The impossibility of giving even a glimpse of the principal colleges of Cambridge in these pages of a book devoted to the road will be obvious. Thus, the great quads of Trinity, the many courts of John's, Milton's mulberry tree at Christ's, the Pepysian Library of Magdalen, and a hundred other things must be sought elsewhere. Turn we, then, to further talk of Thomas Hobson, the carrier and livery-stable keeper of "Hobson's Choice," who lies in an unmarked resting-place in the chancel of St. Benedict's Church, hard by the Market Hill. Born in 1544, he was not a native of Cambridge, but seems to have first seen the light at Buntingford, his father's native place. Already, in that father's time, the business had grown so profitable and important that we find Hobson senior a treasurer of the Cambridge Corporation; and when he died, in 1568, in a position to leave considerable landed and other property among his family. To Thomas, his more famous son, he bequeathed land at Grantchester and the waggon and horses that industrious son had been for some years past driving between Cambridge and London for him, with the surety and regularity of the solar system. "I bequeath," he wrote, "to my son Thomas the team-ware that he now goeth with, that is to say, the cart and eight horses, and all the harness and other things thereunto belonging, with the nag, to be delivered to him at such time and when as he shall attain and come to the age of twenty-five years; or £30 in money, for and in discharge thereof."

And thus he continued to go once a week, back and forth, for close upon sixty-three years, riding the nag and its successors beside the waggon that ploughed its ponderous way along the heavy roads. An ancient portrait of him, a large painting in oil, is now in the Cambridge Guildhall, and inscribed, "Mr. Hobson, 1620." This contemporary portrait has the curious information written on the back, "This picture was hung up at Ye Black Bull inn, Bishopsgate, London, upwards of one hundred years before it was given to J. Burleigh 1787."

Hobson scarce fitted the picture of the "jolly waggoner" drawn in the old song. Have you ever heard the song of the "Jolly Waggoner"? It is a song of lightly come and lightly go; of drinking with good fellows while the waggon and horses are standing long hours outside the wayside inn, and consignees are waiting with what patience they may for their goods. A song that bids dull care begone, and draws for you a lively sketch of the typical waggoner, who lived for the moment, whistled as he went in attempted rivalry with the hedgerow thrushes and blackbirds, spent his money as he earned it, and had a greeting, a ribbon, and a kiss for every lass along the familiar highway.

It is a song that goes to a reckless and flamboyant tune, an almost Handelian melody that is sung with a devil-may-care toss of the head and much emphasis; a rare, sweet, homely old country ditty—

And so forth.

Hobson was not this kind of man. He had his horse-letting business in Cambridge, where, indeed, he had forty saddle-nags always ready, "fit for travelling, with boots, bridle, and whip, to furnish the gentlemen at once, without going from college to college to borrow"; but he continued throughout his long life to go personally with his waggon, and died January 1st, 1631, in his eighty-sixth year, of the irksome and unaccustomed inaction imposed upon him by the authorities, who forbade him to ply to London while one of the periodical outbreaks of plague was raging in the capital. Dependable in business as Hobson was, he prospered exceedingly, and amassed a very considerable fortune, "a much greater fortune," says one, "than a thousand men of genius and learning, educated at the University, ever acquired, or were capable of acquiring." This is not a little hard on the learned and the gifted, by whose favour and goodwill he prospered so amazingly. For, be it known, he was not merely and solely a carrier; but the carrier, especially licensed by the University, and thus a monopolist. Those were the days before a Government monopoly of the post was established, and one of Hobson's particular functions was the conveying of the mails. He was thus a very serious and responsible person.

You cannot conceive Hobson "carrying on" like the typical "jolly waggoner." Look at the portrait of him, taken from a fresco painted on a wall of his old house of call, the Bull, in Bishopsgate Street. A very grave and staid old man it shows us; looking out upon the world with cold and calculating eyes, deep-set beneath knitted brows, and with a long and money-loving, yet cautious, nose. His hand is unwillingly extracting a guinea from a well-filled money-bag, and you may clearly see from his expression of countenance how much rather he would be putting one in.

Yet in his last years he appeared in the guise of a benefactor to the town of Cambridge, for in 1628 he gave to town and University the land on which was built the so-called "Spinning House," or, more correctly, "Hobson's Workhouse," where poor people who had no trade might be taught some honest one, and all stubborn rogues and beggars be compelled to earn their livelihood. A bequest providing for the maintenance of the water-conduit in the Market Place kept his memory green for many a long year afterwards. It remained a prominent object in the centre of the town until 1856, when it was removed; but the little watercourses that of old used to run along the kennels of Cambridge streets still serve to keep the place clean and sweet.

It cannot be too strongly insisted upon that Hobson, although he fared the road personally, and attended to every petty detail of his carrying business, was both a very wealthy and a very important personage. The second condition is not necessarily a corollary of the first. But Hobson bulked large in the Cambridge of his time. Indeed, as much may be gathered from the mass of literature written around his name. In his lifetime even, some compiler of a Commercial Letter Writer, for instructing youths ignorant of affairs, could find no more apt and taking title than that of Hobson's Horse Load of Letters, or Precedents for Epistles of Business; and poets and verse-writers, from Milton downwards, wrote many epitaphs and eulogies on him. Milton, who had gone up to Christ's College in 1624, was twenty-three years of age when Hobson died, and wrote two humorous epitaphs on him, more akin to the manner of Tom Hood than the majestic periods usually associated in the mind with the style commonly called "Miltonic.". "Quibbling epitaphs" an eighteenth century critic has called them. But you shall judge—

"On the University Carrier, who sickened in the time of the Vacancy, being forbid to go to London by reason of the Plague.

The subject seems to have been an engrossing one to the youthful poet, for he harked back to it in the following variant:—

The next example—an anonymous one—makes no bad third—

The couplet printed below touches a pretty note of imagination, and is wholly free from that suspicion of affected scholarly superiority to a common carrier, with which all the others, especially Milton's, are super-saturated—

Charles's Wain, referred to in these two last examples, is, of course, that well-known constellation in the northern heavens usually known as the Great Bear, anciently "Charlemagne's Waggon," and more anciently still, the Greek Hamaxa, "the Waggon."

Coming, as might be expected, a considerable distance after Milton and the others in point of excellence, are the epitaphs printed in a little book of 1640, called the Witt's Recreations, Selected from the Finest Fancies of the Modern Muses. Some of them are a little gruesome, and affect the reader as unfavourably as though he saw the authors of these lines dancing a saraband on poor old Hobson's grave—