 for him to learn how to adapt his
wares to the market, and to know approximately what kind of a picture will fetch
how much, as it is for him to be able to paint the picture. This, I suppose, is
what the French mean by laying so much stress upon values.
    As regards the city itself, the more I saw the more enchanted I became. I
dare not trust myself with any description of the exquisite beauty of the
different colleges, and their walks and gardens. Truly in these things alone
there must be a hallowing and refining influence which is in itself half an
education, and which no amount of error can wholly spoil. I was introduced to
many of the Professors, who showed me every hospitality and kindness;
nevertheless I could hardly avoid a sort of suspicion that some of those whom I
was taken to see had been so long engrossed in their own study of hypothetics
that they had become the exact antitheses of the Athenians in the days of St.
Paul; for whereas the Athenians spent their lives in nothing save to see and to
hear some new thing, there were some here who seemed to devote themselves to the
avoidance of every opinion with which they were not perfectly familiar, and
regarded their own brains as a sort of sanctuary, to which if an opinion had
once resorted, none other was to attack it.
    I should warn the reader, however, that I was rarely sure what the men whom
I met while staying with Mr. Thims really meant; for there was no getting
anything out of them if they scented even a suspicion that they might be what
they call giving themselves away. As there is hardly any subject on which this
suspicion cannot arise, I found it difficult to get definite opinions from any
of them, except on such subjects as the weather, eating and drinking, holiday
excursions, or games of skill.
    If they cannot wriggle out of expressing an opinion of some sort, they will
commonly retail those of some one who has already written upon the subject, and
conclude by saying that though they quite admit that there is an element of
truth in what the writer has said, there are many points on which they are
unable to agree with him. Which these points were, I invariably found myself
unable to determine; indeed, it seemed to be counted the perfection of
scholarship and good breeding among them not to have - much less to express - an
opinion on any subject on which it might prove later that they had been
mistaken. The art of sitting gracefully on a fence has never, I should think,
been brought
