history always lay rooted. He had his mother's delight in living.
He loved the cricket-field, he loved the river; his athletic
instincts and his athletic friends were always fighting in him with
his literary instincts and the friends who appealed primarily to
the intellectual and moral side of him. He made many mistakes alike
in friends and in pursuits; in the freshness of a young and roving
curiosity he had great difficulty in submitting himself to the
intellectual routine of the University, a difficulty which ultimately
cost him much; but at the bottom of the lad, all the time, there
was a strength of will, a force and even tyranny of conscience,
which kept his charm and pliancy from degenerating into weakness,
and made it not only delightful, but profitable to love him. He
knew that his mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to
satisfy, so far as he could, all her honorable ambitions.

His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence must have
been in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly concern us
here. His future life, so far as we can see, was most noticeably
affected by two men older than himself, and belonging to the
dons--both of them fellows and tutors of St. Anselm's, though on
different planes of age.

The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert's tutor, and about seven
years older than himself. He was a man about whom, on entering the
college, Robert heard more than the usual crop of stories. The
healthy young English barbarian has an aversion to the intrusion
of more manner into life than is absolutely necessary. Now Langham
was overburdened with manner, though it was manner of the deprecating
and not of the arrogant order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts
were abominable to him. To help a friend he had once consented to