Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/284

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244

that one of the Dons said, in reply: "No, sir! you are only a fool!"

The Hall-porter can tell you, unfortunately, nothing of Arthur Stanley's room at University College. And no persons now seem to know where they were.

It will be remembered, by the way, that Tom Brown wrote to Arthur as a Cambridge man.

Stanley, a Balliol man of Oxford, became a Tutor of University in 1838, and a Fellow in 1840; giving the best of his time and of himself, says one of his biographers, to firing his pupils with some of his own enthusiasm. His colleagues were stimulated by his example; and his College rose to a high position in the University. He left Oxford in 1851.

A youngster quite as precocious as Horne was John Connington, who repeated a thousand lines of Virgil to his father before he was twelve; and who, when he was thirteen, invested one pound thirteen shillings, out of his own pocket-money, for a copy of Homer. This was a number of years before John Fiske, a boy of about the same age, made, by his disagreeable drudgery, money enough to purchase his copy of Liddell and Scott's Greek Lexicon, in Middletown, Connecticut.

Connington was matriculated at University