But should the Undergraduate read, Then pardon, sirs, if I am bold To offer, when the blood is cold, To you, who taste both books and men. URBANUS SYLVAN. CONFERENCES BOOKS ON AND MEN. I. A STANDARD OF GENTILITY-A COLLEGE GAUDY -THE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL SCIENCE UPON MANNERS-CAXTON'S 'BOOK OF COURTESY.' JOURNEYING inside an omnibus, the roof being full of women, on a recent visit to town, I could not but overhear my vis-à-vis, who was one of nature's ladies, expatiating in a loud whisper upon the merits of some person of my own sex. The crowning encomium was this:-'My dear, he was a perfect gentleman; his hands were as white as milk.' This with an (I hope) involuntary glance at my hands, hot and dusty with turning over books in old book shops, and conscious of their lack of gloves. A phantom procession of milk-white gentlemen began flitting through my brain-Jonson's Court Butterfly, Pope's Sporus, Aucassin-then a too popular advertisement B flashed into memory with the amendment, 'Pink Pills for Perfect Gentlemen,' and I must have smiled; for nature's lady, perhaps thinking herself caught in an indiscretion, flushed as pink as my hands. How interesting all these standards of gentility are! I remember a friend telling me that once on her way home from her dressmaker's, when two girls had overtaken and passed her in the street, she heard one say to the other, 'I took her for a lydy from her back, but she's got a cotting on her dress.' Plainly, then, in the view of this class of the community, to be gentle is to be like the lilies of the field, whose complexion is white, and who neither toil nor spin; a very natural and pathetic ideal for them. On the day of this experience a letter reached me from my old College at Oxford, bidding me to a feast. Such invitations I have in former years declined, I can hardly say why; certainly not from any lack of patriotism or respect for the Dons of my house, or the University. I should never dream of referring to these as Tennyson does, in that section of 'In Memoriam' which describes a visit to Cambridge: And all about The same gray flats again. But somehow, when I have by chance met them, I have found myself at a stand for topics. 'What are you engaged upon now?' seems a dull and conventional query, and even if they took me into |