Sketches from Cambridge by a Don

Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette and published anonymously in 1865, Leslie Stephen's Sketches From Cambridge provides an affectionately sarcastic glimpse of student life at Cambridge University and its colleges. The wickedly funny prose explores the manners and customs of a variety of student stereotypes of the day. Profiled in these caricatures are athletes – with one chapter filled with typically light-hearted venom devoted specifically to rowers; and mathematicians, philosophers, and those poor wandering souls that pursue the social sciences. The collection is intended to provide a complete natural history of that curious specimen the Cambridge student, and it is brilliantly written by Stephen, a former member of the species. While the Cambridge student's fondness for whist, whiskey and billiards is examined, the distinction between him and the even lower, sub-human student form that belongs at Oxford and other institutions is definitively drawn.