His School and University career was uniformly successful. At Winchester he won prizes in many subjects and several tongues, and carried off the Goddard Scholarship, the intellectual blue ribbon, at the age of sixteen.
At Cambridge he was Browne University Scholar in 1903, and in the first “division” of the Classical Tripos in 1904, in which year he also won the Craven Scholarship. The senior Chancellor’s medal fell to him in the following year.
There is no need to enumerate his other distinctions, but the epigram with which he won the Browne Medal in 1903 is so beautiful in itself and so true an epitome of the boy and the man, that I am tempted to quote it here:
ξεῖνε, καλὸν τὸ ζῆν καταγώγιόν ἐστιν ἅπασιν
νηπυτίους γὰρ ὅμως νυκτιπλανεῖς τε φιλεῖ,
δῶρα χαριζόμενον φιλίας καὶ τερπνὸν ἔρωτα
καὶ πόνον εὔανδρον φροντίδα τ’ οὐρανίαν·
τρυχομένους δ’ ἤδη κοιμᾷ τὸν ἀκήρατον ὕπνον
πέμπει δ’ ὥστε λαθεῖν οἰκάδ’ ἐληλυθότας.
He was always an optimist, who regarded life as a “fair Inn,” which provided much good cheer. Shyness and ill-health limited sadly the range of his friends, but not his capacity and desire for “friendship.” “Manly toil,” both physical and intellectual, was dear to his soul: thus, though no great athlete, he was an ardent Volunteer both at School and College, and declared that, had he not chosen the teacher’s profession, he would have wished to be a soldier: he writes of Sparta and Xenophon with evident sympathy. Also he fought and won many an intellectual battle against great odds; to quote one instance, he wrote the papers for his Craven Scholarship while convalescent in his old nursery. His poems, to complete the parallel, may justly be described as the “aspiring thoughts” of a singularly pure and reverent heart.