It was at some time during that year that J. K. Stephen, the founder of the T.A.F., returned to King’s, and instantly for me all the lesser lights of general influence were eclipsed. In presence and personality alike he was one of those who without effort or aim impose themselves on their circle. Had he never said a word, the very fact of his being in the room must have produced more effect that any conversation that might go on round him. He was splendidly handsome, big of head, impressive and regular of feature, and enormously massive in build; slow moving and shambling when he walked, but somehow monumental. He had an immense fund of humour, grim and rather savage at times, at others of such froth and frolic as appeared in the two volumes of verse which he published during the next year, _Lapsus Calami_, and _Quo Musa tendis_. But this bubbling lightness was markedly uncharacteristic of his normal self. That it was there, those two volumes proved, but that particular spring, that light-hearted Puck-like quality, he certainly reserved for his verse, which to those who knew him was in no way the flower of his mind. In the dedication to _Lapsus Calami_, he expresses the desire that the reader should recognize his debt to “C.S.C.” (Calverley of _Fly Leaves_), he hopes that some one will think that “of C.S.C. this gentle art he learned,” and undoubtedly the reader did think so, for it was certainly C.S.C. whose method inspired some of these poems. But it is just these poems in which he was obviously indebted to Calverley, that are least worthy and characteristic of him. Jim Stephen made, at his worst, amusing neat little rhymes not nearly so good as Calverley’s, but, at his best, he made poems, such as “The Old School List,” of which Calverley was quite incapable. Both also were brilliant parodists, but here J.K.S. had a far subtler art than the man with whom he hoped his readers would compare him. Calverley’s famous parody of Robert Browning, “The Cock and the Bull,” does not touch in point of rapier-work J.K.S.’s poem “Sincere Flattery to R.B.” The one does no more than seize on ridiculous phrases in Browning, and go a shade further in absurdity: the other (“Birthdays”) parodies the very essence of the more obscure lyrics: you cannot read it, however often you have done so, without the hope that you may this time or the next find out what it means. He was the inventor, too, of a peculiarly pleasing artifice with regard to parody, for he put into Wordsworth’s mouth, for instance, in pure Wordsworthian phrase, the exact opposite of Wordsworth’s teaching, and produced a lament over the want of locomotive power in the Lake district. The effect is inimitable: the poet longs to see in those happy days when Helvellyn’s base is tunnelled, and its peak grimy The dusky grove of iron rails Which leads to Euston Square, and in lines that almost must have been written by Wordsworth exclaims: