“By this time you are settled at Pembroke, know your way to your rooms, the faces of your fellow collegians, and enough I dare say of a college life to find its duties less formidable, and its habits less agreeable than they are supposed to be. Those habits are said to have undergone a great reformation since I was acquainted with them;—in my time they stood grievously in need of it; but even then a man who had any good moral principles might live as he pleased if he dared make the trial; and however much he might be stared at at first for his singularity, was sure ere long to be respected for it.
“Some dangers beset every man when he enters upon so
new a scene of life; that which I apprehend for you is low spirits . . . . .
Walk a stated distance every day; and that you may never want a motive for
walking, make yourself acquainted with the elements of botany during the
winter, that as soon as the flowers come out in the spring you may begin to
herbalize. A quarter of an hour every day will make you master of the elements
in the course of a very few months. I prescribe for you mentally also, and this
is one of the pre-
| 318 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 38. |
“One word more and I have done with advice. Do not be solicitous about taking a high degree, or about college honours of any kind. Many a man has killed himself at Cambridge by overworking for mathematical honours; recollect how few the persons are who after they have spent their years in severe study at this branch of science, ever make any use of it afterwards. Your wiser plan should be to look on to that state of life in which you wish and expect to be placed, and to lay in such knowledge as will then turn to account. . . . .
