“Next comes the bore, with visage sad and pale,
  And tortures you with some lugubrious tale;
  Relates stale jokes collected near and far,
  And in return expects a choice cigar;
  Your brandy-punch he calls the merest sham,
  Yet does not scruple to partake a dram. 
  His prying eyes your secret nooks explore;
  No place is sacred to the college bore. 
  Not e’en the letter filled with Helen’s praise,
  Escapes the sight of his unhallowed gaze;
  Ere one short hour its silent course has flown,
  Your Helen’s charms to half the class are known. 
  Your books he takes, nor deigns your leave to ask,
  Such forms to him appear a useless task. 
  When themes unfinished stare you in the face,
  Then enters one of this accursed race. 
  Though like the Angel bidding John to write,
  Frail ------ form uprises to thy sight,
  His stupid stories chase your thoughts away,
  And drive you mad with his unwelcome stay. 
  When he, departing, creaks the closing door,
  You raise the Grecian chorus, [Greek:  kikkabau]."[02]
    MS. Poem, F.E.  Felton, Harv.  Coll.

BOS.  At the University of Virginia, the desserts which the students, according to the statutes of college, are allowed twice per week, are respectively called the Senior and Junior Bos.

BOSH.  Nonsense, trash, [Greek:  phluaria].  An English Cantab’s expression.—­Bristed.

But Spriggins’s peculiar forte is that kind of talk which some people irreverently call “bosh.”—­Yale Lit.  Mag., Vol.  XX. p. 259.

BOSKY.  In the cant of the Oxonians, being tipsy.—­Grose.

Now when he comes home fuddled, alias Bosky, I shall not be so unmannerly as to say his Lordship ever gets drunk.—­The Sizar, cited in Gradus ad Cantab., pp. 20, 21.

BOWEL.  At Harvard College, a student in common parlance will express his destitution or poverty by saying, “I have not a bowel.”  The use of the word with this signification has arisen, probably, from a jocular reference to a quaint Scriptural expression.

BRACKET.  At the University of Cambridge, Eng., the result of the final examination in the Senate-House is published in lists signed by the examiners.  In these lists the names of those who have been examined are “placed in individual order of merit.”  When the rank of two or three men is the same, their names are inclosed in brackets.

At the close of the course, and before the examination is concluded, there is made out a new arrangement of the classes called the Brackets.  These, in which each is placed according to merit, are hung upon the pillars in the Senate-House.—­Alma Mater, Vol.  II. p. 93.

As there is no provision in the printed lists for expressing the number of marks by which each man beats the one next below him, and there may be more difference between the twelfth and thirteenth than between the third and twelfth, it has been proposed to extend the use of the brackets (which are now only employed in cases of literal equality between two or three men), and put together six, eight, or ten, whose marks are nearly equal. —­Bristed’s Five Years in an Eng.  Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 227.