Page:The life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton (IA b21778401).pdf/79

Rh master him with foil and broadsword. He was one of the few who would take the trouble to learn. Mostly Englishmen go to a fencing school, and, after six weeks' lessons, clamour to be allowed to fence loose, and very loose fencing it is, and is fated always to be. In the same way, almost before they can fix their colours they want to paint tableaux de genre, and they have hardly learnt their scales, when they want to attempt bravura pieces. On the Continent men work for months, and even years, before they think themselves in sight of their journey's end. A. B. Richards and I often met in after life and became intimates. His erratic career is well known, and he died at a comparatively early age, editor of the Morning Advertiser. He had raised the tone of the Licensed Victuallers' organ to such a high pitch that even Lord Beaconsfield congratulated him upon it.

A. B. Richards was furious to see the treatment my services received; he always stood up bravely for me—his fellow-collegian, both with word and pen—in leaders too.

The time for "Hall," that is to say for college dinner, was five p.m., and the scene was calculated to astonish a youngster brought up on the Continent. The only respectable part of it was the place itself, not a bad imitation of some old convent refectory. The details were mean in the extreme, and made me long for the meanest table d'hôte. Along the bottom of the Hall, raised upon a dwarf dais, ran the high table, intended for the use of fellows and fellow-commoners. The other tables ran along the sides. Wine was forbidden, malt liquor being the only drink. The food certainly suited the heavy strong beers and ales brewed in the college. It consisted chiefly of hunches of meat, cooked after Homeric or Central African fashion, and very filling at the price. The vegetables, as usual, were plain boiled, without the slightest aid to digestion. Yet the college cooks were great swells. They were paid as much as an average clergyman, and put most of their sons into the Church. In fact, the stomach had to do the whole work, whereas a good French or Italian cook does half the work for it in his saucepans. This cannibal meal was succeeded by stodgy pudding, and concluded with some form of cheese, Cheshire or double Gloucester, which painfully reminded one of bees'-wax, and this was called dinner. Very soon my foreign stomach began to revolt at such treatment, and I found out a place in the town, where, when I could escape Hall, I could make something of a dinner.

The moral of the scene offended all my prepossessions. The fellow-