rn long, with a sort of poetic
grace: I am told that now he is very bald; and I can imagine that this
must be a great blow to him, for he was always exceedingly vain. I
remember a peculiarity of his eyes, which could scarcely have been
natural, but how it was acquired I do not know. The eyes of most people
converge upon the object at which they look, but his remained parallel.
It gave them a singular expression, as though he were scrutinising the
inmost thought of the person with whom he talked. He was notorious also
for the extravagance of his costume, but, unlike the aesthetes of that
day, who clothed themselves with artistic carelessness, he had a taste
for outrageous colours. Sometimes, by a queer freak, he dressed himself
at unseasonable moments with excessive formality. He is the only
undergraduate I have ever seen walk down the High in a tall hat and a
closely-buttoned frock-coat.

I have told you he was very unpopular, but it was not an unpopularity
of the sort which ignores a man and leaves him chiefly to his own
society. Haddo knew everybody and was to be found in the most unlikely
places. Though people disliked him, they showed a curious pleasure in his
company, and he was probably entertained more than any man in Oxford. I
never saw him but he was surrounded by a little crowd, who abused him
behind his back, but could not resist his fascination.

I often tried to analyse this, for I felt it as much as anyone, and
though I honestly could not bear him, I could never resist going to
see him whenever opportunity arose. I suppose he offered the charm
of the unexpected to that mass of undergraduates who, for all their
matter-of-fact breeziness, are curiously alive to the romantic. It was
impossible to tell what he would do or say next, and you were kept
perpetually on the alert. He was certainly not witty, but he had a coarse
humour which excited the rather gross sense of the ludicrous possessed by
the young. He had a gift for caricature which was really diverting, and
an imperturbable assurance. He had also an ingenious talent for
profanity, and his inventiveness in this particular was a power among
youths whose imaginations stopped at the commoner sorts of bad language.
I have heard him preach a sermon of the most blasphemous sort in the very
accents of the late Dean of Christ Church, which outraged and at the same
time irresistibly amused everyone who heard it. He had a more varied
knowledge than the greater p