When a remote cousin of Lord Henniker was elected to the Head Mastership of Rossall, a disappointed competitor said that it was a case of [Greek:  eneka tou kuriou]; but a Greek joke is scarcely fair play.

When the New Review was started, its accomplished Editor designed it to be an inexpensive copy of the Nineteenth Century.  It was to cost only sixpence, and was to be written by bearers of famous names—­those of the British aristocracy for choice.  He was complaining in society of the difficulty of finding a suitable title, when a vivacious lady said, “We have got Cornhill, and Ludgate, and Strand—­why not call yours Cheapside?”

Oxford has always been a nursing-mother of polished satirists.  Of a small sprig of aristocracy, who was an undergraduate in my time, it was said by a friend that he was like Euclid’s definition of a point:  he had no parts and no magnitude, but had position.  In previous chapters I have quoted the late Master of Balliol and Lord Sherbrooke.  Professor Thorold Rogers excelled in a Shandean vein.  Lord Bowen is immortalized by his emendation to the Judge’s address to the Queen, which had contained the Heep-like sentence—­“Conscious as we are of our own unworthiness for the great office to which we have been called.”  “Wouldn’t it be better to say, ’Conscious as we are of one another’s unworthiness’?” Henry Smith, Professor of Geometry, the wittiest, most learned, and most genial of Irishmen, said of a well-known man of science—­“His only fault is that he sometimes forgets that he is the Editor, not the Author, of Nature.”  A great lawyer who is now a great judge, and has, with good reason, the very highest opinion of himself, stood as a Liberal at the General Election of 1880.  His Tory opponents set on foot a rumour that he was an Atheist, and when Henry Smith heard it he said, “Now, that’s really too bad, for ——­ is a man who reluctantly acknowledges the existence of a Superior Being.”

At dinner at Balliol the Master’s guests were discussing the careers of two Balliol men, the one of whom had just been made a judge and the other a bishop.  “Oh,” said Henry Smith, “I think the bishop is the greater man.  A judge, at the most, can only say, ‘You be hanged,’ but a bishop can say, ‘You be d—–­d.’” “Yes,” twittered the Master; “but if the judge says, ‘You be hanged,’ you are hanged.”

Henry Smith, though a delightful companion, was a very unsatisfactory politician—­nominally, indeed, a Liberal, but full of qualifications and exceptions.  When Mr. Gathorne Hardy was raised to the peerage at the crisis of the Eastern Question in 1878, and thereby vacated his seat for the University of Oxford, Henry Smith came forward as a candidate in the Liberal interest; but his language about the great controversy of the moment was so lukewarm that Professor Freeman said that, instead of sitting for Oxford in the House of Commons, he ought to represent Laodicea in the Parliament of Asia Minor.