Really the greatest kindness my friends can do me is to leave me in peaceful obscurity, for I have lived so secluded a life that I am more and more disinclined to crowds of any kind. I had to submit to it in America, but then I felt exceptionally well, whereas now I am altogether weak and seedy and not at all up to fatigue or excitement.—Yours very faithfully,
ALFRED R. WALLACE.
Prof. Poulton pressed him to reconsider his decision, and he reluctantly gave way.
Godalming. June 2, 1889.
My dear Mr. Poulton,—I am exceedingly obliged by your kind letters, and I will say at once that if the Council of the University should again ask me to accept the degree, to be conferred in the autumn, as you propose, I could not possibly refuse it. At the same time I hope you will not in any way urge it upon them, as I really feel myself too much of an amateur in Natural History and altogether too ignorant (I left school—a bad one—finally, at fourteen) to receive honours from a great University. But I will say no more about that.—Yours very faithfully,
A.R. WALLACE.
In due course he received the degree. "On that occasion," says Professor Poulton, "Wallace stayed with us, and I was anxious to show him something of Oxford; but, with all that there is to be seen, one subject alone absorbed the whole of his interest—he was intensely anxious to find the rooms where Grant Allen had lived. He had received from Grant Allen's father a manuscript poem giving a picture of the ancient city dimly seen by midnight from an undergraduate's rooms. With the help of Grant Allen's college friends we were able to visit every house in which he had lived, but were forced to conclude that the poem was written in the rooms of a friend or from an imaginary point of view."
His friend Sir W.T. Thiselton-Dyer, with others, was promoting his election to the Royal Society, and wrote to him: