They must have felt quite justified when, two years afterwards, I took my First in History with congratulatory letters from all my examiners, while all the scholars of Trinity who went in for the School of Literæ Humaniores took Seconds and Thirds. I should have got a Fourth, I am convinced.
Again I read voraciously. For the first year I hardly bothered about my text-books at all. I read biographies, books about architecture and art and literature, historical novels, the writings of historical personages, everything which threw brilliant sidelights on my subject. And in the second year I learnt my text-books almost by heart, except Stubbs’s Constitutional History and Selected Charters. I simply could not memorise them—they were so dry, and I hated the dry bones of Constitutional History almost as badly as philosophy. I learned digests of them, which took less time, and were no dryer, and proved equally efficacious in answering the papers.
In after years, when I was entertaining Bishop Stubbs at a reception, which Montague Fowler and I gave in honour of Mark Twain at the Authors’ Club, he roared with laughter when I told him that I got a First in History without reading his books, by learning the Digests of them by heart.
He said, “I know they are dreadfully dull. Did you find my lectures very dull when you came to them?” He had not forgotten that I had attended his lectures for a couple of years.
I said, “No, not at all.”
“Honestly, did you get any good from them?”
“Quite honestly?”
He nodded.
I said, “Not in the usual way.”
“Well,” he asked, “how did you get any good from them?”