scarcely fifteen years old. Here is Jack moaning with despair and Byronic misanthropy, whose career at the University was one of unmixed milk-punch. Here is Tom's daring Essay in defense of suicide and of republicanism in general apropos of the death of Roland and the Girondins—Tom's, who wears the starchest tie in all the diocese, and would go to Smithfield rather than eat a beefsteak on a Friday in Lent. Here is Bob of the —— Circuit, who has made a fortune in railroad committees, and whose dinners are so good—bellowing out with Tancred and Godfrey, "On to the breach, ye soldiers of the cross, Scale the red wall and swim the choking foss. Ye dauntless archers, twang your cross-bows well; On, bill and battle-ax and mangonel! Ply battering-ram and hurtling catapult, Jerusalem is ours—id Deus vult." After which comes a mellifluous description of the gardens of Sharon and the maids of Salem, and a prophecy that roses shall deck the entire country of Syria, and a speedy reign of peace be established—all in undeniably decasyllabic lines, and the queerest aping of sense and sentiment and poetry. And there are Essays and Poems along with these grave parodies, and boyish exercises (which are at once frank and false, and so mirthful, yet, somehow, so mournful), by youthful hands, that shall never write more. Fate has interposed darkly, and the young voices are silent, and the eager brains have ceased to work. This one had genius and a great descent, and seemed to be destined for honors which now are of little worth to him: that had virtue, learning, genius—every faculty and endowment which might secure love, admiration and worldly fame: an obscure and solitary churchyard contains the grave of many fond hopes, and the pathetic stone which bids them farewell—I saw the sun shining on it in the fall of last year, and heard the sweet village choir raising anthems round about. What boots whether it be Westminster or a little country spire which covers your ashes, or if, a few days sooner or later, the world forgets you?
Amidst these friends then, and a host more, Pen passed more than two brilliant and happy years of his life. He had his fill of pleasure and popularity. No dinner or supper party was complete without him; and Pen's jovial wit, and Pen's songs, and dashing courage, and frank and manly bearing, charmed all the undergraduates, and even disarmed the tutors who cried out at his idleness, and murmured about his extravagant way of life. Though he became the favorite and leader of young men who were much his superiors in wealth and station, he was much too generous to endeavor to propitiate them by any meanness or cringing on his own part, and would not neglect the humblest man of his acquaintance in order to curry favor with the richest young grandee in the University. His name is still remembered at the Union Debating Club, as one of the brilliant orators of his day. By the way, from having been an ardent Tory in his freshman's year, his principles took a sudden turn afterward, and he became a Liberal of the most violent order. He avowed himself a Dantonist and asserted that Louis the Sixteenth was served right. And as for Charles the First, he vowed that he would chop off that monarch's head with his own right hand were he then in the room at the Union Debating Club, and had Cromwell no other executioner for the traitor. He and Lord Magnus Charters, the Marquis of Runnymede's son, before-mentioned, were the most truculent republicans of their day.
There are reputations of this sort made quite independent of the collegiate hierarchy, in the republic of gownsmen. A man may be famous in the honor-lists and entirely unknown to the undergraduates: who elect kings and chieftains of their own, whom they admire and obey, as negro-gangs have private black sovereigns in their own body, to whom they pay an occult obedience, besides that which they publicly profess for their owners and drivers. Among the young ones Pen became famous and popular: not that he did much, but there was a general determination that he could do a great deal if he chose. "Ah, if Pendennis of Boniface would but try," the men said, "he might do any thing." He was backed for the Greek Ode won by Smith of Trinity; every body was sure he would have the Latin hexameter prize which Brown of St. John's, however, carried off, and in this way, one university honor after another was lost by him, until, after two or three failures, Mr. Pen ceased to compete. But he got a declamation prize in his own college, and brought home to his mother and Laura at Fairoaks, a set of prize-books begilt with the college arms, and so big, well-bound, and magnificent, that these ladies thought there had been no such prize ever given in a college before as this of Pen's, and that he had won the very largest honor which Oxbridge was capable of awarding.
As vacation after vacation and term after term passed away without the desired news that Pen had sate for any scholarship or won any honor, Doctor Portman grew mightily gloomy in his behavior toward Arthur, and adopted a sulky grandeur of deportment toward him, which the lad returned by a similar haughtiness. One vacation he did not call upon the doctor at all, much to his mother's annoyance, who thought that it was a privilege to enter the Rectory-house at Clavering, and listened to Dr. Portman's antique jokes and stories, though ever so often repeated, with unfailing veneration. "I can not stand the doctor's patronizing air," Pen said. "He's too kind to me, a great deal too fatherly. I have seen in the world better men than him, and I am not going to bore myself by listening to his dull old stories and drinking his stupid old port wine." The tacit feud between Pen and the doctor made the widow nervous, so that she too avoided Doctor Portman, and was afraid to go to the Rectory when Arthur was at home.
One Sunday in the last long vacation, the wretched boy pushed his rebellious spirit so far as not to go to church, and he was seen at the gate of the Clavering Arms, smoking a cigar, in the face of the congregation as it issued from St. Mary's. There was an awful sensation in the village-society, Portman prophesied Pen's ruin after that, and groaned in spirit over the rebellious young prodigal.