202 PRÆTERITA-I

in Tauris,¹ and found, to his own and all the class’s astonishment and disgust, that I did not know what a triglyph was,-never spoke to me with any patience again, until long afterwards at St. Paul’s, where he received me, on an occasion of school ceremony, with affection and respect.

Hussey was, by all except the best men of the college, felt to be a censorious censor; and the manners of the college were unhappily such as to make any wise censor censorious. He had, by the judgment of heaven, a grim countenance; and was to me accordingly, from first to last, as a Christchurch Gorgon or Erinnys, whose passing cast a shadow on the air as well as on the gravel.

I am amused, as I look back, in now perceiving what an æsthetic view I had of all my tutors and companions,-how consistently they took to me the aspect of pictures, and how I from the first declined giving any attention to those which were not well painted enough. My ideal of a tutor was founded on what Holbein or Dürer had represented in Erasmus² or Melanchthon, or, even more solemnly, on Titian’s Magnificoes or Bonifazio’s Bishops. No presences of that kind appeared either in Tom or Peckwater; and even Doctor Pusey (who also never spoke to me) was not in the least a picturesque or tremendous figure, but only a sickly and rather ill put together English clerical gentleman, who never looked one in the face, or appeared aware of the state of the weather.

230. My own tutor was a dark-eyed, animated, pleasant, but not in the least impressive person, who walked with an unconscious air of assumption, noticeable by us juniors not to his advantage. Kynaston was ludicrously like a fat schoolboy. Hussey, grim and brown as I said, somewhat lank, incapable of jest, equally incapable of enthusiasm; for the rest, doing his duty thoroughly, and a most estimable member of the college and university,-but to me, a

¹ [Ruskin made good use of the line, however, presently in his Poetry of Architecture, § 126: see Vol. I. p. 99.]

² [See Plates XXXVI. and XXXVII. in Vol. XXII. (pp. 418, 419).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]