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OCR Rendition - approximate
CHAPTER V LEHRJAHRE AND WANDERJAHRE PART II. MATHEMATICAL STUDIES AND CAMBRIDGE PLEASURES IN October, 1840, "we find Francis Galton established in Trinity College, Cambridge. It was, he says, a notable day in his life when, escorted by his father, Tertius, he arrived on the top of a stage coach in the town of Cambridge. No man was ever a more loyal son of Alma Mater than Galton, and nothing gave him greater joy in later life than the honours conferred on him by his College and University. That the portrait of him-a mere pollman-should hang with those of great heroes in the dining-hall, that he could once again order audit ale and dine by right at the Fellows' table were matters which gave him inexpressible delight. Those who have never left the University have little knowledge of how very tender, and largely unreasoning is the affection of the old Cambridge man to his University. The existing life of the place he feels has nothing to do with him, it is transient, interloping. The permanent and substantial is the old environment, peopled with many familiar forms, with the wonted figures crossing the court, the friendly shout from the windows, the tones of voices long silent or now grown unsympathetic, the midnight fireside, the enthusiasms of youth (our youth, of course!), and the seniors with their failings, which have grown to be essential virtues, landmarks of that time, with their indulgent tolerations, and their moulding affectionate sarcasm of our certainties. We own the place, we people it ; the present population are but lessees of our ancestral halls, intrusive, alien, anomalous. The magic fascination of it all is merely thwarted by the reality ; for us " the ideal shall be the real." And when two Cambridge exiles talk together of the place-they unconsciously mingle in one same environment, two races of men separated, perhaps, by a generation. W e know them all : Harry Hallam', " with his singular sweetness and 1 Brother of Tennyson's Arthur Hallam.
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