Not long afterwards I received a nomination for the Foreign Office and was delighted to say farewell to the University. I was disgusted with Oxford, when I ought to have been disgusted with myself. But it was better that I should go. Amidst the old surroundings it would have been difficult, perhaps impossible for me to break with the old habits, the old loafing, and for an undergraduate there is nothing so dangerous, nothing so demoralizing as loafing. In that respect I believe that the University can claim a change for the better. In my day, unless a youngster played cricket or rowed in the summer, unless he hunted or went out riding in the winter, there was little for him to do except dawdle about the High Street, or play billiards, or rackets, or tennis, and for these latter games there was but small provision. There was no hockey, and practically no football: I believe that there were a few young men who kicked about a ball in remote pastures, but the game was looked upon as a degradation and the players as eccentricities. There were no “blues” except for the eleven, and the eight. I quite sympathize with those who think that too much attention is now given to games; still, when I go to Oxford and see the hundreds of lads flocking out, half naked, to football, hockey, running and jumping, I cannot help admitting that they are leading cleaner, wholesomer lives than we did, when we sauntered between Carfax and Magdalen Bridge, parading the last unpaid masterpiece of some London tailor. I am reminded of one of Gavarni’s old caricatures. A poor, shabby student in the Quartier Latin is watching another trying on a very glorious new coat. “Combien ça te coûte-t-il un habit comme cela?” “Je ne sais pas.” “Dieu veuille, mon cher, que tu ne le saches jamais!” Sooner or later the bill has to be paid, whether for loafing or for coats, and the bill for loafing is the heavier of the two. CHAPTER VI THE F. O. Je suis copiste, Affreux métier! Joyeux ou triste, Toujours copier! No one knew who was the unhappy clerk who, in a pessimistic mood, wrote those Dantesque lines with a diamond on a pane of glass in the old Foreign Office in Downing Street. If I had been in England when the old house was broken up, I should have tried to buy that window-pane, with its inscription—a note of despair recalling the “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ intrate.”