His life at Cambridge was very monotonous, for he enjoyed monotony;
he used to say that he liked to reflect on getting up in the morning,
that his day was going to be filled by ordinary familiar things. He
got up rather late, read his subjects for an hour or two, strolled
about to see one or two friends, lunched with them or at home,
strolled in the afternoon, often dropping in to King's for the
anthem, went back to his rooms for tea, the one time at which he
liked to see his friends, read or talked till hall, and finally
settled down to his books again at ten, reading till one or two in
the morning.

He read very desultorily and widely. Thus he would read books on
Arctic voyages for ten days and talk of nothing else, then read
novels till he sickened for facts and fact till he sickened for
fiction; biographies, elementary science, poetry, general philosophy,
particularly delighting in any ideal theories of life and discipline
in state or association, but with a unique devotion to "Hamlet"
and "As You Like It," the "Pilgrim's Progress," and Emerson's
"Representative Men." He rarely read the Bible, he told me, and then
only in great masses at a sitting; and the one thing that he disliked
with an utter hatred was theology of a settled and orthodox type,
though next to the four books I have mentioned, "The Christian Year"
and "Ecce Homo" were his constant companions.

He did not care for history; he used to lament it. "I have but a
languid interest in facts, qua facts," he said; "and I try to arrive
at history through biography. I like to disentangle the separate
strands, one at a time; the fabric is too complex for me."