to fake the old VICTORY at Portsmouth into a line of
battleship again. Besides which the old Academic mind, like those old
bathless, damp Gothic colleges, is much too delightful in its peculiar
and distinctive way to damage by futile patching.

My heart warms to a sense of affectionate absurdity as I recall dear old
Codger, surely the most "unleaderly" of men. No more than from the old
Schoolmen, his kindred, could one get from him a School for Princes.
Yet apart from his teaching he was as curious and adorable as a good
Netsuke. Until quite recently he was a power in Cambridge, he could
make and bar and destroy, and in a way he has become the quintessence of
Cambridge in my thoughts.

I see him on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish
face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand
carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a
trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping
pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I
see him lecturing. He lectured walking up and down between the desks,
talking in a fluting rapid voice, and with the utmost lucidity. If he
could not walk up and down he could not lecture. His mind and voice had
precisely the fluid quality of some clear subtle liquid; one felt it
could flow round anything and overcome nothing. And its nimble eddies
were wonderful! Or again I recall him drinking port with little muscular
movements in his neck and cheek and chin and his brows knit--very
judicial, very concentrated, preparing to say the apt just thing; it was
the last thing he would have told a lie about.

When I think of Codger I am reminded of an inscription I saw on some
occasion in Regent's Park above two eyes scarcely more limpidly innocent
than his--"Born in the Menagerie." Never once since Codger began to
display the early promise of scholarship at the age of eight or more,
had he been outside the bars. His utmost travel had been to lecture here
and lecture there. His student phase had culminated in papers of quite
exceptional brilliance, and he had gone on to lecture with a cheerful
combination of wit and mannerism that had made him a success from the
beginning. He has lectured ever since. He lectures still. Year by year
he has become plumper, more rubicund and more and more of an item for
the intelligent visitor to see. Even in my time he was pointed out to
people as part of our innum