A scholar fully _en rapport_ with
Aristophanes or Juvenal and Martial may never have read Ben Jonson's
_Alchemist,_ or Beaumont and Fletcher's _Knight of the Burning
Pestle;_ or studied Charles Churchill, or Green on _The Spleen._
There was a mental attitude which the typical Don, full of the public-
school spirit and its dislikes, could never forgive. Except for the few
intimate friends who were devoted to me--Nettleship and Warren, T. H.
Green and, later, curiously enough, Mr. A. L. Smith, the present Master
of Balliol,--I was, I expect, universally regarded as the most
intolerable undergraduate they had ever beheld.
Jowett, the Master of Balliol, evidently felt the Stracheyphobia very
strongly, or perhaps I should say felt it his duty to express it very
strongly. He had not, I think, a great natural instinct in regard to the
characters of young men, but he was naturally anxious to improve those
with whom he came in contact. His method was to apply two or three fixed
rules. One of these was--and a good one in suitable cases--that if you
got hold of a boy who thought too much of himself, the best thing was to
stamp upon him upon every possible occasion, and so help him to reform
his ways.
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