allow body to keep pace with mind. He was a boy to be, intellectually,
held in leash, said the doctors. But that was easier said than done.
What system of sedatives could one apply to a youngster whose
imagination wrought him to a fever during a simple walk by the seashore,
who if books were forcibly withheld consoled himself with the
composition of five-act tragedies, interspersed with lyrics to which he
supplied original strains? Mr. Athel conceived a theory that such
exuberance of emotionality might be counterbalanced by studies of a
strictly positive nature; a tutor was engaged to ground young Wilfrid in
mathematics and the physical sciences. The result was that the tutor's
enthusiasm for these pursuits communicated itself after a brief
repugnance to the versatile pupil; instincts of mastery became as vivid
in the study of Euclid and the chemical elements as formerly in the
humaner paths of learning; the plan had failed. In the upshot Wilfrid
was sent to school; if that did not develop the animal in him, nothing
would.

He was not quite three-and-twenty when the break-down removed him from
Oxford. Going to Balliol with a scholarship, he had from the first been
marked for great things, at all events by the measure of the schools.
Removal from the system of home education had in truth seemed to answer
in some degree the ends aimed at; the lad took his fair share of cricket
and football, and kept clear of nervous crises. At the same time he made
extraordinary progress with his books. He acquired with extreme
facility, and his ambition never allowed him to find content in a second
place; conquest became his habit; he grew to deem it the order of nature
that Wilfrid Athel's name should come first in the list. Hence a
reputation to support. During his early terms at Balliol he fagged as
hard as the mere dullard whose dear life depended upon a first class and
a subsequent tutorship. What he would make of himself in the end was