LOVE AND LEARNING.
" Love seldom haunts the breast where learning lies, And Venus sets ere Mercury can rise."
CHAUCER, he POPE'S Version.
IT iS announced in the Irish papers, that "The Junior Fellows of Trinity College, Dublin, have drawn up a petition to the Queen, praying, that her Majesty would be graciously pleased to repeal the statute of celibacy, which prevents them from marrying. The petition will be presented to her Majesty by Dr. Lefroy, one of the Members for the University."
Rer Majesty will scarcely be so ill-advised as to grant the prayer of this petition. We recollect a story of a student of the Dublin College who had just obtained a fellowship, writing to a friend for his congratulation on the preferment : the jocose friend replied, that the event provoked regret, not joy, inasmuch as
" Worth makes the man, the want of it the fellow."
But we hold that "fellows" are sage, reflecting persons, whose hearts are set upon learned lore. In harems, Lord BYRON tell us, —" Learning soon would make a pretty schism ; " and love would produce equal confusion in colleges. A tender penchant for a "bedmaker" is the utmost that can be permitted to "fellows."
But marriage would be worse than love. Imagine the conse- quences of matrimony !—grave divines jostled by children riding cock-horse in the college cloisters ; balls flying through the painted windows, and pelting the pates of professors ; infants squalling, nurses scolding—all the hubbub and distraction of a "fine family," in recesses intended for lonely contemplation, dis- cussions on the Molic digamina, and the philosophy of ARISTOTLE. Indeed, we marvel that so grave and austere a personage as Dr. LEFROY can sanction the proposed profanation. But our hope is in the Queen. Her Majesty will never consent to the Dublin
desecration, but, addressing herself especially to the clerical portion of the petitioners, will reply, in the words of an author with whose writings her Majesty's Premier has doubtless made her familiar— "A single life cloth well with Churchmen ; for charity will hardly water the ground, where it must first till a pool."
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