Cambridge the next day, and as the rabbi was at the house of one of his
scholars in the country, and was not to return to Cambridge till the
ensuing week, Jacob left with me a letter for him, and the very parcel
which I had seen directed to Mr. Israel Lyons: these I engaged to deliver
with my own hands. Jacob departed satisfied--happy in the hope that he had
done me a service; and so in fact it proved. Every father, and every son,
who has been at the university, knows how much depends upon the college
companions with whom a young man first associates. There are usually two
sets: if he should join the dissipated set, it is all over with him, he
learns nothing; but if he should get into the set with whom science and
literature are in fashion, he acquires knowledge, and a taste for
knowledge; with all the ardour inspired by sympathy and emulation, with all
the facility afforded by public libraries and public lectures--the
collected and combined information of the living and the dead--he pursues
his studies. He then fully enjoys the peculiar benefits of a university
education, the union of many minds intent upon the same object, working,
with all the advantages of the scientific division of labour, in a literary
manufactory.

When I went to deliver my packet to Mr. Lyons, I was surprised by seeing in
him a man as different as possible from my preconceived notion of a Jewish
rabbi; I never should have guessed him to be either a rabbi, or a Jew. I
expected to have seen a man nearly as old as Methuselah, with a reverend
beard, dirty and shabby, and with a blue pocket handkerchief. Instead of
which I saw a gay looking man, of middle age, with quick sparkling black
eyes, and altogether a person of modern appearance, both in dress and
address. I thought I must have made a mistake, and presented my packet with
some hesitation, reading aloud the direction to Mr. Israel Lyons--"I am the
man, sir," said he; "our honest friend Jacob has described you so well, Mr.
Harrington--_Mr. William Harrington Harrington_ (you perceive that I am