"At least I have proved that nothing is worse Than Trigonometrical Problems in verse:"
there are also similarly to be recorded my mathematical _séances_ with that worthy and clever Professor, A.P. Saunders, afterwards headmaster of Charterhouse; and my Hebrew lectures with the mild-spoken Dr. Pusey, afterwards so notorious; and I know not whatever else is memorable, unless one condescended to what goes without saying about Hall and Chapel, and Examinations: however, some frivolous larks in the Waterford days, wherewith I need not say the present scribe had nothing to do, may amuse. Here are three I remember; 1. An edict had gone out from the authorities against hunting in pink,--and next morning the Dean's and the Canons' doors in quad were found to have been miraculously painted red in the night. 2. There was a grand party of Dons at the Deanery, and as they hung their togas in the hall (for they couldn't conveniently dine in them) there was filched from each proctorial sleeve that marvellous little triangular survival of a stole which nobody can explain, and all these collectively were nailed on the Dean's outer door in a star. 3. A certain garden of small yews and box trees was found one morning to have been transplanted bodily into Peckwater Quadrangle, as a matter of mystery and defiance. And there were other like exploits; as the immersion of that leaden Mercury into its own pond; and town and gown rows, wherein I remember to have seen the herculean Lord Hillsborough on one side of High Street, and Peard (afterwards Garibaldi's Englishman) on the other, clear away the crowd of roughs with their fists, scattering them like duplicates of the hero of Corioli.
Of course I duly took my degrees of B.A. and M.A.,--and long after of D.C.L., when the Cathedral chimes rang for me, as they always do for a grand compounding Doctor.
A mentionable _curio_ of authorship on that occasion is this: whatever may be the rule now, in those days the degree of D.C.L. involved a three-hours' imprisonment in the pulpit of the Bodleian Chapel, for the candidate to answer therefrom in Latin any theological objectors who might show themselves for that purpose; as, however, the chapel was always locked by Dr. Bliss, the registrar, there was never a possibility to make objection. So my three hours of enforced idleness obliged me to use pencil and paper, which I happened to have in my pocket,--and I then and there produced my poem on "The Dead"--to be found at p. 26 of my Miscellaneous Poems, still extant at Gall & Inglis's--a long one of eighteen stanzas, much liked by Gladstone amongst others. I didn't intend it certainly, but, as the poem ends with the word "bliss," it was ridiculously thought that I had specially alluded to the registrar!