The drawing together of the threads of memories much more than half a century old is but dismal work. It is like walking through a cemetery filled with tombstones all inscribed with names that in spite of time are still familiar, and some of them very dear. This has probably been said before—it is so evident. Of the Dons of 1855 not one remains. Baynes, who died a few years ago, was the last. Even of my own contemporaries few, only here and there one, are left. The bright curly heads, fair or dark, with whose owners we lived, and laughed, and hoped and quarrelled, have all been laid low, and if one remains above ground, it is as bald as a billiard ball, or perhaps nourishes a few straggling lifeless hairs, white as old age can bleach them. Few became eminent: among them were Lord St. Aldwyn (Sir Michael Hicks-Beach), _facile princeps_—Alfred Thesiger, raised to be a Lord Justice of Appeal, but who did not live long to enjoy his fame—Roland Williams, also Lord Justice, himself the son of a judge (if I only knew how to apply “matre pulchrâ filia pulchrior” to a legal reputation!) one of the most delightful room-neighbours—were men who made their mark in the world—outside of Christ Church were Swinburne, and, a little older, Lord Justice Bowen, prince of lawyers and wits—Tom Brassey at University, and above all, John Morley at Exeter. The latter I did not know until a dozen or so years later, when he was already a power in Letters, a man for whom, differing with him as I always have done _toto cœlo_ in politics, I entertain the greatest respect mingled with an affectionate gratitude for giving me my first encouragement as a writer in 1871. The rest of us were just mediocrities: tolerable specimens of healthy young Englishmen ready to do our duty as landowners, soldiers, lawyers, clergymen, civil servants; in general, fairly respectable, in some cases woeful scamps. On one point we were most of us agreed, at any rate in practice, and that was that it was expedient that we should go through the University doing as little work and spending as much money as possible. That was the way in which we interpreted our duty to our parents. And so I spent the first two years of my life at Oxford in forgetting with the utmost facility the small modicum of scholarship that with the utmost difficulty I had acquired under Jelf. A piteous and a shameful record.