with minds as
eager and as crude as his own, and of all the delightful dipping into
the very latest literature, which such moments encouraged and involved,
seemed to convey a sort of warning to the boy's will that it was not
equal to the situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for
a striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from attempting
impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity? He felt a dismal
certainty that he should never be able to control the strayings of will
and curiosity, now into this path, now into that; and a still stronger
and genuine certainty that it is not by such digression that a man gets
up the Ethics or the Annals.

Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In spite of the
paralysis of all natural ambitious in himself, he was illogically keen
that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the place. He, the most
laborious, the most disinterested of scholars, turned himself almost
into a crammer for Elsmere's benefit. He abused the lad's multifarious
reading, declared it was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached
to him an ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts
to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some triumphant
retort drawn from his own utterances at some sincerer and less discreet
moment. In vain. Langham felt a dismal certainty before many weeks were
over that Elsmere would miss his First in Greats. He was too curious,
too restless, too passionate about many things. Above all he was
beginning, in the tutor's opinion, to concern himself disastrously
early with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing of all human
interests--the interest of religion. Grey had made him 'earnest' with a
vengeance.

Elsmere was now attending Grey's philosophical lectures, following them
with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as so often happens, for the
defence and fortification of views quite other than his teacher's. The
whole basis of Grey's thought was ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had
broken with the popular Christianity, but for him, God, consciousness,
duty, were the only realities. None of the various forms of materialist
thought escaped his challenge; no genuine utterance of the spiritual
life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It was known that after having
prepared himself for the Christian ministry, he had remained a layman
because it had become impossible to him to accept miracle; and it
was