other evening and sat with me, and I breakfast with them, and dine,
&c. The only inconvenience attaching itself to such a number of men
is, that I have to give several parties, and as I meant to get them
over before Lent, I have been coining out rather strong in that line
lately, as the pastry-cook's bill for desserts will show in good
time.

'I have been asked to play cricket in the University eleven, and have
declined, though not without a little struggle, but cricket here,
especially to play in such matches as against Cambridge, &c., entails
almost necessarily idleness and expense.'

The struggle was hardly a little one to a youth whose fame in the
cricket field stood so high, and who was never happy or healthy
without strong bodily exercise. Nor had he outgrown his taste for
this particular sport. Professor Edwin Palmer (alluded to above)
describes him as at this time 'a thorough public schoolboy, with a
full capacity for enjoying undergraduate society and undergraduate
amusements, though with so fond a recollection of Eton that to some
of us he hardly seemed to appreciate Oxford sufficiently.'

Again, Mr. Roundell (his late adversary at Lord's) says: 'He was a
reluctant and half-interested sojourner was ever looking back to the
playing-fields of Eton, or forward to the more congenial sphere of a
country parish.' So it was his prime pleasure and glory that he thus
denied himself, though not with total abstinence, for he played
occasionally. I remember hearing of a match at Ottery, where he was
one of an eleven of Coleridge kith and kin against the rest of Devon.
His reputation in the field was such that, many years later, when he
chanced to be at Melbourne at the same time with the champion English