There were they bathing and dressing: it was but a step from the cottage,
Only the road and larches and ruinous millstead between.
Hewson and Hobbes followed quick upon Adam; on them followed Arthur.
"Airlie descended the last, splendescent as god of Olympus.
When for ten minutes already the fourwheel had stood at the gateway;
He, like a god, came leaving his ample Olympian chamber."--pp. 5, 6.
A peculiar point of style in this poem, and one which gives a certain
classic character to some of its more familiar aspects, is the
frequent recurrence of the same line, and the repeated definition of
a personage by the same attributes. Thus, Lindsay is "the Piper, the
Dialectician," Arthur Audley "the glory of headers," and the tutor
"the grave man nicknamed Adam," from beginning to end; and so also of
the others.
Omitting the after-dinner speeches, with their "Long constructions
strange and plusquam-Thucydidean," that only of "Sir Hector, the
Chief and the Chairman;" in honor of the Oxonians, than which nothing
could be more unpoetically truthful, is preserved, with the
acknowledgment, ending in a sarcasm at the game laws, by Hewson, who,
as he is leaving the room, is accosted by "a thin man, clad as the
Saxon:"
"'Young man, if ye pass thro' the Braes o'Lochaber,
See by the Loch-side ye come to the Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich.
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