studied reserve as to his deepest admirations; and, perhaps, at that
day (1803-8) the occasions would be rare in which much dissimulation
would be needed. Until Lord Byron had begun to pilfer from Wordsworth
and to abuse him, allusions to Wordsworth were not frequent in
conversation; and it was chiefly on occasion of some question arising
about poetry in general, or about the poets of the day, that it became
difficult to dissemble. For my part, hating the necessity for
dissimulation as much as the dissimulation itself, I drew from this
peculiarity also of my own mind a fresh reinforcement of my other
motives for sequestering myself; and, for the first two years of my
residence in Oxford, I compute that I did not utter one hundred words.

I remember distinctly the first (which happened also to be the last)
conversation that I ever held with my tutor. It consisted of three
sentences, two of which fell to his share, one to mine. On a fine
morning, he met me in the Quadrangle, and, having then no guess of the
nature of my pretensions, he determined (I suppose) to probe them.
Accordingly, he asked me, "What I had been lately reading?" Now, the
fact was, that I, at that time immersed in metaphysics, had really been
reading and studying very closely the _Parmenides_, of which
obscure work some Oxford men, early in the last century, published a
separate edition. Yet, so profound was the benignity of my nature,
that, in those days, I could not bear to witness, far less to cause,
the least pain or mortification to any human being. I recoiled, indeed,
from the society of most men, but not with any feelings of dislike. On
the contrary, in order that I _might_ like all men, I wished to
associate with none. Now, then, to have mentioned the _Parmenides_
to one who, fifty thousand to one, was a perfect stranger to its whole
drift and purpose, looked too _mechant_, too like a trick of
malice, in an age when such reading was so very unusual. I felt that it