I can see him, in a brown library or a pictured hall, beginning a lecture. He moves about a little uneasily, like the late William Morris, and as if he would rather use deeds than words. An old book lies open before him: now and then he turns over a page, reads to himself, and smiles. The conscientious undergraduate looks at his watch and begins spoiling his pen upon the blotting-paper. He comes to take notes; but Urbanus does not care. Suddenly the lecturer laughs heartily at a good passage and begins:-- “I think perhaps you will like this story....” And he reads, punctuating the matter with his own lively appreciation. Somerville and Lady Margaret and St. Hugh’s look resigned; future first (or third) class men look contemptuous; a Blue feels that his time is being wasted,--he must complain,--he rises and walks out as Urbanus remarks:-- “I don’t know your name, sir, but you can sleep _here_, if you wish.” Urbanus closes the book five minutes before or after the appointed hour; some one mutters about “the worst lecturer in this incubator of bad lecturers”: such is his influence, not so much injecting knowledge as dredging and maturing what is already gained, that others can think of him easily as a humanist of the great days, who has survived in his old college, with an indifference to mere time which is not incredible in Oxford, where memories three centuries old are still alive in oral tradition. VI Philip Amberley, late fellow of----, took it much to heart that he was not born in 1300. He would have been a monk, and would have illuminated Ovid to the astonishment of all ages. All he could do in this age was to perform his tutorial duty, and to write a few pages of noble English in a caligraphy that was worthy of the ages he loved. He wrote but one book, which he burned, because nobody would give him £5 for it. A not very old or very credible story tells how an intelligent alien blurted out the question, at the high table of Philip’s college: Whether the uncomely heads before the Sheldonian Theatre were not the fellows of that same college. The inquirer was corrected with asperity; and in revenge he always stated that he afterwards received photographs of the younger fellows, by way of removing the mote from his eye. But Philip sent a photograph of the least human physiognomy, signed with full name and college. For the rest, he had that uncertainty of character which is called conscience in the good and timidity in the bad, and in him meant merely that he exchanged an act for a dream. He was filled with a supreme pity, even for the Devil, whom he called “that immortal scapegoat of gods and men.”