Page:The common reader.djvu/277

 board, it was drawn from the College, at the command of the snuff-box, for nothing. The principles of “delicacy and good feeling” which the Master might have been expected to observe (great scholar as he was, steeped in the wine of the classics) went for nothing. His argument that the “few College loaves” upon which the four young patricians were nourished were amply repaid by the three sash windows which he had put into their rooms at his own expense failed to convince the Fellows. And when, on Trinity Sunday 1719, the Fellows found the famous College ale not to their liking, they were scarcely satisfied when the butler told them that it had been brewed by the Master’s orders, from the Master’s malt, which was stored in the Master’s granary, and though damaged by “an insect called the weevil” had been paid for at the very high rates which the Master demanded.

Still these battles over bread and beer are trifles and domestic trifles at that. His conduct in his profession will throw more light upon our inquiry. For, released from brick and building, bread and beer, patricians and their windows, it may be found that he expanded in the atmosphere of Homer, Horace, and Manilius, and proved in his study the benign nature of those influences which have been wafted down to us through the ages. But there the evidence is even less to the credit of the dead languages. He acquitted himself magnificently, all agree, in the great controversy about the letters of Phalaris. His temper was excellent and his learning prodigious. But that triumph was suc-