Yet I do not doubt that I may have occasionally “rubbed Whately the wrong way,” as the phrase goes. He was, as I have said, a most autocratically minded man. And we Wykehamists, as the reader may have perceived from my Winchester reminiscences, were not accustomed to be ruled autocratically. We lived under the empire, and I might almost say, in an atmosphere of law, as distinguished from individual will. It was constantly in our minds and on our tongues, that the “informator” or the “hostiarius” _could_ or _could not_ do this or that. We lived with the ever-present consciousness that the _suprema lex_ was not what this master or the other master, or even the Warden might say, save in so far as it coincided with the college statutes. And I doubt not that Whately perceived and understood the influence of this habit of mind in something or other that I might have said or done. It was probably something of the sort which led to his telling me that he wanted no New College manners at Alban Hall. My “Winchester manners” however, enabled me I remember to understand him when some of his own flock could not. He would at a Euclid lecture say, “Take any straight line,” scrawling, as he said the words, a line as far from straight as he could draw it, to the utter bewilderment of some among his audience, who, I believe, really thought that the Principal was a shocking bad draughtsman, while the despised Wykehamist perfectly understood that his object was to show that the process of reasoning to be illustrated in no wise depended on accuracy of lines or angles. There is another passage in one of the letters published by his biographer, which illustrates Whately’s aversion from all Wiccamical men and things, and at the same time his utter ignorance of them. “It is commonly said at Oxford,” he writes, “at least it used to be, that it was next to impossible to make a Wykehamist believe that any examination could be harder than that which the candidates for New College undergo.” My reader has already been told in some degree what that examination was, and the nature of it. It was a real and serious examination, whereas that of candidates for admission to Winchester College was a mere form; and it was certainly a searching examination into the thoroughness with which schoolboys had done their schoolboy work. But the supposition that any New College man ever imagined his examination in election chamber to be of equal difficulty with the subsequent work at the university, or with that in the schools for honours, is an absolute proof that the person so supposing never knew anything about them, or had come much into contact with them.