-teaching then in
vogue, which consisted in demanding of all candidates for the schools a
knowledge of selected fragments of certain authors, giving them no
choice or scope in the handling of wider subjects. He refused to enter
for a class in the one subject in which he could shine, and managed to
scrape through his examination by combining a variety of uncongenial
subjects. This was perverse, and he himself recognized it to be so
afterwards. All the while there was latent in him the talent, and the
ambition, which might have enabled him to surpass all his
contemporaries. His one literary achievement of the time was unknown to
the men of his college, but it is of singular interest in view of what
he came to achieve later. He was asked by the editor of the _Oxford
Chronicle_, an old-established local paper, to write two articles on the
history of the city of Oxford. To most undergraduates the town seemed a
mere parasite of the University; to Green it was an elder sister. Many
years later he complained in one of his letters that the city had been
stifled by the University, which in its turn had suffered similar
treatment from the Church. To this task, accordingly, he brought a ready
enthusiasm and a full mind; and his articles are alive with the essence
of what, since the days of his childhood, he had observed, learnt, and
imagined, in the town of his birth. We see the same spirit in a letter
which he wrote to Dawkins in 1860, telling him how he had given up a day
to following the Mayor of Oxford when he observed the time-honoured
custom of beating the bounds of the city. He describes with gusto how he
trudged along roads, clambered over hedges, and even waded through
marshes in order to perform the rite with scrupulous thoroughness. But
it was years before he could find an audience who would appreciate his
power of handling such a subject, and his University career must, on his
own evidence, be written down a failure.

When it was over he was confronted with the need for choosing a
profession. It had strained the resources of his family to give him a
good education, and now he must fend for himself. To a man of his nature
and upbringing the choice was not wide. His age and his limited means
put the Services out of the question; nor was he fitted to embark in
trade. Medicine would revolt his sensibility, law would chill his
imagination, and journalism did not yet exist as a profession for men of
his stamp. In the teaching