"The masters of olden time at Athens, and afterwards at Oxford, were
called _Sophi_, and the scholars _Sophistæ_; but the _masters_ taking
it in scorn that the _scholars_ should have a larger name than they,
called themselves _Philosophi_,--that is, lovers of science, and so
got the advantage of the scholars by _one syllable_." Every body has
heard of Foote's celebrated motto for a tailor friend of his, about to
sport his coat of arms,---"_List, list, O list!_" But every body has
not heard, probably, though it is noticed in his memoir, extant in
Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, that the learned Cambridge divine and
antiquary, Dr. _Cocks Macro_, having applied to a Cambridge
acquaintance for an appropriate motto to his coat of arms, was pithily
answered with
"COCKS MAY CROW."
Every Cantab remembers and regrets the early death of the accomplished
scholar, Charles Skinner Matthews, M.A., late Fellow of Downing
College, who was "the familiar" of the present Sir J. C. Hobhouse, and
of the late Lord Byron. He was not more accomplished than facetious,
nor, according to one of Lord Byron's letters, more facetious than
"beloved." Speaking of his university _freaks_, his lordship says,
"when Sir Henry Smith was expelled from Cambridge, for a row with a
tradesman named "_Hiron_," Matthews solaced himself with shouting
under Hiron's window every evening--
"Ah me! what perils do environ
The man who meddles with _hot Hiron_!"