So it happened that he came to live in a cottage attic, five or six miles from Oxford. He wanted to be a university man. He despised scholarships as if they had been the badge of the Legion of Honour. Colleges he would have nothing to do with, because they spoiled the simplicity of the idea of a university in his mind. They had made possible the social folly of Oxford. But in his reading of history he had travelled no farther than the Middle Ages towards his own time; and a picture of Oxford life in that day fascinated him. He believed that it was still possible to lead the unstable, independent, penniless life of a scholar; and he knew not why a student should hope or wish to be anything like a merchant or a prince. A merchant had money, and a prince flattery: he would have wisdom. It was likely to be a long search, and in his view it was the search that was beyond price. He wanted wisdom as a man might want a star, because it was a rare and beautiful thing. So his studies were a spiritual experience. The short passages of Homer which he knew by heart had something of religious unction in his utterance. He left London afoot, with a parcel of books strapped to his shoulders; his only disappointment coming from a landlord who refused to pay for his singing with a meal, as he would have done six hundred years ago. A farmer treated him generously, under the belief that he was mad. A few antiquated Greek texts and notes, an odd volume of Chronicles from the Rolls Series, and an Aldrich, adorned his room, and with their help he hoped to lay the foundations of a seraphic, universal wisdom. Gradually he would become worthy to use the Bodleian and contend with the learned gown and hostile town. Once a week, in the beginning, he walked into Oxford. He saw the river covered with boats, and laughed happily and pitifully at men who seemed to know nothing about the uses of a university. A good-tempered youth, in rowing knickerbockers, was a fit disciple for his revelations, he thought, and was about to preach, when he barely escaped from a bicycle and a megaphone. Almost sad, murmuring Abelard’s line Sunt multi fratres sed in illis rarus amicus-- he hastened to the city. The spires gave him courage again, and he ran, singing an old song:-- When that I was a scholar bold, And in my head was wealth untold: Heigh! Ho! in the days of old In Oxford town a scholar trolled.