perhaps most of all, exhibited an incongruous mixture of men and things.  Besides the academic exercises within the sanctuary of learning and religion, followed by the festivities in the College dining-hall, and under temporary tents and awnings erected for the entertainments given to the numerous guests of wealthy parents of young men who had come out successful competitors for prizes in the academic race, the large common was decked with tents filled with various refreshments for the hungry and thirsty multitudes, and the intermediate spaces crowded with men, women, and boys, white and black, many of them gambling, drinking, swearing, dancing, and fighting from morning to midnight.  Here and there the scene was varied by some show of curiosities, or of monkeys or less common wild animals, and the gambols of mountebanks, who by their ridiculous tricks drew a greater crowd than the abandoned group at the gaming-tables, or than the fooleries, distortions, and mad pranks of the inebriates.  If my revered uncle[07] took a glimpse at these scenes, he did not see there any of our red brethren, as Mr. Jefferson kindly called them, who formed a considerable part of the gathering at the time of his graduation, forty-two years before; but he must have seen exhibitions of depravity which would disgust the most untutored savage.  Near the close of the last century these outrages began to disappear, and lessened from year to year, until by public opinion, enforced by an efficient police, they were many years ago wholly suppressed, and the vicinity of the College halls has become, as it should be, a classic ground.”—­Memories of Youth and Manhood, Vol.  I. pp. 251, 252.

It is to such scenes as these that Mr. William Biglow refers, in his poem recited before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, in their dining-hall, August 29th, 1811.

 “All hail, Commencement! when all classes free
  Throng learning’s fount, from interest, taste, or glee;
  When sutlers plain in tents, like Jacob, dwell,
  Their goods distribute, and their purses swell;
  When tipplers cease on wretchedness to think,
  Those born to sell, as well as these to drink;
  When every day each merry Andrew clears
  More cash than useful men in many years;
  When men to business come, or come to rake,
  And modest women spurn at Pope’s mistake.[08]

 “All hail, Commencement! when all colors join,
  To gamble, riot, quarrel, and purloin;
  When Afric’s sooty sons, a race forlorn,
  Play, swear, and fight, like Christians freely born;
  And Indians bless our civilizing merit,
  And get dead drunk with truly Christian spirit;
  When heroes, skilled in pocket-picking sleights,
  Of equal property and equal rights,
  Of rights of man and woman, boldest friends,
  Believing means are sanctioned by their ends,
  Sequester part of Gripus’ boundless store,
  While Gripus thanks god Plutus he has more;
  And needy poet, from this ill secure,
  Feeling his fob, cries, ‘Blessed are the poor.’”