have allured me, had I come fresh from school, had no charm for me now.
Hard drinking and high play, a certain mixture of coarseness and
extravagance, made the fashion among the idle when I was at the
University, console Planco,--when Wordsworth was master of Trinity; it
may be altered now.

But I had already outlived such temptations, and so, naturally, I was
thrown out of the society of the idle, and somewhat into that of the
laborious.

Still, to speak frankly, I had no longer the old pleasure in books. If
my acquaintance with the great world had destroyed the temptation to
puerile excesses, it had also increased my constitutional tendency to
practical action. And, alas! in spite of all the benefit I had derived
from Robert Hall, there were times when memory was so poignant that I
had no choice but to rush from the lonely room haunted by tempting
phantoms too dangerously fair, and sober Town the fever of the heart by
some violent bodily fatigue. The ardor which belongs to early youth,
and which it best dedicates to knowledge, had been charmed prematurely
to shrines less severely sacred. Therefore, though I labored, it was
with that full sense of labor which (as I found at a much later period
of life) the truly triumphant student never knows. Learning--that
marble image--warms into life, not at the toil of the chisel, but the
worship of the sculptor. The mechanical workman finds but the voiceless
stone.

At my uncle's, such a thing as a newspaper rarely made its appearance.
At Cambridge, even among reading men, the newspapers had their due
importance. Politics ran high; and I had not been three days at
Cambridge before I heard Trevanion's name. Newspapers, therefore, had