There is some truth in the contention. The erudite world is apt to think that a reputation acquired with the general public by literary accomplishments is a second-rate sort of affair, and only to be gained by those who are not sufficiently hard-headed and exact to win academical repute. A man, too, who betrays an interest in the younger members of the community is thought to be slightly abnormal, and either to be actuated by a vague sentimentality, or else to be desirous of receiving the admiration of immature minds, which he cannot win from more mature intellects. This atmosphere, these conditions, Pater accepted with the gentle outward deference that was characteristic of him; he had no taste for the warm luxuriance of coteries; he had no sort of desire to label with contemptuous names those who must have appeared to him deaf and blind to the subtle and beautiful effects that made the substance of his own life. It seemed a curious irony of fate which planted Pater in a college which for years enjoyed a robust pre-eminence for athletic triumphs, together with a reputation for wholesale turbulence. But it may be said that such an atmosphere was not wholly uncongenial to Pater. Though he had no sort of proficiency in athletics, and though he was pre-eminently peaceable in disposition, he had, as I have said, a genuine and deep admiration for strongly developed physical vigour, while he had little of the sensitive disciplinary instinct that feels the frank display of youthful ebullience a kind of slur upon the privileges of constituted authority. No one was more anxious than Pater, in a disciplinary crisis, to give a case a fair hearing, and to condone as far as possible an outbreak that was thoughtless rather than deliberate. In all cases where there was a question of the infliction of punishment for some breach of discipline, Pater was always on the side of mercy. And this was with no wish to preserve his own dignity by temporising with the disorderly section. He was always a loyal and faithful supporter of authority, while he was anxious that a case should not be judged with the undue sternness that the sense of outraged dignity tends to bring with it. As Dr. Bussell wrote:— “Naturally inclined to a certain rigour in discipline, he was full of excuse for individual cases; and regretted and thought over stern measures more than most members of a governing body can afford to do.”