It is sorrow-killing to see his amazement at sorrow, like the amazement of those spirits in Purgatory who exclaimed, as Dante passed: “The light seems not to shine on one side of him, though he behaves as one that lives.” Men of very different persuasions are fascinated by “the young Greek” in the Parks or on the river. He is successful everywhere, and is in time captain of football and president of the debating and literary society, although his knowledge of literature is confined to Scott’s Novels, _Hypatia_, and the _Idylls of the King_. He accepts the advice of the Important Undergraduate, here and elsewhere, and unconsciously ignores it, with happy results. For his contemporaries believe that he has launched his college upon one of those sudden, mysterious ascensions that mean social, learned, and athletic improvement at once. To the last he is diffident, and at the same time always capable of doing his best. “Can you clear that brook?” one asks in the Hinksey fields. “I don’t know,” is the reply, and over he goes, a foot clear amongst the orchis. Not a great deal more powerful than the cox, he strokes a boat that has never been bumped, and is the only oar whom the rest all praise. To see him halting over a commonplace speech at a college function, or making the most ludicrous new verses to the alphabetical song of “Jolly old Dons,” and winning applause; or dropping his head on his knees at the winning-post on the river; or carried for the hundredth time round the quadrangle on some festive night--is, nobody knows or asks why, an inspiration. And after his last farewell dinner he smiles, as if he knew everything or had the _pitié suprême_, as he notices the follies which he supposes he is “not clever enough for,” and goes down to his manor or country curacy very happily. IX There was for a short time, amidst but not of the University, a student whom I cannot but count as a “clerk of Oxenford.” He came from no school, but straight from a counting-house. All his life he had been a deep, unguided delver in the past. An orphan in the world, he had chosen his family among the noble persons of antiquity. Cæsar was more real to him than Napoleon, and Cato more influential than any millionaire. He had tasted all the types, from Diogenes to Seneca and Lucullus. When he tired of his counting-house, he tried to imagine a resemblance between it and a city state, but was himself but a helot in the end.