is it?) has borrowed my copy. It is the perpetual fate of that
book--everyone should have six copies.

After the rough and saline company of French gunners it is a comical
contrast to find him winning a scholarship at Balliol College,
Oxford--admittedly the most rarefied and azure-pedalled precinct in
England. He matriculated at Balliol in January, 1895, and was soon known
as one of the "characters" of the college. There was little of the lean
and pallid clerk of Oxenford in his bearing: he was the Roman candle of
the Junior Common Room, where the vivacious and robust humour of the
barracks at Toul at first horrified and then captivated the men from the
public schools. Alternately blasphemous and idolatrous he may have
seemed to Winchester and Eton: a devil for work and a genius at play. He
swam, wrestled, shouted, rode, drank, and debated, says Mr. Seccombe. He
read strange books, swore strange oaths, and amazed his tutors by the
fire and fury of his historical study. His rooms were a continual focus
of noise: troops of friends, song, loud laughter, and night-long
readings from Rabelais. And probably his battels, if they are still
recorded in the Balliol buttery, would show a larger quantity of ale and
wine consumed than by any other man who ever made drinking a fine art at
Balliol. Some day perhaps some scholar will look the matter up.

Balliol is not beautiful: more than any other of the older colleges in
Oxford, she has suffered from the "restorations" of the 70's and 80's.
It is a favourite jest to pretend to confuse her with the Great Western
Railway Station, which never fails to bring a flush to a Balliol cheek.
But whatever the merciless hand of the architect has done to turn her
into a jumble of sham Gothic spikes and corners, no one can doubt her
wholesome democracy of intellect, her passion for sound scholarship, and
the unsurpassable gift of her undergraduates for the delicately obscene.