A writer in the Christ's College Magazine for the Lent term 1904 says: 'Many older friends will always think of him in his attic rooms, where he began to make his mark in our College society upon his first coming up. Only two other Freshmen had rooms in College, and Robinson's rooms became at once a centre for his year, and later a meeting-place where the gulfs between higher and lower years were bridged over. A little older than most men of his year, he was considerably their senior in character and in intellect. He showed at once the qualities which he retained to such a unique degree in later years--an inexhaustible power of making friends with all sorts and conditions of men, and an insatiable interest in all sides of College life; the most serious things were from the first not beyond his comprehension, and the most trivial did not appear to bore him, even when their freshness had worn off. His love of books was catholic; he possessed a great many and read them {11} to his friends. At the College Debate, of which he became secretary and president in his second year, he was a frequent and fluent speaker, with a remarkable command of language, though sometimes his eloquence was more than half burlesque. His powers of thought and real strength in argument were more often displayed in private discussions, where irony and humour hardly veiled the depth of earnestness below.' [Illustration: Forbes Robinson (1887)] During his first three years at Cambridge he read for the Theological Tripos. In the course of his first year he was elected a scholar of his College. At the beginning of his second year he won his first University distinction, the Carus prize for the Greek Testament. The other University prizes which he gained were the Jeremie prize for the Septuagint in 1889, the Burney prize essay in 1891, the Carus prize for Bachelors, the Hulsean prize essay, and the Crosse University Scholarship in 1892. He took his degree in the first class of the Theological Tripos in 1890, and obtained a second class in the Moral Science Tripos of 1891. The year which he spent in reading moral science he afterwards looked back upon as one of the most useful in his life. After he had been reading for some time in view of this Tripos, he wrote to a friend: 'I have come to the conclusion that I know nothing, and am an awful fool into the bargain. . . . The subject is so utterly fresh to me, so completely unlike theology of any sort at Cambridge, that I find it hard to do anything at it. In fact, I chucked it up for about ten days in the middle of the term, and determined to have nothing more to {12} do with it; but after that rest I thought better and renewed the study. It is an excellent training for the mind. I never distinctly remember thinking at all before this term.'