There was a Professor at Oxford at whose blunders people laughed, forgetting that his blunders were only a by-product of a large output of learning. But once, when I was joining others in the laugh, we were all reduced to silence by a question from a friend of his, “Do any of you know of any other man in England who would sit for two hours up to his neck in a Syrian sewer in order to copy an inscription?” There was also a Don I went to see whenever I was in Oxford--he was always ready for a talk on Dante or Strabo--and I usually found him seated in an easy-chair exactly in front of the fire with Minos and Rhadamanthus seated on foot-stools on each side of it. They were cats; and he had given them these names (when kittens) on returning from a tour in Crete. He had travelled a good deal, and was able to tell me that Albanians really had got tails--a fact that I had never been able to ascertain. The tails are very short, only the last few bones of the spine; and they are only on people whose Pelasgian ancestry has not been swamped by intermarrying with other races. In my brother’s time at Cambridge there was a story of a Senior Wrangler lecturing an undergraduate for forty minutes on the theory of the common pump, and the undergraduate then asking him, “But why does the water go up?” There were men like that who could not get their knowledge out, and there were other men who could--it came down like a thunderstorm that goes streaming off the surface and does not sink into the ground. They did not teach you much of what they meant to teach, but every now and then they would come out with something that implied a mode of reasoning or a point of view which was entirely new to you. And these illuminating things made up for all the rest. There is talk enough now of the training of teachers and the art of teaching. These men had no such training, and would have scoffed at it as a mere trick by which a silly man could make the most of what he knew. And possibly there are schoolteachers now whose knowledge would look small unless they made the most of it. Education now means class-rooms, attendances, inspections, salaries, and such like things, and very little of what it used to mean; and I fear that it may someday meet the fate of monasteries under Henry VIII. The monasteries saved learning from extinction in the depths of the Dark Ages, and afterwards they were the guardians of the poor: yet they were all swept away, for no shortcomings of their own, but just because there were so many of them that they ate the country up.