Memorials of the Hon. Ion Keith-Falconer Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Student Life At Cambridge. " Whose powers shed round him in the common strife, Or mild concerns of ordinary life, A constant influence, a peculiar grace." Wordsworth. In the October term of 1874, Ion Keith-Falconer began his residence as a Cambridge undergraduate, having been entered on the books of Trinity College on the 24th of September preceding. To this great College, with which so many illustrious names of the past are associated, he was warmly attached, and his letters in later years contain frequent remarks shewing cordial love both to College and University. He did not occupy rooms within the College walls at any period of his undergraduate life, save in the Long Vacations, when, by the rule of the College, such residence is obligatory. With this exception, he occupied the same set of rooms during his whole Cambridge life until his marriage in 1884. These were on the north side of the Market Square (21 MarketHill), facing the Guild-Hall. Here he worked resolutely at his books, utterly unaffected by certain distracting sounds, which might have disturbed a less diligent or less equable student. On market days, a noisy hum from the busy square pervaded his room; all day long and all night the clock of the University Church of St Mary chimed the quarter-hours, and at nine each evening the great curfew bell rang, as it had done for centuries, and this was followed by the tolling of the number of the day of the month. To all these disturbances, Keith-Falconer was supremely indifferent: he liked in the intervals of work to look out on the busy scene of life below. The late Bishop Hampden was said to have written his Bampton Lectures while his children were playing around him in his study. The same kind of concentration over work, irrespective o...Read More