however, they will declare, the case is different. Young men have
become selfish and arrogant. Their respect for age has vanished,
their behaviour to ladies is familiar and flippant, their style of
conversation is slangy and disreputable, they are wanting in all
proper reverence, they are pampered, luxurious, affected, foolish, and
disingenuous; unworthy, in short, to be mentioned in the same breath
with those who have preceded them, and have left to their degenerate
successors a brilliant but unavailing example of youthful conduct.
These diatribes may or may not be founded to some extent in truth.
At the best, however, their truth is only a half-truth. So long as
the world endures, it is probable that young men will have a large
allowance of follies, of affectations, of extravagances, and the young
men of to-day are certainly not without them. But, in the main, though
the task of comparison is difficult, they do not appear to be at all
inferior in manliness, in modesty of bearing, and in reverence to the
generations that have gone before. Here and there in London the antics
of some youth plunged into a torrent of folly before he had had time
even to think of being wise, excite the comments of the world. But
London is not the school to which one would look for youth at its
best. To find that in any considerable quantity one must travel either
to Cambridge or to Oxford, and inspect the average undergraduates, who
form the vast majority at both these Universities.

Now the Average Undergraduate, as he exists, and has for ages existed,
is not, perhaps, a very wise young man. Nor does he possess those
brilliant qualities which bring the Precocious Undergraduate to
premature ruin. He has his follies, but they are not very foolish; he
has his affectations, but they are innocent; he has his extravagances,
but they pass away, and leave him not very much the worse for the
experience. On the whole, however, he is a fine specimen of the young