A more suitable exercise, as it would have seemed at first sight, was supplied by that curious portion of Oxford routine, the Annual Prize Poem. This, he himself tells us, was, in his academic years, the real and single object of his ambition. His reason is, for an autobiographical reason, decidedly simple. ‘A great poet,’ he says, ‘I should not have imagined myself, for I knew well enough that the verses were no great things.’ But he entertained at that period of life—he was twenty-one—a favourable opinion of young ladies; and he seems to have ascertained, possibly from actual trial, that verses were not in themselves a very emphatic attraction. Singular as it may sound, the ladies selected were not only insensible to what is, after all, a metaphysical line, the distinction between good poetry and bad, but were almost indifferent to poetry itself. Yet the experiment was not quite conclusive. Verses might fail in common life, and yet succeed in the Sheldonian theatre. It is plain that they would be _read out_; it occurred to him, as he naïvely relates, that if he should appear ‘as a prizeman,’ ‘as an intelligible reciter of poetry,’ he would be an object of ‘some curiosity to the fair promenaders in Christchurch Meadow;’ that the young ladies ‘with whom he was on bowing and speaking terms might have felt a satisfaction in being known to know me, which they had never experienced before.’ ‘I should,’ he adds, ‘have deemed myself a prodigious lion, and it was a character I was weak enough to covet more than that of poet, scholar, or philosopher.’