Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson — Read

Mr. Jackson, a tall, short-sighted clergyman with the green moustache, and classical tutor at St. Stephen's College, was accustomed to dine _en garcon_ every Saturday night in Hall, instead of _en famille_ at home, and after two or three glasses of port, play a rubber of whist in the room of one of his colleagues. To-night the gathering was planned to take place at Mr. Butler's rooms in the Fellows' Buildings, and it was with great pleasure that he had heard his host ask Waters and Alison to complete the four. They were all Classical dons, tutors and lecturers, and it was completely characteristic of them that they continued to play whist rather than bridge, which they considered a debased and easy variety of dummy whist. All four had minds of the same academic calibre, and they constituted in this very Conservative college the stronghold and inner defences of Conservatism.

Chief among its tenets was the doctrine that Latin and Greek were the sole and essential instruments of education that should be used on the mind of the young, just as cricket and football and rowing were a young man's proper physical exercises. In later life you could play golf and lawn-tennis and croquet, even as in later life you could learn French and Italian, in which, no doubt, there were many light and agreeable pieces of literature to be enjoyed. But until you had attained to maturity all these minor diversions had best be eschewed. "A fellow," as Mr. Jackson was fond of saying, "who can write a decent set of Greek Iambics, or translate a piece of Gibbon into Thucydidean Greek, has a trained mind, which can without difficulty acquire any other subject of human knowledge with which his profession makes it desirable that he should be acquainted."