The liberal life, close in friendship with so many of the living and the historical, on occasions almost gives him the freedom of all time. His friends note that Catullus or Lucan or Dante is nearer to him than to other men. He quotes them as if he had lived with them and were their executor, and by his sympathy seems to have won a part authorship of their finest things. He expounds the law and makes it as exhilarating as the _Arabian Nights_, or as if it were a sequel to _Don Quixote_. And in history the dons notice his picturesqueness, which is as passionate as if he could have written that ardent sonnet:-- The kings come riding back from the Crusade, The purple kings, and all their mounted men; They fill the street with clamorous cavalcade; The kings have broken down the Saracen. Singing a great song of the Eastern wars, In crimson ships across the sea they came, With crimson sails and diamonded dark oars, That made the Mediterranean flash with flame. And reading how, in that far month, the ranks Formed on the edge of the desert, armoured all, I wish to God that I had been with them When the first Norman leapt upon the wall, And Godfrey led the foremost of the Franks, And young Lord Raymond stormed Jerusalem. So the glories of youth and history and summer mingle in his brain and speech. No one is so married to his surroundings as he, and while he appears to many to be shaped by them--beautiful or grotesque--as an animal in a shell; to a few he appears also to shape them, so that Oxford in his company is a new thing, as if it were the highest, last creation of the modern mind. He does not acquiesce in the limp mediævalism of the rest, but recreates the Middle Ages for himself, finding new humanities in the sculptures, and beauties in the perspective, strange sympathies between the monkish work and the voices and faces of those who sit amidst it. In his own college he effects a surprising “modernisation” by removing a little eighteenth-century work and revealing the fifteenth-century original. Thus all history is to him a vivid personal experience. But he is overwhelmed by his versatility, and cultivates that for its own sake, and at last loses his sympathy with all who are not as he. The athletes begin to treat him as a poser. The hard workers stand aloof from his extravagances. With different sets he is treated and rejected as a man of the world, a hepatetic philosopher, a dilettante; ... some speak of the literary taint; the dons are tired. He is in danger of becoming the hero of the most unstable freshman and his scout. And so, though he has perhaps but one failing more than his contemporaries, and certainly more virtues, he is ridiculed or feared or despised, and goes about like Leonolo in the play, who wandered Because perhaps among the crowd I shall find some to whom I may relate That story of the children and the meat--