My dear Mr Feilding,
I am very well pleased with the place I have got, but I did not like the examination. – There were three of us going to try for the medals, but Arnold <1> has failed of getting a senior optime, <2> as you may see by the list, <3> so that only Ollivant <4> & myself remain. I do not know whether any one else will offer himself a candidate, but we are not much afraid of any whose names appear in the list of honours. The weather was pleasant & it was not such a fatigue as we expected – You may see that a good many of us have beaten Fisher who was astronomer in Buchan’s voyage to the North Pole. <5> Poor fellow if he had been examined in practical mathematics, the result would have been rather different. I told you it wd be so, if you remember –
Yours ever afftly
W.H.F.Talbot
Captn Feilding R.N.
Burley on the Hill
Stamford
Notes:
1. Rev Thomas Kerchever Arnold (1800–1853), editor & author.
2. A Senior Optime is equivalent to Second Class Honours; a Junior Optime is equivalent to Third Class Honours.
3. Enclosed printed List of Honors of Cambridge University Mathematics, 1821, where WHFT is listed as a Wrangler.
4. Alfred Ollivant (1798–1882), author & Bishop of Llandaff.
5. Reverend George Fisher (1794–1873), astronomer in Captain David Buchan’s (1780–1837) unsuccessful Arctic expedition of 1818.