"Then they knew you as a great talker even at Oxford?" I asked in some
surprise.

"Frank," he cried reprovingly, laughing at the same time delightfully,
"I was a great talker at school. I did nothing at Trinity but talk, my
reading was done at odd hours. I was the best talker ever seen in
Oxford."

"And did you find any teacher there like Mahaffy?" I asked, "any
professor with a touch of the poet?"

He came to seriousness at once.

"There were two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than
Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin
for instance, who appealed to me intensely--a wonderful man and a most
wonderful writer. A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet
filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has
always seemed to me the Plato of England--a Prophet of the Good and
True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that the three are one
perfect flower. But it was his prose I loved, and not his piety. His
sympathy with the poor bored me: the road he wanted us to build was
tiresome. I could see nothing in poverty that appealed to me, nothing;
I shrank away from it as from a degradation of the spirit; but his
prose was lyrical and rose on broad wings into the blue. He was a
great poet and teacher, Frank, and therefore of course a most
preposterous professor; he bored you to death when he taught, but was
an inspiration when he sang.