Well, I don\'t know what you fellows think, but as far as I\'m concerned,\' Trevor Gillingham remarked, with an expansive wave of his delicate white hand, \'my verdict on the Last of the Plantagenets is simply this: the Prince of the Blood has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.\'

It was a fortnight later, in Faussett\'s rooms in the Chapel Quad at Durham (Chapel Quad is the most fashionably expensive quarter), and a party of raw lads, who took themselves for men, all gathered round their dessert, were engaged in discussing their fellow-undergraduate. The table groaned with dried fruits and mandarin oranges. Faussett himself raised to his lips a glass of Oxford wine-merchant\'s sherry—\'our famous Amontillado as imported, thirty-six shillings the dozen\'—and observed in a tone of the severest criticism: \'Oh, the man\'s a smug; a most unmitigated smug: that\'s the long and the short of it.\'

Now, to be a smug is, in Oxford undergraduate circles, the unpardonable sin. It means, to stop in your own rooms and moil and toil, or to lurk and do nothing, while other men in shoals are out and enjoying themselves. It means to avoid the river and the boats; to shun the bump-supper; to decline the wine-party. Sometimes, it is true, the smug is a curmudgeon; but sometimes he is merely a poor and hard-working fellow, the sort of person whom at forty we call a man of ability.

\'Well, I won\'t go quite so far as that,\' one of the other lads observed, smacking his lips with an ostentatious air of judicial candour, about equally divided between Dick and the claret. \'I won\'t quite condemn him as a smug, unheard. But it\'s certainly odd he shouldn\'t join the wine-club.\'

He was a second-year man, the speaker, one Westall by name, who had rowed in the Torpids; and as the rest were mostly freshmen of that term, his opinion naturally carried weight with all except Gillingham. He, indeed, as a Born Poet, was of course allowed a little more license in such matters than his even Christians.

\'Up till now,\' Faussett put in, with a candid air of historical inquiry, \'you see every Durham man has always as a matter of course subscribed to the wine-club. Senior men tell me they never knew an exception.\'

Gillingham looked up from his easy-chair with a superior smile. \'I don\'t object to his not joining it,\' he said, with a curl of the cultured lip, for the Born Poet of course represented culture in this scratch collection of ardent young Philistines; \'but why, in the name of goodness, didn\'t he say outright like a man he couldn\'t afford it? It\'s the base hypocrisy of his putting his refusal upon moral grounds, and calling himself a total abstainer, that sets my back up. If a man\'s poor in this world\'s goods, and can\'t afford to drink a decent wine, in heaven\'s name let him say so; but don\'t let him go snuffling about, pretending he doesn\'t care for it, or he doesn\'t want it, or he doesn\'t like it, or he wouldn\'t take it if he could get it. I call that foolish and degrading, as well as unmanly. Even Shakespeare himself used to frequent the Mermaid tavern. Why, where would all our poetry be, I should like to know, if it weren\'t for Bacchus? Bacchus, ever fair and ever young? “War, he sang, is toil and trouble; Honour but an empty bubble; Never ending, still beginning; Fighting still, and still destroying; If the world be worth thy winning, Think, oh, think it worth enjoying.”\'

And Gillingham closed his eyes ecstatically as he spoke, and took another sip at the thirty-six Amontillado, in a rapture of divine poesy.

\'Hear, hear!\' Faussett cried, clapping his hands with delight. \'The Born Poet for a song! The Born Poet for a recitation! You men should just hear him spout “Alexander\'s Feast.” It\'s a thing to remember! He\'s famous as a spouter, don\'t you know, at Rugby. Why, he\'s got half the British poets or more by heart, and a quarter of the prose authors. He can speak whole pages. But “Alexander\'s Feast” is the thing he does the very best of all. Whenever he recites it he brings the house down.\'

\'Respect for an ancient and picturesque seat of learning prevents me from bringing down the roof of Durham College, then,\' Gillingham answered lightly, with a slight sneer for his friend\'s boyish enthusiasm. \'Besides, my dear boy, you wander from the subject. When the French farmer asked his barn-door fowls to decide with what sauce they would wish to be eaten, they held a meeting of their own in the barton-yard, and sent their spokesman to say, “If you please, M. le Propriétaire, we very much prefer not to be eaten.”

“Mes amis,” said the farmer, “vous vous écartez de la question.” And that\'s your case, Faussett. The business before the house is the moral turpitude and mental obliquity of the man Plantagenet, who refuses—as he says, on conscientious grounds—to join the college wine-club. Now, I take that as an insult to a society of gentlemen.\'

\'What a lark it would be,\' Faussett cried, \'if we were to get him up here just now, offer him some wine, to which he pretends he has a conscientious objection—unless somebody else pays for it—make him drink success to the cause of total abstinence, keep filling up his glass till we make him dead drunk, and then set him at the window in a paper cap to sing “John Barleycorn.”\'

Gillingham\'s thin lip curled visibly. \'Your humour, my dear boy,\' he said, patting Faussett on the back, \'is English—English—essentially English. It reminds me of Gilray. It lacks point and fineness. Your fun is like your neckties—loud, too loud! You must cultivate your mind (if any) by a diligent study of the best French models. I would recommend, for my part, as an efficient antidote, a chapter of De Maupassant and an ode of Fran?ois Coppée\'s every night and morning.\'

\'But if Plantagenet\'s poor,\' one more tolerant lad put in apologetically, \'it\'s natural enough, after all, he shouldn\'t want to join the club. It\'s precious expensive, you know, Gillingham. It runs into money.\'

The Born Poet was all sweet reasonableness.

\'To be poor, my dear Matthews,\' he said, with a charming smile, turning round to the objector, \'as Beau Brummell remarked about a rent in one\'s coat, is an accident that may happen to any gentleman any day; but a patch, you must recognise, is premeditated poverty. The man Plan-tagenet may be as poor as he chooses, so far as I\'m concerned; I approve of his being poor. What so picturesque, so affecting, so poetical, indeed, as honest poverty? But to pretend he doesn\'t care for wine—that\'s quite another matter. There the atrocity comes in—the vulgarian atrocity. For I call such a statement nothing short of vulgar.\' He raised his glass once more, and eyed the light of the lamp through the amethystine claret with poetic appreciation. \'Now give the hautboys breath,\' he cried, breaking out once more in a fit of ............