The digressive habit of mind not only grows upon him; he cultivates it. His tutor says that it is impossible to give a title to his best essays. Long, lonely evenings with books only encourage the habit. But he can defend it, and laughs at criticism. Shakespeare’s dramas, he says, flow through the centuries, like the Nile; his flood is not so vast, that it may not be aggrandised by many a tributary. It has come down to us vaster than when it reached Milton or Gray, not only by definite commentary, but by the shy emotions of a myriad readers. We add to it, he says triumphantly, by our digressions; and what revelation it may make in consequence, to a far future generation, we cannot guess. In his pursuit of words, which soon enthrall him, he goes far, rather than deep. Wherever the word has been cherished for its own sake, in all “decadent” literature, he makes his mind a home. He begins to write, but in a style which, along with his ornate penmanship, would occupy a lifetime, and result in one _brochure_ or half a dozen sonnets. It is a kind of higher philately. But it takes him to strange and fascinating byways in literature. He loves the grotesque. Now and then, he lets fall a quotation or even a dissertation on such a book at dinner, and suddenly he is launched into popularity. First he is hailed as a decadent, and shrinks. When the shrinking is over, he secretly falls in love with the half-contemptuous title, and seeks others who accept it. Now he is never by himself. Those with whom he has no sympathies like him because he happens to know _Pantagruel_ and a few books such as some undergraduates keep between false covers. His room is fragrant with unseasonable flowers, with the perfume of burning juniper, burning cassia, and cedar, and sweet oils. What if the honourable ghosts of Oxford frown upon his strange devotions? He is at least living a life that could not persist elsewhere. At chapel, he is reading Theophrastus. He is studying an undercurrent of the Italian Renaissance at a lecture on Thucydides. As if he were to live for ever, and in Oxford, his existence is such that his stay in Oxford or in life becomes precarious. He is reputed to be a connoisseur in wines, pictures, and sixteenth-century furniture. He is a Roman Catholic by profession, an agnostic by conviction; yet no religion or superstition is quite safe from his patronage. He mistakes the recrudescence of childishness for a sad and wise maturity. Freshmen are struck by his listless gaiety and the unkind and seeming wise solemnity of his light expressions. If to sit sumptuous and still, to discourse melodiously of everything or nothing, to be courteous, sentimental, cold, and rude in turns, were wisdom, he is wise. He acquires the lofty cynicism of the under-informed and the over-fed. He can talk with ease and point, about the merely married don, about virtue as the fine which the timid pay to the bold, about the dulness of enthusiasm and the strange beauty of grey.