ith Unseens and Compositions. Never in his life had
he felt more irritable or more intellectually impotent. The yellow
blanket of mist hung over Oxford continually: the hall smelled
abominably of stale gravy and recent meals, and, worst of all, the pens
supplied to such as did not bring their own were quills; consequently
the stuffy room was never free from a maddening scratch and squeak. A
youth with a sloping brow and waving, faultless hair who sat next
Martin made great play with his quill: he was a 'dog' whose doggishness
took the form of a graceful abandon in his dress; he wore soft collars
and long woolly waistcoats and dilapidated pumps. He held his quill
between his first and second fingers, and he wrote splashily with brave
flourishes and a spasmodic squeak; also he had a habit of marching out
majestically half-an-hour before the time for a paper was finished.
Martin wondered whether this implied that he was immensely bad or
immensely good: he feared the latter. Altogether he was a fascinating
and disconcerting neighbour, and one morning Martin, struggling with
verses that would not 'come,' wanted to kill him.

Another cause of depression was the presence of boys

from Grammar Schools. Martin was no snob, but he could not keep
himself unspotted from Public School tradition, and he felt that these
smug-looking youths were rivals in a way that the dull Rugbeian never
could be. He was certain that they were far better scholars than he
was, that they had worked like slaves and could translate anything ever
written in Greek or Latin: he might have escaped much mental suffering
had he known that, even if they had been so brilliant (and in reality
they were amazingly dull), the dons are, with a few exceptions, well
rooted in class tradition and are not going to sacrifice the Public
Schools on the altar of modern honesty. But Martin did not know these
things, and when he saw the Grammar School candidates parading the town
with little crested caps on the backs of their heads and greasy curls
sticking bravely up in front, the natural dislike of the rival was
fused with the Public School man's loathing of inferior form. There
was one unforgettable person who came every day to King's wearing a
black overcoat and black kid gloves: his cap had a little silver button
gleaming over the inevitable curl. He looked both wise and good.

On the Thursday evening Martin glanced through the rough copy of his
Latin vers