devoutly to St. Peter's, where we shall find him again, later in the
day, in another mood. About eight o'clock he "commonises" with a
Paris man, Henricus de Bourges, who has an admirable mode of cooking
omelettes, which makes his company much sought after at breakfast-
time. The University, in old times, was full of French students, as
Paris was thronged by Englishmen. Lectures begin at nine, and first
there is lecture in the hall by the principal of Catte's. That
scholar receives his pupils in a bare room, where it is very doubtful
whether the students are allowed to sit down. From the curious old
seal of the University of St. Andrews, however, it appears that the
luxury of forms was permitted, in Scotland, to all but the servitors,
who held the lecturer's candles. The principal of Catte's is in
academic dress, and wears a black cape, boots, and a hood. The
undergraduates have no distinguishing costume. After an hour or two
of viva voce exercises in the grammar of Priscian, preparatory
lecture is over, and a reading man will hurry off to the "schools," a
set of low-roofed buildings between St. Mary's and Brasenose. There
he will find the Divinity "school" or lecture-room in the place of
honour, with Medicine on one hand and Law on the other; the lecture-
rooms for grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geometry, and
astronomy, for metaphysics, ethics, and "the tongues," stretching
down School Street on either side. Here the Praelectors are holding
forth, and all newly made Masters of Arts are bound to teach their
subject regere scholas, whether they like it or not. Our friend,
Master Stoke, however, is on pleasure bent, and means to pay his fine
of two-pence for omitting lecture, and go off to the festival of his
nation (he is of the Southern nation, and hates Scotch, Welsh, and
Irish) in the parish Church. He stops in the Flower Market and at a
barber's shop on his way to St. Peter's, and comes forth a wonderful
pagan figure with a Bacchic mask covering his honest countenance,