reverse process_ of that implied in the words above quoted, viz. I often
question whether it would not be at once wiser and more right to raise my
teaching to the small minority of my best pupils, and ignore the many who
come in on my classes unprepared. I have of late suspected that I allow
the University so to drag me down into school teaching that the abler and
advanced students are driven away from me. Moreover, I am getting quite
sick of going again and again over elementary books in mere school
fashion.

"To vary this, I have this term given one day a week in my senior class to
lecture _on_ books, viz. 1st, on Horace's _Odes_, which nine out of ten
have already read, and which I myself read with the junior class last
session (having engaged to do this before I guessed that the University
would select the same year for B.A.), and many of the junior class being
this year in my senior class. 2nd, on the _Epistles_ of Cicero, which are
enormously too long and too difficult for pupils to read, and in which,
nevertheless, candidates for honours at B.A. are liable to be examined. I
conjecture that somebody has seen this announcement of mine in our
prospectus, and imputes it to a _relaxation of discipline_ in my pupils
(indeed there is little enough, and always was, in the majority of mine;
they only want to scrape through their degree, and the University kindly
keeps its real demands at a minimum). On the contrary, it is an effort of
mine to make the lectures less unworthy of my more advanced pupils. I may
add that I have _always_ lectured more or less in this way on Cicero's
_Letters_.... At the same time I avow my entire dissatisfaction with
things as I have them. In June I have to print and publish the books in
which I will lecture from October to June next, _while I have not the
slightest idea who will be in the classes_. In August, out comes the
statement of University books for the following year, which often
increases my confusion. It is easier to complain of this than to remedy