He will attend the lectures of----, which are outside his course. He will accept some hearty excesses in the rooms of---- as equally important. When he comes up his sympathies are universal. He is eager and warm in his liking of men and things; and he is straightway on happy terms with undergraduates and dons. After a few terms his versatility is hard-worked in order to give something more than an appearance of sympathy in the company of athletes, reading men, contemplative men, and wealthy men. For a time his success is sublime. The reading man thinks there was never such a student. The rowing man approves of his leg-work and his narratives at those little training parties for the enjoyment of music, port, and fruit--“togger ports.” His method appeals to the don. Now and then, indeed, some one a little more reticent than himself puts him to a test, and he may discourse on Aquinas to a Unitarian Socialist, or on Gargantua to one deep in Christian mysticism or fresh from the new year’s advice of his great-aunt. In such cases, either he is repulsed with sufficient narrowness on the part of the other to supply a necessary balm, or he makes a surprised and admiring convert, who may do odd things on account of his inferior versatility. For quite a long time he may have the good fortune to let loose his interest in the Ptolemies in the neighbourhood of other admirers or neutral gentlemen. And so long all is more than well. He is popular, exuberant, and in a fair way of growth, albeit a little overdone. It is true that in tired moments he is likely to choose the path of least resistance and find himself in not very versatile company. But what a life he leads! what afternoons on the Cherwell between Marston and Islip in the summer; and beyond Fyfield, when autumn still has all that is a perfecting of summer in its gift! The admiring plodder who hears his speeches says that he will some day be Lord Chancellor. His verses have something beyond cleverness in them: they have a high impulsion, as when spring makes a crown imperial or a tulip. And listening to his talk or reading his letters, one might think that he will be content to be one of those men of genius who avoid fame--but if their letters are unearthed two hundred years hence they will have the life of Wotton’s or T. E. Brown’s. His friends think that such a clear-souled, gracious, brilliant creature would leaven the Senior Common Room and draw out the shyness of ----, and twist the neck of ----’s exuberant dulness.