All the fine old professional flavour in language has evaporated.

Your very gravedigger has forgotten his avocation in his electorship, and would quibble on the Franchise over Ophelia's grave, instead of more appropriately discussing the duration of bodies under ground.

From this tendency, from this gradual attrition of life, in which everything pointed and characteristic is being rubbed down, till the whole world begins to slip between our fingers in smooth undistinguishable sands, from this, we say, it follows that we must not attempt to join _Mr.Taller_ in his simple division of students into _Law_, _Divinity_, and _Medical_.

Nowadays the Faculties may shake hands over their follies; and, like Mrs.Frail and Mrs.Foresight (in _Love for Love_) they may stand in the doors of opposite class-rooms, crying: 'Sister, Sister--Sister everyway!' A few restrictions, indeed, remain to influence the followers of individual branches of study.

The Divinity, for example, must be an avowed believer; and as this, in the present day, is unhappily considered by many as a confession of weakness, he is fain to choose one of two ways of gilding the distasteful orthodox bolus.
Some swallow it in a thin jelly of metaphysics; for it is even a credit to believe in God on the evidence of some crack-jaw philosopher, although it is a decided slur to believe in Him on His own authority.