not, the man for the [Greek: dolichos] (or long struggle), though
first-rate for a short examination."

Oscar himself only completed these spirit-photographs by what he told
me of his life at Trinity.

"It was the fascination of Greek letters, and the delight I took in
Greek life and thought," he said to me once, "which made me a scholar.
I got my love of the Greek ideal and my intimate knowledge of the
language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell; they were Trinity to me;
Mahaffy was especially valuable to me at that time. Though not so good
a scholar as Tyrrell, he had been in Greece, had lived there and
saturated himself with Greek thought and Greek feeling. Besides he
took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything, which
was coming more and more to be my standpoint. He was a delightful
talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way--an artist in
vivid words and eloquent pauses. Tyrrell, too, was very kind to
me--intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge. If he had known
less he would have been a poet. Learning is a sad handicap, Frank, an
appalling handicap," and he laughed irresistibly.

"What were the students like in Dublin?" I asked. "Did you make
friends with any of them?"

"They were worse even than the boys at Portora," he replied; "they
thought of nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and
they varied these intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and
drinking. If they had any souls they diverted them with coarse
_amours_ among barmaids and the women of the streets; they were simply
awful. Sexual vice is even coarser and more loathsome in Ireland than