se of incompleteness, even of fragmentariness. This
impression was deepened by the oral examinations which he was in the
habit of holding every week on his lectures.

For these examinations he prepared most carefully, sitting up
sometimes till two o'clock in the morning collecting material and
verifying references which he deemed necessary to make them complete.
His aim in them was not only to test the students' attention and
progress, but to communicate information of a supplementary and
miscellaneous character which he had been unable to work into his
lectures. And so he would bring down to the class a tattered Father or
two, and would regale its members with long Greek quotations and with
a mass of details that were pure gold to him but were hid treasure
to them. His examination of individual students was lenient in the
extreme. It used to be said of him that if he asked a question to
which the correct answer was Yes, while the answer he got was No,
he would exert his ingenuity to show that in a certain subtle and
hitherto unsuspected sense the real answer _was_ No, and that Mr.
So-and-so deserved credit for having discovered this, and for having
boldly dared to _say_ No at the risk of being misunderstood. This, of
course, is caricature; but it nevertheless sufficiently indicates his
general attitude to his students.

It was the same with the written as with the oral examinations.
In these he assigned full marks to a large proportion of the papers
sent in. Once it was represented to him that this method of valuation
prevented his examination results from having any influence on the
adjudication of a prize that was given every year to the student who
had the highest aggregate of marks in all the classes. He admitted the
justice of this contention, and promised to make a change. When he
announced the results of his next examination it was found that he
had been as good as his word; but the change consisted in this: that
whereas formerly two-thirds of the class had received full marks,
now two-thirds of the class received ninety per cent.!

And yet the popular idea of his inability to distinguish between a
good student and a bad one was quite wrong. He was not so simple as he
seemed. All who have sat in his classroom remember times when a sudden
keen look from him showed that he knew quite well when liberties were
being attempted with him, and gave rise to the uncomfortable suspicion
that, as it was put, "he could se