Five Years at an English University. By Charles Astor Bristed [pp. 294-311]

1852.] Five Years in an English University. 295
Bristed that had fallen in our way, we had no doubt that his
volumes would be on the whole quite readable-certainly amusing, if not very instructive. Nor have we been in this respect
disappointed. He has an ample copia fandi, he is not wanting in satirical power, his style is fluent and lively, he tells a
story very well, and now and then he has a telling stroke of
humour. But we regret to say that we have not found in the
work those other and higher qualities for which we had looked.
The author indeed apologizes to Cambridge men into whose
hands the book may come, for the minuteness of his details,
and commends to their attention an apologue, in which an
Arab traveller in England is represented as writing home
to his friends, "the frivolity of these English is intense.
Yesterday I saw a large concourse of people staring at an
ordinary camel, which one of our boys would not have turned
his head to look at." We cannot however help thinking that
the apology is needless, and that the work, for American readers at least, would have gained greatly both in interest and
value, if the author had kept the story of the Arab traveller
more constantly in mind.
Mr. Bristed says that his original intention was merely to
present a series of sketches of Cambridge life. "Two different
Magazines," he adds, "at different times began to publish
them, but were very soon afraid to go on, because I did not
pretend to conceal our inferiority to the English in certain
branches of liberal education." He then resolved to abstain
from writing as well as publishing, until as many years had
been spent at home as he spent in England. Whether this
resolution arose from a sudden remembrance of the well known
Horatian advice, "nonumque prematur in annum," or from a
sudden conviction that it would be proper to wait and make
himself better acquainted with the state of education in this
country, than he could be supposed to be after so long an
absence, he does not tell us. All we know is the fact that he
determined to wait-and that his opinions on the subjects of
which he treats have undergone no change; at the same time
we strongly suspect that his knowledge of these topics has
received no material addition; so that for all his readers have