Perhaps his schoolmasters have been Oxford men. But that has not disillusioned him. He has been in the habit of thinking of them as men who, for some fault or misfortune, have come back from the fortunate islands, discontented or empty. They have not known how to use the place: he knows, or will learn to know; and he dreams of it in his peaceful country school, or at a London school, where boys go as to a place of business, and make verses as others cast accounts. To some Oxford men, Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis” is the finest poem that was ever written; and he knows it by heart already; has sighed ignorantly over it; and as his train draws near to Oxford, he repeats it to himself, with a most fantastic fervour, as if it were half a prayer and half a love-song, and certainly more than half his own. The pleasant excited uncertainty, as to whether he has seen the Fyfield elm, or whether that oaken slope was Cumnor, and his happy surmises while his eye skips from tower to tower in the distance, blind him to the drizzling, holiday air of the platform: he has no time to remember how it differs from Eastbourne: he is so set upon beholding the High Street that he is indifferent to the tram and the mean streets, and is not reminded of Wandsworth. The cabman is to him a supernal, Olympian cabman. He pays the man heavily, and quotes from Sophocles as he steps through the lodge gate, amid the greetings of porter, messenger, and a scout or two. The magnificent quadrangle gives a dignity to his walk that is laughable to senior men. He goes from room to room, making his choice, and knows not whether to be attracted by the spaciousness of one suite, or the miniature sufficiency of another,--the wainscot of a third, the traditions of a fourth, or the view from a fifth.