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Bailey's account of his voyage to England is the best contemporary testimony to the truth of Smollett's pictures of sea-life that we ever met with, and we cannot sufficiently regret that the whole of his journal during his college-life was not published. Mr. Olmsted would be sure of a grateful recognition from posterity, if he would do for New England what he has done for the South.
His course was not completed; but, as he was tired of college-life, he declared he would not return there, and he never did return. When his father asked him timidly what he proposed doing, he shrugged his shoulders as his sole reply. What did he do? Nothing. He idled about Paris.
Not long after this, Thyrsis was selected to represent his college on a debating-team, and he went away to another city and was invited to a fraternity-house; and here, suddenly, he discovered how much of "college-life" he had been missing. This was a fashionable university, and he met the sons of wealthy parents.
He had gone through his school-life and was now passing through his college-life as a man travels through a country that has for him no interest and no worth but that may lead, once it has been traversed, to something of importance and adventure. He was now at the beginning of his second year at Cambridge and was regarded by every one with distrust, admiration, excitement.
And now, probably at school, or in the first months of his college-life, a new phase of experience begins. He has wandered over the border of what is commonly called science, and the marvel of facts multitudinous, strung upon the golden threads of law, has laid hold upon him. His intellect is seized and possessed by a new spirit.
We know that the professors in those days were pedagogues in the Anglo-American sense, and that university-life stood little if at all higher than our own present college-life. But when Goethe died, in 1832, the universities of Germany had reached their prime. Since then they have made no gain.
Reeve and the celebrated Samuel Lathrop Mitchell were his classmates, and agree that he had no equal in college. They were educated at Princeton. Burr showed not only talent, but application, and a most burning ambition. He showed, too, that he was already unscrupulous in the use of means to accomplish his object. There are stories told of his college-life very discreditable to his fame.
But talk of them was only preliminary to more interesting talk of themselves, modestly deferred, but well lingered over once it was begun. Harry Musgrave could not tell Bessie too much he could not explain with too exact a precision the system of college-life, its delights and drawbacks.
I know now what I never dreamed then, that her life was one of serious anxiety. The heavy burden of my brother's school and college-life pressed on her constantly, and her need of money was often serious. A lawyer whom she trusted absolutely cheated her systematically, using for his own purposes the remittances she made for payment of liabilities, thus keeping upon her a constant drain.
Even in college-life, there is a difference in the privileges of the mere freshman, and of the youth who has already completed the first half of his period in the university. The season of what may be denominated the independence of the individual, is certainly in no small degree critical.
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