saying:

"What was your lady-love like, dear Master?"

JOWETT: "Violent . . . very violent."

After this disconcerting description, we drove back to Balliol.

Mrs. Humphry Ward's novel "Robert Elsmere" had just been published
and was dedicated to my sister Laura and Thomas Hill Green,
Jowett's rival in Oxford. This is what the Master wrote to me
about it:

Nov. 28, 1888.

DEAR MISS TENNANT,

I have just finished examining for the Balliol Scholarships: a
great institution of which you may possibly have heard. To what
shall I liken it? It is not unlike a man casting into the sea a
great dragnet, and when it is full of fish, pulling it up again
and taking out fishes, good, bad and indifferent, and throwing the
bad and indifferent back again into the sea. Among the good fish
there have been Archbishop Tait, Dean Stanley, A. H. Clough, Mr.
Arnold, Lord Coleridge, Lord Justice Bowen, Mr. Ilbert, &c., &c.,
&c. The institution was founded about sixty years ago.

I have been dining alone rather dismally, and now I shall imagine
that I receive a visit from a young lady about twenty-three years
of age, who enlivens me by her prattle. Is it her or her angel?