However,
he proceeded in due time to a University. There he let it be known that his
ultimate destination was the Church, but he had his own method of
qualifying for his profession. He was not afflicted with the possession of
great muscular strength, or of a very robust health. Neither the river nor
the football-field attracted him. Cricket was a bore, athletic sports were
a burden; the rough manners of the ordinary Undergraduates made him
shudder. However, since at College there are sets of all sorts and sizes,
he soon managed to fashion for himself a little world of effete and mincing
idlers, who adored themselves even more than they worshipped one another.
They drank deep from the well of modern French literature, and chattered
interminably of RICHEPIN, GUY DE MAUPASSANT, PAUL BOURGET, and the rest.
They themselves were their own favourite native writers; but their morbid
sonnets, their love-lorn elegies, their versified mixtures of passion and a
quasi-religious mysticism, were too sacred for print, though they were
sometimes adapted to thin and fluttering airs, and sung to sympathisers in
private.
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