‘The name given me by my foolish old father—whose father was a contemporary of Bentley—who gave his life to the study of Homer, and tried to establish the thesis that early Greece had but one poet; that the cyclic poets were the merest phantasma; and that Stasinus, Arctinus, Lesches, and the rest, were but the mouthpieces of that one mighty bard. Every man is said to be mad upon one point, or mad once in twenty-four hours. My father was very mad about Greek. He gave me my ridiculous name—which made me the laughing-stock of my schoolfellows—a university education and his blessing. He had no more to give. My college career cost him the only fortune he could have left me; and I found myself, at one-and-twenty, fatherless, motherless, homeless, and penniless, and—what to my poor father would have seemed worst of all—plucked for my incapacity to appreciate the niceties of Homeric Greek.’ ‘How did you weather the storm?’ ‘I might not have weathered it at all, but for a self-delusion which sustained me in the very face of starvation. But for that I could hardly have crossed Waterloo-bridge without being sorely tempted to take the shortest cut out of my perplexities. I fancied myself a painter. That dream kept me alive. I got bread somehow; sold my daubs to a dealer; made some progress even in the art of daubing; and only after five years of hard work and harder living awoke one day to the bitter truth that I was no more a painter than I was a Grecian, no nearer Reynolds than Porson.’ ‘You bore your disappointment bravely, I imagine.’ ‘Why imagine that?’ ‘Because your physiognomy teaches me your ability to come safely through such an ordeal—a will strong enough to stand against even a worse shock.’