Whose mind, at twenty, was a chaos, and must from his birth have been,
not as Locke would have supposed, a sheet of white paper, ready to
receive impressions, but one smeared and useless. Yet Solomon in all
his glory was not half so wise as was this scion in his mother's
opinion. She, therefore, brought him to Cambridge, and having
introduced him to the amiable tutor of St. John's College, smirkingly
asked him, "If he thought her _darling_ would be _senior wrangler_?"
"I don't know, madam," was his reply, in his short quick manner of
speaking, pulling up a certain portion of his dress, in the wearing of
which he resembled Sir Charles Wetherell, "I don't know, madam; that
remains to be seen." Poor fellow, he never could get a degree, nor
(after having been removed from Cambridge to the _Politechnique
School_ at Paris, for a year or two) could he ever get over the _Pons
Asinorum_ (as we Cantabs term the fifth proposition of the first book
of Euclid.) Another