XI. CHRIST CHURCH CHOIR 211

Society, which had its quiet club-room at the corner of Oriel Lane, looking across to the “beautiful gate”¹ of St. Mary’s; and on whose books were entered the names of most of the good men belonging to the upper table and its set, who had passed through Christ Church for the last ten or twelve years.

237. Under these luxurious, and-in the world’s sight-honourable, conditions, my mind gradually recovering its tranquillity and spring, and making some daily, though infinitesimal, progress towards the attainment of common sense, I believe that I did harder and better work in my college reading than I can at all remember. It seems to me now as if I had known Thucydides, as I knew Homer (Pope’s!),² since I could spell; but the fact was, that for a youth who had so little Greek to bless himself with at seventeen, to know every syllable of his Thucydides at half past eighteen meant some steady sitting at it. The perfect honesty of the Greek soldier, his high breeding, his political insight, and the scorn of construction with which he knotted his meaning into a rhythmic strength that writhed and wrought every way at once, all interested me intensely in him as a writer; while his subject, the central tragedy of all the world, the suicide of Greece, was felt by me with a sympathy in which the best powers of my heart and brain were brought up to their fullest, for my years.³

I open, and lay beside me as I write, the perfectly clean and well-preserved third volume of Arnold, over which I spent so much toil, and burnt with such sorrow; my close-written abstracts still dovetailed into its pages; and read with surprised gratitude the editor’s final sentence in the preface dated “Fox How, Ambleside, January, 1835.”

¹ [Acts iii. 2. The MS. adds a note:-

“The South Porch, whose twisted pillars were copied from those in Raphael’s cartoon of Peter and John at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple.”

This Italian porch was erected by Morgan Owen, one of Laud’s chaplains, and the image of the Virgin and Child over it formed one of the articles on which the Archbishop was impeached.]

² [See above, § 61 (p. 51).]

³ [For a passage that follows here in the MS., see below, p. 610.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]