At Cambridge things were not very different. I was starved intellectually by the meagre academical system. I took up the Classical Tripos, and read, with translations, in the loosest style imaginable, great masses of classical literature, caring little about the subject matter, seldom reading the notes, with no knowledge of history, archÆology, or philosophy, and even strangely ignorant of idiom. I received no guidance in these matters; my attendance at lectures was not insisted upon; and the composition lecturers, though conscientious, were not inspiring men. My tutor did, it must be confessed, make some attempt to influence my reading, urging me to lay down a regular plan, and even recommending books and editions. But I was too dilatory to carry it out; and though I find that in one Long Vacation I read through the Odyssey, the Æneid, and the whole of Aristotle’s Ethics, yet they left little or no impression on my mind. I did indeed drift into a First Class, but this was merely due to familiarity with, rather than knowledge of, the Classics; and my ignorance of the commonest classical rules was phenomenal.

But I did derive immense intellectual stimulus from my Cambridge life, though little from the prescribed course of study; for I belonged to a little society that met weekly, and read papers on literary and ethical subjects, prolonging a serious, if fitful, discussion late into the night. I read a great deal of English in a sketchy way, and even wrote both poetry and fiction; but I left Cambridge a thoroughly uneducated man, without an idea of literary method, and contemning accuracy and precision in favour of brilliant and heady writing. The initial impulse to interest in literature was certainly instinctive in me; but I maintain that not only did that interest never receive encouragement from the professed educators under whose influence I passed, but that I was not even professionally trained in the matter; that solidity and accuracy were never insisted upon; and that the definiteness, which at least education is capable of communicating, was either never imparted by mental processes, or that I successfully resisted the imparting of it—indeed, never knew that any attempt was being made to teach me the value or necessity of it.

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