too old in mind for his
years; and after having mixed in the choicest circles of a metropolis,
college suppers and wine parties had little charm for him. He maintained
his pugilistic renown; and on certain occasions, when some delicate
undergraduate had been bullied by some gigantic bargeman, his muscular
Christianity nobly developed itself. He did not do as much as he might
have done in the more intellectual ways of academical distinction.
Still, he was always among the first in the college examinations; he won
two university prizes, and took a very creditable degree, after which
he returned home, more odd, more saturnine--in short, less like other
people--than when he had left Merton School. He had woven a solitude
round him out of his own heart, and in that solitude he sat still and
watchful as a spider sits in his web.

Whether from natural temperament or from his educational training under
such teachers as Mr. Mivers, who carried out the new ideas of reform by
revering nothing in the past, and Mr. Welby, who accepted the routine of
the present as realistic, and pooh-poohed all visions of the future as
idealistic, Kenelm's chief mental characteristic was a kind of tranquil
indifferentism. It was difficult to detect in him either of those
ordinary incentives to action,--vanity or ambition, the yearning for
applause or the desire of power. To all female fascinations he had been
hitherto star-proof. He had never experienced love, but he had read
a good deal about it; and that passion seemed to him an unaccountable
aberration of human reason, and an ignominious surrender of the
equanimity of thought which it should be the object of masculine natures
to maintain undisturbed. A very eloquent book in praise of celibacy, and
entitled "The Approach to the Angels," written by that eminent Oxford
scholar, Decimus Roach, had produced so remarkable an effect upon his
youthful mind that, had he been a Roman Catholic, he might have become
a monk. Where he most evinced ardour it was a logician's ardour for
abstract truth; that is, for what he considered truth: and, as what
seems truth to one man is sure to seem falsehood to some other man, this
predilection of his was not without its inconveniences and dangers, as
may probably be seen in the following chapter.

Meanwhile, rightly to appreciate his conduct therein, I entreat thee, O
candid reader (not that any reader ever is candid), to remember that he
is brimful of new ideas, whi