Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

The Spike: or, Victoria College Review, October 1906

[Capping day]

"He,
With an urbanity
Full of satanity,
Vexes humanity
With an inanity
Swollen with vanity,
Driving his hearers to muttered profanity."

Capping day written on mortarboards

TThe Capping Ceremony was held this year in the Concert Room of the Town Hall. As Victoria College is not a purely local institution, the City Fathers felt unable to shower upon us the further benefit of gracing our function with their presence. In spite, however, of this drawback there was a fair attendance of the public, who had come evidently expecting a recurrence of the usual disgraceful exhibitions, as our Chancellor has on so many occasions styled them. The public went away grievously disappointed; and yet the entertainment afforded was in its way somewhat unique. The most irreproachable sentiments evoked no sympathetic response from the students, who maintained throughout a freezing silence, unbroken even by the calculated flattery of the Chairman of the College Council. Prettily worded sentiments were uttered again and again, evidently in the hope of evoking the uproarious approbation of the gallery. When this was not forthcoming, the uneasiness of the orators and the abrupt curtailment of their flowery effusiveness amply repaid the students for their preconcerted self-repression.

Some of the more diminutive lady graduates found the last step in their academic career the hardest to negotiate, and received their diplomas from afar. The embarrassment of the Chairman of the Professorial Board at each successive refusal of his proffered help was a source of joy to the unsympathetic undergrad.

page 51

The harrassed and overworked law-student, who may be seen at all hours of the day drowning his worries, came in for what seemed to many an undue amount of commiseration at the hands of the newly appointed law professor. The latter expressed his conviction that it was the bounden duty of the various legal firms to release their clerks during the afternoon from the drudgery of stamp-licking, so as to permit of their advancing a little further upon their weary pilgrimage across the barren and thirsty desert of law.

The Chancellor next invited a student to orate from the gallery. The student in question, being taken quite unawares, had not prepared anything special, but moved by the evident zeal of a previous speaker, expressed the hope that some of the leading legal firms would help along the law library with spare copies of books. The hope was only a little one, and the appeal seems to have fallen on stony ground.

The Chancellor concluded a dismal function by complimenting the students upon their dutiful behaviour.