The social entertainments of a community are always an object of interest to the stranger, and many things may be learned from them. It certainly gave me a new idea or two when, on the Commemoration Day in November, I attended a Supper of the Dons in Combination Room (an apartment over the hall, devoted to the suppers and desserts of those in authority), after which meal, we, that is such of the Fellow-Commoners as preferred grave society, sat with these college dignitaries round the fire playing whist for shilling points, and drinking bishop (mulled port), and a very enticing mixture appropriately called silky, the component parts of which, so far as I could judge from internal evidence, appeared to be made of rum and madeira.

Of ordinary undergraduate wine-parties there is no need to say much. Thackeray has summed them up according to their deserts: “thirty lads round a table covered with bad sweetmeats, drinking bad wines, telling bad stories, singing bad songs over and over again.” The younger Fellows, Bachelor Scholars, and some of the more knowing among the older Under-graduates, understood the thing better; had good wine, with the simplest accompaniments, such as biscuits and oranges; and when they extemporized a supper, did it with equal simplicity.