[Sidenote: Freeing the Fellowships.] In the year that Fawcett was elected fellow of his college the question of reforming the tenure of the fellowships was newly opened, and at once he took a hot and revolutionary part. When he returned to Cambridge he continued to uphold a policy which would leave the fellowships open to the freest competition. He insisted that neither religious opinions nor other disabilities, many of which existed, should be any bar. The issues involved by these reforms were intricate and came up for discussion in the House of Commons when Fawcett was a member; but all through their varying phases he kept to the one view that fellowships should be aids to poor men who desired a university training and should be open to the competition of the ablest. But in 1858 fellowships could be held by unmarried men only. Cambridge society consisted largely of young men before their departure into those wider fields which permit of matrimony, and a few belated seniors lingering behind, bachelors by predilection or compulsion. The youthfulness of the majority appealed to the youthful; sanguine, buoyant, and sociable, they could boast of sufficient ability to have won them places in open competition. If they gave evidence of the truth of the famous admonition of Dr. Thompson, the Master of Trinity College, that ‘we are none of us infallible, not even the youngest of us,’ their intercourse was only the more lively. Into this circle Fawcett came like a huge magnet, drawing to himself all kinds of curiously different people. He was most heartily welcomed everywhere, and even when his hot Radicalism encountered in some senior a wall of Conservative opposition, the wall soon crumbled under Fawcett’s unquestionable sincerity and good-will. CHAPTER IX THE GOOD SAMARITAN ‘Ask Fawcett’—The Ancient Mariners and the Diplomat—Christmas Exceedings—Fawcett as Host—A Bore foiled—The British Association. But if no respecter of persons, Fawcett unfailingly took every opportunity to play the good Samaritan. Were a friend in trouble, this great rough comforter was the first at hand to help. If ill, he had probably from the beginning been sitting daily at the patient’s bedside, bringing good cheer, or aiding in the thousand and one ways which his understanding of suffering, through his own great suffering, had taught him. Nothing gave him greater joy than to help in this way. He was sent for on one occasion by an old gentleman on his deathbed. [Sidenote: ‘Ask Fawcett.’]