fragmentary impressions which I suppose must be called my education. So
I thought it would be ungrateful to refuse, even though it should prove
that I have nothing to express save goodwill and the affections of
memory.

When I matriculated in the University of London and became a student in
this place, my professors were Professor Goodwin, Professor Church,
Professor Henrici, Professor Groom Robertson, and Professor Henry
Morley. I remember all these, though, if they were alive, I do not think
that any of them would remember me. The indescribable exhilaration,
which must be familiar to many of you, of leaving school and entering
college, is in great part the exhilaration of making acquaintance with
teachers who care much about their subject and little or nothing about
their pupils. To escape from the eternal personal judgements which make
a school a place of torment is to walk upon air. The schoolmaster looks
at you; the college professor looks the way you are looking. The
statements made by Euclid, that thoughtful Greek, are no longer
encumbered at college with all those preposterous and irrelevant moral
considerations which desolate the atmosphere of a school. The question
now is not whether you have perfectly acquainted yourself with what
Euclid said, but whether what he said is true. In my earliest days at
college I heard a complete exposition of the first six books of Euclid,
given in four lectures, with masterly ease and freedom, by Professor
Henrici, who did not hesitate to employ methods of demonstration which,
though they are perfectly legitimate and convincing, were rejected by
the daintiness of the Greek. Professor Groom Robertson introduced his
pupils to the mysteries of mental and moral philosophy, and incidentally
disaffected some of us by what seemed to us his excessive reverence for
the works of Alexander Bain. Those works were our favourite theme for
satirical verse, which we did not pain our Professor by publishing.