than his flesh and blood could
stand; then he was very penitent and would go a fairly long while without
sinning again. And this was how it had always been with him since he had arrived
at years of indiscretion.
    Even to the end of his career at Cambridge he was not aware that he could do
anything, but others had begun to see that he was not wanting in ability, and
sometimes told him so. He did not believe it, indeed he knew very well that if
they thought him clever they were being taken in, but it pleased him to have
been able to take them in, and he tried to do so still further; he was therefore
a good deal on the lookout for cants that he could catch and apply in season,
and might have done himself some mischief thus if he had not been ready to throw
over any cant as soon as he had come across another more nearly to his fancy;
his friends used to say that when he rose he flew like a snipe, darting several
times in various directions before he settled down to a steady straight flight -
but when he had once got into this he would keep to it.
 

                                   Chapter 46

When he was in his third year a magazine was founded at Cambridge, the
contributions to which were exclusively by undergraduates. Ernest sent in an
essay upon the Greek Drama, which he has declined to let me reproduce here
without his being allowed to re-edit it. I have therefore been unable to give it
in its original form, but when pruned of its redundancies (and this is all that
has been done to it) it runs as follows -
 
        »I shall not attempt within the limits at my disposal to make a résumé
        of the rise and progress of the Greek drama, but will confine myself to
        considering whether the reputation enjoyed by the three chief Greek
        tragedians, Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides is one that will be
        permanent, or whether they too will one day be held to have been
        overrated.
            Why, I ask myself, do I see much that I can easily admire in Homer,
        Thucydides, Herodotus, Demosthenes, Aristophanes, Theocritus, parts of
        Lucretius, Horace's satires and epistles, to say nothing of other
        ancient writers, and yet find myself at once repelled by even those
        works of Æschylus, Sophocles and Euripides which are most generally
        admired? With the first-named writers I am in the hands of men who feel,
        if not as I do, still as I can understand their feeling, and as I am
        interested to see that they should have felt; with the second