for he found a good audience
in Martin. "You'll get a first in Mods, if you take the trouble, and
by the time you're twenty or twenty-one you'll know all about Athenian
law-courts and what the Greek is for a demurrer or a counter-claim, and
you'll know all the hard words in Homer and be able to translate
Cicero's jokes. You'll cram up a lot of variant readings for your
special play and collect a nice set of texts with all the difficult
passages marked. And when it's all over you'll thank God and imagine
that you've done with it, only to find out that Greats is rather worse
and means spotting the words for Egyptian bogwort in Herodotus and
getting up the most meaningless bits of gibberish in Thucydides. It's
the same all along. A schoolmaster wants to make some money, a don
wants to make a name, so out comes a new reading, a new conjecture, a
new edition and a thousand other straws of pedantry to be piled on the
back of a poor old camel that collapsed years ago."

"It sounds pretty rotten," said Martin. "But I suppose at Oxford one
can read and talk freely and follow up the things one likes?"

"Yes, you must do that. Don't get worried about Mods. Are you
thinking of the Civil Service?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Well Mods won't matter much. So take up anything you really care for.
That's the only thing in life worth doing, and it may be about the only
time in your life when you're able to do it."

Of course Finney never spoke to Martin about school discipline, but it
was not hard for Martin to see that he was very much depressed. His
sufferings with the Fourth he might have expected: but that the Upper
Sixth should rag childishly was a cruel blow. He was so keenly anxious
to take an interest in his work and to make those hours of rapid
translation valuable: but everything seemed to go against him.

He went through some Tacitus and Juvenal and Pindar at a great pace
amid considerable amusement. For Tacitus gave facilities for
journalese, Juvenal for obscenity, and Pindar for colossal bathos. In
despair Finney turned to the sixth book of the AEneid, "Just to help
your hexameters." They surely wouldn't rag that.

Yet trouble did break out. One Cartwright, a large, genial, athletic
person who expected to get an exhibition at Cambridge for his games,
was always to the fore when there seemed any opportunity of baiting
Finney. To him fell the Daedalus passage at the beginning of the book:
his rendering was