deserved success. This was _The Oxford Spectator_, a most humorous
little periodical, in shape and size like Addison's famous journal. The
authors were Mr. Reginald Copleston, now Bishop of Colombo, Mr. Humphry
Ward, and Mr. Nolan, a great athlete, who died early. There have been
good periodicals since; many amusing things occur in the _Echoes from the
Oxford Magazine_, but the _Spectator_ was the flower of academic
journals. "When I look back to my own experience," says the _Spectator_,
"I find one scene, of all Oxford, most deeply engraved upon 'the mindful
tablets of my soul.' And yet not a scene, but a fairy compound of smell
and sound, and sight and thought. The wonderful scent of the meadow air
just above Iffley, on a hot May evening, and the gay colours of twenty
boats along the shore, the poles all stretched out from the bank to set
the boats clear, and the sonorous cries of 'ten seconds more,' all down
from the green barge to the lasher. And yet that unrivalled moment is
only typical of all the term; the various elements of beauty and pleasure
are concentrated there."

Unfortunately, life at Oxford is not all beauty and pleasure. Things go
wrong somehow. Life drops her happy mask. But this has nothing to do
with books.

About books, however, I have not many more confessions that I care to
make. A man's old self is so far away that he can speak about it and its
adventures almost as if he were speaking about another who is dead. After
taking one's degree, and beginning to write a little for publication, the
topic has a tendency to become much more personal. My last undergraduate
literary discoveries were of France and the Renaissance. Accidentally
finding out that I could read French, I naturally betook myself to
Balzac. If you read him straight on, without a dictionary, you begin to
learn a good many words. The literature of France has been much more