In my Cambridge days the Mathematical Tripos and the Classical Tripos were still in their primæval shape. It had gone on for half a century with little change, and lasted until 1882. If you were going in for either of these, you had no examinations (except Little Go) until the middle of your fourth year there, and then came these two Triposes with only four weeks interval between them. The system had worked well, but subjects were enlarged till it became unworkable--Electricity and Magnetism were reckoned as Mathematics, and so on with many other things. Down to 1850 nobody could go into the Classical Tripos unless he had already got honours in the Mathematical: in the next four years, 1851 to 1854, there were about thirty men each year who got honours in both; but in the four years I was there, 1877 to 1880, this average of thirty had fallen to an average of two, and in 1880 I was one of the two. I was a Senior Optime in the Mathematical Tripos and got a bad Third in the Classical--a result that always puzzles me, as I had a considerable knowledge of the Classics even then. I knew Greek enough at Harrow to get the prize there for Greek epigram, but I did not go seriously into Greek until after I came down from Cambridge. A few years later on, German reviewers were remarking that I knew Greek inscriptions and Greek literature from Homer onwards to the Fathers of the Church and the Byzantine authors, and that nothing escaped me even in neglected writings like the Almagest. I was doing other things as well, and cannot imagine now how I found time for all. But my interest in the Byzantines was not quite keen enough to satisfy Krumbacher. One day at Munich in 1896 he was advising me to read a book in Russian instead of its translation into French, and I said I knew too little of the language. He fired out--“You cannot read the Russian book? You go to Patmos. Go to Patmos.” I told him I had been to Jericho--or rather to its site--and had not found it very attractive; and Patmos had looked just as unattractive when I had seen it from a ship. But he meant it literally. I should learn good Russian from the monks, and could collate Byzantine manuscripts as well. It really was a first-rate plan, but somehow I did not go to Patmos. He was remarkable to look at--his hair had turned snow-white when he was only twenty, and he had eyes like coals of fire. In his own line he was unquestionably the greatest man since Ducange; and there at Munich he was a colleague of Furtwaengler, the greatest since Winckelmann in one aspect of archæology. I knew Furtwaengler from 1885, when he was still at Berlin, and Krumbacher from 1891. They both died far too young, at 53 or 54. With a further twenty years of life, they might have achieved far greater things than they had yet attempted. They were unaffected men and never posed, as Mommsen sometimes did when he thought of his resemblance to Voltaire.