The eighteenth century was unpopular because it was French. Anti-French feeling among most ex-soldiers amounted almost to an obsession. Edmund, shaking with nerves, used to say at this time: ‘No more wars for me at any price. Except against the French. If there’s ever a war with them I’ll go like a shot.’ Pro-German feeling was increasing. Now that the war was over and the German armies had been beaten, it was possible to give the German soldier credit for being the best fighting-man in Europe. I often heard it said that it was only the blockade that had beaten them; that in Haig’s last push they never really broke, and that their machine-gun sections had held us up for as long as was needed to cover the withdrawal of the main forces. And even that we had been fighting on the wrong side; our natural enemies were the French. At the end of my first term’s work I attended the usual college board to give an account of myself. The spokesman coughed and said a little stiffly: ‘I understand, Mr. Graves, that the essays that you write for your English tutor are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others.’ There were a number of poets living on Boar’s Hill; too many, Edmund and I agreed. It had become almost a tourist centre. There was the Poet Laureate, with his bright eye, abrupt challenging manner, a flower in his buttonhole; he was one of the first men of letters to sign the Oxford recantation of war-time hatred against the Germans—indeed it was for the most part written by him. There was Gilbert Murray, too, gentle-voiced and with the spiritual look of the strict vegetarian, doing preliminary propaganda work for the League of Nations. Once, while I was sitting talking to him in his study about Aristotle’s _Poetics_, and he was walking up and down the room, I suddenly asked him: ‘Exactly what is the principle of that walk of yours? Are you trying to avoid the flowers on the rug or are you trying to keep to the squares?’ I had compulsion-neuroses of this sort myself so it was easy to notice one in him. He wheeled round sharply: ‘You’re the first person who has caught me out,’ he said. ‘No, it’s not the flowers or the squares; it’s a habit that I have got into of doing things in sevens. I take seven steps, you see, then I change direction and go another seven steps, than I turn round. I asked Browne, the professor of Psychology, about it the other day, but he assured me it wasn’t a dangerous habit. He said: “When you find it getting into multiples of seven, come to me again.”’