INTRODUCTION. (continued 11)

"Wrestling was, at an after period, I cannot say in what year, superseded by football; a grovelling and inglorious game in comparison. Wrestling is an art; success in the exercise depends not on mere bodily strength. It had, at the time of which I have spoken, its well-known and acknowledged technical rules, and any violation of them, alleged against one who had prostrated his adversary, became a matter of inquiry. If it was found that the act was not achieved secundum artem, it was void, and might be followed by another trial."—Vol. I. pp. 260, 261.

Remarks on this subject are continued in another part of the work from which the above extract is made, and the story of Thomas Mason is related, with a few variations from the generally received version. "Wrestling," says Professor Willard, "was reduced to an art, which had its technical terms for the movement of the limbs, and the manner of using them adroitly, with the skill acquired by practice in applying muscular force at the right time and in the right degree. Success in the art, therefore, depended partly on skill; and a violation of the rules of the contest vitiated any apparent triumph gained by mere physical strength. There were traditionary accounts of some of our predecessors who were commemorated as among the coryphæi of wrestlers; a renown that was not then looked upon with contempt. The art of wrestling was not then confined to the literary gymnasium. It was practised in every rustic village. There were even migrating braves and Hectors, who, in their wanderings from their places of abode to villages more or less distant, defied the chiefest of this order of gymnasts to enter the lists. In a country town of Massachusetts remote from the capital, one of these wanderers appeared about half a century since, and issued a general challenge against the foremost wrestlers. The clergyman of the town, a son of Harvard, whose fame in this particular had travelled from the academic to the rustic green, was apprised of the challenge, and complied with the solicitation of some of his young parishioners to accept it in their behalf. His triumph over the challenger was completed without agony or delay, and having prostrated him often enough to convince him of his folly, he threw him over the stone wall, and gravely admonished him against repeating his visit, and disturbing the peace of his parish."—Vol. I. p. 315.

The peculiarities of Thomas Mason were his most noticeable characteristics. As an orator, his eloquence was of the ore rotundo order; as a writer, his periods were singularly Johnsonian. He closed his ministerial labors in Northfield, February 28, 1830, on which occasion he delivered a farewell discourse, taking for his text, the words of Paul to Timothy: "The time of my departure is at hand. I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness."

As a specimen of his style of writing, the following passages are presented, taken from this discourse:—"Time, which forms the scene of all human enterprise, solicitude, toil, and improvement, and which fixes the limitations of all human pleasures and sufferings, has at length conducted us to the termination of our long-protracted alliance. An assignment of the reasons of this measure must open a field too extended and too diversified for our present survey. Nor could a development of the whole be any way interesting to us, to whom alone this address is now submitted. Suffice it to say, that in the lively exercise of mutual and unimpaired friendship and confidence, the contracting parties, after sober, continued, and unimpassioned deliberation, have yielded to existing circumstances, as a problematical expedient of social blessing."

After commenting upon the declaration of Paul, he continued: "The Apostle proceeds, 'I have fought a good fight' Would to God I could say the same! Let me say, however, without the fear of contradiction, 'I have fought a fight!' How far it has been 'good,' I forbear to decide." His summing up was this: "You see, my hearers, all I can say, in common with the Apostle in the text, is this: 'The time of my departure is at hand,'—and, 'I have finished my course.'"

Referring then to the situation which he had occupied, he said: "The scene of our alliance and co-operation, my friends, has been one of no ordinary cast and character. The last half-century has been pregnant with novelty, project, innovation, and extreme excitement. The pillars of the social edifice have been shaken, and the whole social atmosphere has been decomposed by alchemical demagogues and revolutionary apes. The sickly atmosphere has suffused a morbid humor over the whole frame, and left the social body little more than 'the empty and bloody skin of an immolated victim.'

"We pass by the ordinary incidents of alienation, which are too numerous, and too evanescent to admit of detail. But seasons and circumstances of great alarm are not readily forgotten. We have witnessed, and we have felt, my friends, a political convulsion, which seemed the harbinger of inevitable desolation. But it has passed by with a harmless explosion, and returning friends have paused in wonder, at a moment's suspension of friendship. Mingled with the factitious mass, there was a large spice of sincerity which sanctified the whole composition, and restored the social body to sanity, health, and increased strength and vigor.

"Thrice happy must be our reflections could we stop here, and contemplate the ascending prosperity and increasing vigor of this religious community. But the one half has not yet been told,—the beginning has hardly been begun. Could I borrow the language of the spirits of wrath,—was my pen transmuted to a viper's tooth dipped in gore,—was my paper transformed to a vellum which no light could illume, and which only darkness could render legible, I could, and I would, record a tale of blood, of which the foulest miscreant must burn in ceaseless anguish only once to have been suspected. But I refer to imagination what description can never reach."

What the author referred to in this last paragraph no one knew, nor did he ever advance any explanation of these strange words.

Near the close of his discourse, he said: "Standing in the place of a Christian minister among you, through the whole course of my ministrations, it has been my great and leading aim ever to maintain and exhibit the character and example of a Christian man. With clerical foppery, grimace, craft, and hypocrisy, I have had no concern. In the free participation of every innocent entertainment and delight, I have pursued an open, unreserved course, equally removed from the mummery of superstition and the dissipation of infidelity. And though I have enjoyed my full share of honor from the scandal of bigotry and malice, yet I may safely congratulate myself in the reflection, that by this liberal and independent progress were men weighed in the balance of intellectual, social, and moral worth, I have yet never lost a single friend who was worth preserving."—pp. 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 11.

Y.

YAGER FIGHTS. At Bowdoin College, "Yager Fights," says a correspondent, "are the annual conflicts which occur between the townsmen and the students. The Yagers (from the German Jager, a hunter, a chaser) were accustomed, when the lumbermen came down the river in the spring, to assemble in force, march up to the College yard with fife and drum, get famously drubbed, and retreat in confusion to their dens. The custom has become extinct within the past four years, in consequence of the non-appearance of the Yagers."

YALENSIAN. A student at or a member of Yale College.

In making this selection, we have been governed partly by poetic merit, but more by the associations connected with various pieces inserted, in the minds of the present generation of Yalensians. —Preface to Songs of Yale, 1853.

The Yalensian is off for Commencement.—Yale Lit. Mag., Vol. XIX. p. 355.

YANKEE. According to the account of this word as given by Dr. William Gordon, it appears to have been in use among the students of Harvard College at a very early period. A citation from his work will show this fact in its proper light.

"You may wish to know the origin of the term Yankee. Take the best account of it which your friend can procure. It was a cant, favorite word with Farmer Jonathan Hastings, of Cambridge, about 1713. Two aged ministers, who were at the College in that town, have told me, they remembered it to have been then in use among the students, but had no recollection of it before that period. The inventor used it to express excellency. A Yankee good horse, or Yankee cider, and the like, were an excellent good horse and excellent cider. The students used to hire horses of him; their intercourse with him, and his use of the term upon all occasions, led them to adopt it, and they gave him the name of Yankee Jon. He was a worthy, honest man, but no conjurer. This could not escape the notice of the collegiates. Yankee probably became a by-word among them to express a weak, simple, awkward person; was carried from the College with them when they left it, and was in that way circulated and established through the country, (as was the case in respect to Hobson's choice, by the students at Cambridge, in Old England,) till, from its currency in New England, it was at length taken up and unjustly applied to the New-Englanders in common, as a term of reproach."—American War, Ed. 1789, Vol. I. pp. 324, 325. Thomas's Spy, April, 1789, No. 834.

In the Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. VII., p. 301, the editor, the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, D.D., of Dorchester, referring to a letter written by the Rev. John Seccombe, and dated "Cambridge, Sept. 27, 1728," observes: "It is a most humorous narrative of the fate of a goose roasted at 'Yankee Hastings's,' and it concludes with a poem on the occasion, in the mock-heroic." The fact of the name is further substantiated in the following remarks by the Rev. John Langdon Sibley, of Harvard College: "Jonathan Hastings, Steward of the College from 1750 to 1779,… was a son of Jonathan Hastings, a tanner, who was called 'Yankee Hastings,' and lived on the spot at the northwest corner of Holmes Place in Old Cambridge, where, not many years since, a house was built by the late William Pomeroy."—Father Abbey's Will, Cambridge, Mass., 1854, pp. 7, 8.

YEAR. At the English universities, the undergraduate course is three years and a third. Students of the first year are called Freshmen, and the other classes at Cambridge are, in popular phrase, designated successively Second-year Men, Third-year Men, and Men who are just going out. The word year is often used in the sense of class.

The lecturer stands, and the lectured sit, even when construing, as the Freshmen are sometimes asked to do; the other Years are only called on to listen.—Bristed's Five Years in an Eng. Univ., Ed. 2d, p. 18.

Of the "year" that entered with me at Trinity, three men died before the time of graduating.—Ibid., p. 330.

YEOMAN-BEDELL. At the University of Cambridge, Eng., the yeoman-bedell in processions precedes the esquire-bedells, carrying an ebony mace, tipped with silver.—Cam. Guide.

At the University of Oxford, the yeoman-bedels bear the silver staves in procession. The vice-chancellor never walks out without being preceded by a yeoman-bedel with his insignium of office.—Guide to Oxford.

See BEADLE.

YOUNG BURSCH. In the German universities, a name given to a student during his third term, or semester.

The fox year is then over, and they wash the eyes of the new-baked Young Bursche, since during the fox-year he was held to be blind, the fox not being endued with reason.—Howitt's Student Life of Germany, Am. ed., p. 124.