“You must forgive me if I tell you.”
“Tell me; it cannot be worse than what you said about my books.”
“Well,” I confessed, “the reason why I attended your lectures was that you never bothered as to whether I was there or not, and I hardly ever was there. I did not think any lectures were any good, but my tutor made me attend sixteen a week, and the time which I was supposed to spend at your lectures, I used to spend in my rooms reading. You were the only gentleman among my lecturers—all the rest used to call the names, and report me to my tutor if I was absent.”
He was immensely tickled, and said, “You deserved to get a First, if you took things as seriously as that.”
But Bishop Stubbs was very human. He always read the lightest novel he could lay hands on before he went to bed, to relieve his mind after working, and save him from insomnia.
“They are so light,” he said, “that I keep other books in front of them in my book-case.”
As an author, I have found the education I was given and gave myself a very useful foundation. Those ten years I gave to the study of Latin and Greek and classical history and mythology were not thrown away, because I have written so many books about Italy and Sicily and Egypt, in which having the classics at my fingers’ ends made me understand the history, and the allusions in the materials I had to digest. It is impossible to write freely about Italy and Greece unless you know your classics.
The two years of incessant study which I gave to taking my degree in Modern History at Oxford have been equally useful, because it is impossible to write guide-books and books of travel unless you have a sound knowledge of history.
For a brief while my degree in history had a most practical and technical value, for it won me the Chair of Modern History in the University of Sydney, New South Wales.
Beyond a week or two in Paris, I had never left England before I went to Australia in the end of 1879, a few months after I left Oxford, but I knew my England pretty well, because my father had always encouraged me to see the parts of England which contained the finest scenery and the architectural chefs d’œuvres, like cathedrals. Ireland I had never visited, and of Scotland I only knew Dumfriesshire, where my father rented a shooting-box and a moor for four years; and where I had enjoyed splendid rough shooting when I was a boy, in the very heart of the land of Burns. “The Grey Mare’s Tail” was on one shooting which we had, and the Carlyle cottage was right under our Craigenputtock shooting.