In 1882 the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge brought out a book on _The Hebrew Text of the Old Covenant_, two volumes and upwards of 1200 pages; and I used to see it at the house of a friend of mine, who died some years ago. Wishing to look at it again, I asked a bookseller to get it for me, but he could not hear of a copy of it anywhere, either new or second-hand: so I had the University Library copy sent down to me from Cambridge. Though it had been in the Library for close on forty years, there were only two pages in the whole of it that had their edges cut. Of course, a prophet is without honour in his own country, and Jarrett was only a minor prophet; but it seems strange that nobody had curiosity enough to see more of the book.
There was a Professor at Oxford at whose blunders people laughed, forgetting that his blunders were only a by-product of a large output of learning. But once, when I was joining others in the laugh, we were all reduced to silence by a question from a friend of his, “Do any of you know of any other man in England who would sit for two hours up to his neck in a Syrian sewer in order to copy an inscription?”
There was also a Don I went to see whenever I was in Oxford--he was always ready for a talk on Dante or Strabo--and I usually found him seated in an easy-chair exactly in front of the fire with Minos and Rhadamanthus seated on foot-stools on each side of it. They were cats; and he had given them these names (when kittens) on returning from a tour in Crete. He had travelled a good deal, and was able to tell me that Albanians really had got tails--a fact that I had never been able to ascertain. The tails are very short, only the last few bones of the spine; and they are only on people whose Pelasgian ancestry has not been swamped by intermarrying with other races.
In my brother’s time at Cambridge there was a story of a Senior Wrangler lecturing an undergraduate for forty minutes on the theory of the common pump, and the undergraduate then asking him, “But why does the water go up?” There were men like that who could not get their knowledge out, and there were other men who could--it came down like a thunderstorm that goes streaming off the surface and does not sink into the ground. They did not teach you much of what they meant to teach, but every now and then they would come out with something that implied a mode of reasoning or a point of view which was entirely new to you. And these illuminating things made up for all the rest.