"Your kindness enchants me," I exclaimed, "and I no longer scruple to
confess the pleasure I have in accepting my old friend's offer."

This affair being settled, I continued to converse for some minutes with
as much vivacity as I could summon to my aid, and when I went once more
to the library, it was with the comfortable impression of having left
those as friends, whom I had visited as foes.

The dinner hour was four, and till it came, Clutterbuck and I amused
ourselves "in commune wise and sage." There was something high in the
sentiments and generous in the feelings of this man, which made me the
more regret the bias of mind which rendered them so unavailing. At
college he had never (illis dissimilis in nostro tempore natis) cringed
to the possessors of clerical power. In the duties of his station, as
dean of the college, he was equally strict to the black cap and the
lordly hat. Nay, when one of his private pupils, whose father was
possessed of more church preferment than any nobleman in the peerage,
disobeyed his repeated summons, and constantly neglected to attend his
instructions, he sent for him, resigned his tuition, and refused any
longer to accept a salary which the negligence of his pupil would not
allow him to requite. In his clerical tenets he was high: in his judgment
of others he was mild. His knowledge of the liberty of Greece was not
drawn from the ignorant historian of her republics; [Note: It is really a
disgrace to the University, that any of its colleges should accept as a
reference, or even tolerate as an author, the presumptuous bigot who has
bequeathed to us, in his History of Greece, the masterpiece of a
declaimer without energy, and of a pedant without learning.] nor did he
find in the contemplative mildness and gentle philosophy of the ancients,
nothing but a sanction for modern bigotry and existing abuses.