lectures and of "classes." In my own time I really believe you could
know nothing which might not "pay" in the schools and prove serviceable
in examinations. But a good deal depended on being able to use your
knowledge by way of literary illustration. Perhaps the cleverest of my
own juniors, since very well known in letters, did not use his own
special vein, even when he had the chance, in writing answers to
questions in examinations. Hence his academic success was much below his
deserts. For my own part, I remember my tutor saying, "Don't write as if
you were writing for a penny paper." Alas, it was "a prediction, cruel,
smart." But, "as yet no sin was dreamed."

At my own college we had to write weekly essays, alternately in English
and Latin. This might have been good literary training, but I fear the
essays were not taken very seriously. The chief object was to make the
late learned Dr. Scott bound on his chair by paradoxes. But nobody ever
succeeded. He was experienced in trash. As for what may be called
unacademic literature, there were not many essays in that art. There
have been very literary generations, as when Corydon and Thyrsis "lived
in Oxford as if it had been a great country house;" so Corydon confessed.
Probably many of the poems by Mr. Matthew Arnold and many of Mr.
Swinburne's early works were undergraduate poems. A later generation
produced "Love in Idleness," a very pleasing volume. But the gods had
not made us poetical. In those days I remember picking up, in the Union
Reading-room, a pretty white quarto, "Atalanta in Calydon," by A. C.
Swinburne. Only once had I seen Mr. Swinburne's name before, signing a
brief tale in _Once a Week_. "Atalanta" was a revelation; there was a
new and original poet here, a Balliol man, too. In my own mind
"Atalanta" remains the best, the most beautiful, the most musical of Mr.
Swinburne's many poems. He instantly became the easily parodied model of
undergraduate versifiers.